So I have this whole new writer crush. I was sunning this afternoon and catchin up on a weeks worth of Wall Street Journals and Friday's Science Journal section, featured this brilliant piece really well written by Robert Lee Hotz."Scientists draw Link between Morality And Brain's Wiring"
is a thoroughly profound piece "drawing a direct link between the neuroanatomy of emotion and moral judgement".
is a thoroughly profound piece "drawing a direct link between the neuroanatomy of emotion and moral judgement".
My favorite part : " At this level of inquiry, the mind is a special effect generated by neurons".Trust is a measure of neuropeptide levels, while fairness is an electromagnetic pattern in the right pre-frontal cortex.Disrupt it with a strong magnet, as did University of Zurich researchers in 2006, and any sense of fair-dealing fades away like a radio station subsumed by static." Robert Lee Hotz.
Its utterly profound and scintillatingly terrific neuroscientific stuff , he is sooooo my new favorite neuroscience writer .
4 comments:
It's a huge mistake of logic to mistake observable links between certain abstract concepts, including kinds of thoughts, experienced in the brain, with those things themselves. It's like saying there is no vanilla ice cream; if you put a magnet here and an electrode there it becomes a Jersey heifer. Indeed it may be experienced as a ton of beef, but it is still vanilla ice cream. The fact that something is abstract does not remove it from reality and make it merely a figment of neurophysiology. This is so reductionist -- at least, Jaded, your presentation is (so is the Journal's -- that a sophomore philosophy student could, with a simple protractor and perhaps a little copper wire and battery and a corkscrew, demonstrate the silliness of these assertions.
How simple it would be if all meaning were the result of mix-and-match humors. It would indeed excuse us of not only moral choice but meaning and purpose -- ooh, but I like the moral choice part better; right and wrong, just a function of my brain soup and a few flipped switches! It's almost a parody of scientism, Jaded. You are fascinated, I know, by popular neuroscience, but don't mistake it for God.
ummmmm, neuroscientifically speaking, im goin to have to sleep on this just until dawn, as the baby blue benadryl pills ive been popping in good faith for my stuffed head and surrounding brain area, are messing with my cognitive initiatives and good comeback skills.and your points are just a hazy shade of dazy text.
What are the other shades of dazy, again?
Ron, I'm not "mistakening it" for G-d. I dont know G-d well enough to mistaken other things for him or her.Do you ?
Sometime though fiddling around with chemical balances and levels almost seems as though we are actually fiddling around with free will/ choice and other fun moral related ideologies and brain functions.
If I can control things like discipline,empathy and other emotions with mere chemicals then how does that relate to how Gd wanted stuff.
Is Gd ok with that.
Does Gd exist.
Does he care.
Does he care about me ?
lol yeah i had to stick that in for fun. Anyway ,
Other shades of dazy include dizzy dazzle and lazy.
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