Mind

Recently, we noted Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s new “neurolaw” book, Incognito. The basic idea, driven by evolutionary psychology, is that criminal law would improve if we dropped the illusion that people are responsible for their behaviour. Perhaps social justice minded supporters hope it will bring about prison reform, an end to capital punishment, or such.

They hope in vain. Here’s my MercatorNet article in which a defense lawyer who specializes in capital punishment explains why that probably won’t happen:

This is not a controversy between the String ‘Em Up Gang and the Prison Reform Society. All parties want a just and humane system; they differ fundamentally as to whether they think that personal responsibility is an illusion. Read More ›

Here, Liz Else (New Scientist, (3 June 2011) tells us, that “recursivity” or “thoughts within thoughts” make us human:

Chimps, bonobos and orangutans just don’t tell stories, paint pictures, write music or make films – there are no great ape equivalents of Hamlet or Inception. Similarly, theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: I may know not only what you are thinking, says Corballis, but also that you know what I am thinking. Most – but not all – language depends on this capability.

Actually, no, other sources say, Read More ›

Senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, Ann Gauger, reflects on “Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails”, Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011):

Up until now, the materialist, reductionist method has been very successful, because cells can be ground up, probed, measured and tested in a way that life forces or agency can’t be. But now molecular, cellular, and developmental biologists are drowning in a flood of data that we don’t know how to interpret. We do not know, for example, how to read a genome from an unknown new species to say what kind of organism it will produce. We can only determine what other genomes it most closely resembles. In order to predict the nature and appearance of the organism with that genome, we would need to know — just for starters — the maternal and paternal contributions to the egg and sperm, the whole of the developmental path from egg to adult, plus the particular effects of any mutations within that genome on its phenotype, not to mention its environmental history. Read More ›

“A Psychopath Walks Into A Room. Can You Tell? (NPR May21, 2011) Arresting title, that, for an interesting proposition: “Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. Of course, some allowance should be made for the fact that bosses are noticed/hated much more than other folk, and big bosses are larger than life. The effect one comes away with is that psychiatry has not done a better job than traditional wisdom in explaining things like: Why Read More ›

Johnson meant that real Darwinists say what Darwinism entails (materialist atheism) and then Christian Darwinists rush in to announce that we can somehow harmonize it with Christianity by not taking seriously what Darwinists actually say. Explained in detail here. The analogy is to American football.

In The Moral Landscape, for example, new atheist and PhD neuroscientist Sam Harris tackles free will: In The Moral Landscape, for example, new atheist Sam Harris tackles free will:

Many scientists and philosophers realized log ago that free will could not be squared with our growing understanding of the physical world. Nevertheless, mny still deny this fact. … The problem is tat no account of causality leaves room for free will … Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-mement ignorance of specific prior causes. (Pp. 103-5)

Are we clear about this yet? If not, dozens of examples from other Darwinists are available. And then
Read More ›

The author of a new study claims that humans learned to walk upright primarily to beat each other:

“The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females,” says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. “Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous.”

That also explains, Carrier says, why women find tall men attractive.

Carrier says many scientists are reluctant to consider an idea that paints our ancestors as violent.”Among academics there often is resistance to the reality that humans are a violent species. It’s an intrinsic desire to have us be more peaceful than we are,” he says.

In the age of Evilicious, few others have noted this trend among academics. The study demonstrates that men hit harder in an upright position. Read More ›

Here vjtorley cites the unspeakable Johansson case (Sweden), asking “Are secular humanism and freedom of thought ultimately incompatible?” The short answer is: Of course.

Secular humanism, as normally argued, denies the reality of the mind. On that, note this item at New Scientist on illusions, real and imagined*, which dramatically dismisses free will and just about everything else,

This might come as a shock, but everything you think is wrong. Much of what you take for granted about day-to-day existence is largely a figment of your imagination. From your senses to your memory, your opinions and beliefs, how you see yourself and others and even your sense of free will, things are not as they seem. The power these delusions hold over you is staggering, yet, as Graham Lawton discovers, they are vital to help you function in the world.

– Graham Lawton, “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems” (16 May 2011)

The only freedom possible, if this folly were true – and the secular humanist believes it is – Read More ›

Few things in that area show much promise, but this one does.

Two economists have spent some time studying precommitment, the idea of freely choosing what’s right and ten instructing others not to listen when you say you have changed your mind. The first well-known precommiter was Homer’s Odysseus (1000  BCE), who

has been warned about the Sirens, whose seductive song leads sailors to destruction, but he wants to hear it anyway. So he gives his men earplugs and orders that they tie him to the mast, ignoring all subsequent pleas for release until they are safely past the danger.

– Daniel Akst, “Commit Yourself: Self-control in the age of abundance” Reason , May 2011

As Akst tell it, Read More ›

Yes, we all do, but that’s not the whole story …

Some findings in the field of collaborative memory research have been counter intuitive. For one, collaboration can hurt memory. Some studies have compared the recall of items on lists by “collaborative groups,” or those who study together, and “nominal groups,” in which individuals work alone and the results are collated. The collaborative groups remembered more items than any single person would have done alone. But they also remembered fewer than the nominal groups did by totaling the efforts of its solitary workers. In other words, the collaborators’ whole was less than the sum of its parts.

This so-called “collaborative inhibition” affects recall for all sorts of things, from word pairs to emotionally laden events; it affects strangers or spouses, children or adults. It is, in scientific lingo, “robust.” Read More ›

Non-materialist neuroscientists, friends of design, often talk about “mindfulness,” that is, the capacity of making changes in the brain by directing attention. Or, as psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz puts it, You are not your brain. Recent research suggests one difference mindfulness makes: Read More ›

No, not what you think: More from Raymond Tallis, this time What neuroscience cannot tell us about ourselves (New Atlantis, Fall 2010), debunking “the tropes of neuromythology.”:

So when we are talking about the brain, we are talking about nothing more than a piece of matter. If we keep this in mind, we will have enough ammunition to demonstrate the necessary failure of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and conscious behavior. Read More ›

Jack Scanlan, over at Panda’s Thumb, asks, “Does intelligent design have a dualistic assumption, not a theistic one?”

Interesting question, his point being that dualism is not the same thing as theism.

A dualist may hold that nature is governed by a meta-nature, without that latter realm being “God.” Without being God, a meta-nature could exhibit in nature what looks like intelligence (and is). Comments?

There are many types of dualism: Read More ›

According to “Evolution of Human ‘Super-Brain’ Tied to Development of Bipedalism, Tool-Making” ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2011),

Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees — not ancestral apes — for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist.

It’s not known how many entomologists agree but,

CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker said there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite variety of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the “super-brain,” or collective mind, an event that took place in Africa no later than 75,000 years ago.[ … ] Read More ›

In “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science” (Mother Jones, April 18, 2011), Chris Mooney offers to explain “How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.” For example, Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. “They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs,” says Taber, “and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what Read More ›

In “Scientific solutions to sin?”, Suzanne Morrison (April 08, 2011) of Canada’s Mcmaster University asks,

Most people are familiar with the seven deadly sins – pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed and sloth – but could there be molecular solutions for this daily struggle between good and evil?That’s what first year bachelor of health sciences students in the undergraduate biology course at McMaster University were asked to find out: their assignment required that they explore the molecular underpinnings of human misbehaviour.

At the Physiological Society’s DC annual meeting, they are to be feted for their project in which Read More ›