Using our brains. Amy Gutmann explains why ethics should be integrated into neuroscience research early and thoroughly. “Too often in our nation’s past, ethical lapses in research have had tragic consequences and derailed scientific progress. … Ethics in science must not come to the fore for the first time after something has gone wrong.”
neuroscience
Fight your fate
Does neuroscience disprove free will? Julian Baggini’s very nice review of four books about free will, responsibility, and neuroscience. “But perhaps the greatest mystery of free will is how it can be that on both major axes of the debate – whether it exists and whether it matters if it does – intelligent, informed opinion can be found at both ends. That might be a clue that this is a question without a definitive, factual answer.” And that could mean we are asking the wrong questions about free will. “… [E]ven if you want to insist that we don’t have free will, we still have recognisable, if subtly altered, forms of many of the cherished notions we assume depend on it, like love, responsibility and morality. … That’s what matters, and if you don’t want to call it free will, feel free to call it what you will.”
How to have an out of body experience
… and it isn’t even that hard. It won’t be the kind of experience you might have seen in sci-fi movies, but it can help you think more about the philosophical question of self-identity.
Neuroscience and criminal responsibility
Was it really me? Some think that as we learn more about the brain processes underlying our actions, the less meaningful it will be to lock people up for their actions because those actions can always be traced back to brain functions. But Steve Fleming thinks neuroscience might make us more, not less, responsible for our actions.
You’re like traffic jam
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette explores the emerging science of the self, a body of research that examines not just who we are, but also … if we are. “Ouellette ultimately concludes that the self is an emergent property of the billions of neurons of our brain all interacting with one another. What’s emergence? ‘A system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,’ writes Ouellette. ‘A traffic jam is emergent,’ she explains. ‘You have all these cars interacting. If it gets dense enough, enough interactions, you’re going to get a traffic jam. But that traffic jam is real.’ It is more than the sum of all its cars. Something similar goes for the self.”
Descartes, Aristotle, and Terri Schiavo
Did Descartes doom Terri Schiavo? “The plea … to prolong Ms. Schiavo’s feeding, against the wishes of her husband or what courts determined to be her own expressed inclinations, echoed the teachings of Aristotle, who considered existence itself to be inviolable. On the other side, the argument that Ms. Schiavo’s life could be judged as not worth living echoed Descartes, the Enlightenment philosopher who defined human life not as biological existence – which might be an inviolable gift from God – but as consciousness, about which people can make judgments.”
More about Plato, Google, neuroscience, etc.
Colin McGinn’s review of Rebecca Goldstein’s “Plato at the Googleplex.” Here “Ms. Goldstein employs her novelistic skills to sparkling effect by weaving abstract concepts into concrete modern narratives. At a cable news station, he is grilled by one Roy McCoy, who is not a bit intimidated by his distinguished Greek guest: ‘Okay, so they tell me you’re a big deal in philosophy, Plato. I’m going to tell you up front—because that’s the kind of guy I am, up-front—that I don’t think much of philosophers.’ Plato coolly responds: ‘Many don’t. The term attracts a wide range of reaction, from admiration to amusement to animadversion. Some people think philosophers are worthless, and others that they are worth everything in the world. Sometimes they take on the appearance of statesmen, and sometimes of sophists. Sometimes, too, they might give the impression that they are completely insane.'”
The war on reason
“Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here’s why they’re wrong.” This is Paul Bloom’s very good review of neuroscience’s claim that we are biochemical puppets and social psychology’s demonstration that factors we are unaware of influence our thoughts and acts. But Bloom concludes: “Yes, we are physical beings, and yes, we are continually swayed by factors beyond our control. But as Aristotle recognized long ago, what’s so interesting about us is our capacity for reason, which reigns over all. If you miss this, you miss almost everything that matters.”
A psychopath’s brain
Life as a nonviolent psychopath. “Neuroscientist James Fallon discovered through his work that he has the brain of a psychopath, and subsequently learned a lot about the role of genes in personality and how his brain affects his life.” What make you the person you are? Your brain, your environment, or you?
It it the brain that makes humans unique?
What makes you so special? The brain probably has something to do with it. But what exactly? “If it seems like scientists trying to find the basis of human uniqueness in the brain are looking for a neural needle in a haystack, it’s because they are. Whatever makes us different is built on the bedrock of a billion years of common ancestry. Humans will never abandon the quest to prove that they are special. But nor can we escape the fact that our minds are a modest tweak on an ancient plan that originated millions of years before we came onto the scene.”
Socratically Speaking 