Neuroscience

Topic: Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? (Thursday, April 7 – 7:00pm – 9:00pm Eastern time) Facebook page Live webcast: www.ndtv.net One viewer commented … the atheist damage control machine is going full throttle! Craig absolutely wiped the floor with Krauss. It might be the worst debate performance ever versus Craig, adding Check out the “damage control” comments from Lawrence Krauss that Richard Dawkins posted on his website! Krauss on Dawkins’s site PZ Myers added his usual shower of roses too… Other views of the Krauss-Craig debate: Wintery Knight’s summary Possible Worlds Always have a reason Letters to Nature

“Our understanding of the way the brain works could help us create a better legal system, says Baylor College of Medicine’sneuroscientist David Eagleman,” in “The human brain: turning our minds to the law” (Telegraph 05 Apr 2011): The problem, he says,

is that the law rests on two assumptions that are charitable, but demonstrably false. The first is that people are “practical reasoners”, which is the law’s way of saying that they are capable of acting in alignment with their best interests, and capable of rational foresight about their actions. The second is that all brains are created equal. Everyone who is of legal age and above an IQ of 70 is assumed, in the eyes of the law, to have the same capacity for decision-making, understanding, impulse control and reasoning. But these ideas simply don’t match up with the facts of neuroscience.

Isn’t equality in the eyes of the law somewhat like “We hold these truths to be self-evident … ”? where the equality claimed by the American founders was not based on assumptions about nature at all but on assumption’s about nature’s Author?

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This article, based on Eagleman’s book Incognito, follows the usual pattern of tracts favouring materialist law reform: Asserting, with no evidence, that traditional beliefs about justice are merely a “desire for revenge.”

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If the argument is that Crazy Jake is not as generously endowed with intellect as Richard Feynman, who doubts it? But – on the traditional assumption that Feynman’s intellect is a gift to him, and not proof of ultimate Darwinian superiority – they are indeed equal in the eyes of the law, though one is considerably better endowed in that way than the other. Rich and poor appear in the same court.

We also learn, Read More ›

“So if someone is mentally ill, is it the mind (spiritual, demonic, etc.) or the translating organ of the brain (age, MS, injury, other disease, etc.) that is the cause, (or perhaps both)?  How does one distinguish the causes?” Read More ›

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

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Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

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The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

Read More ›

(My latest MercatorNet column reviews an  attempt to refound morality on a  materialist basis: Commonsense notions of the mind must be abandoned in favor of a purely brain-based approach because we are our neurons: Churchland is partial to a theory that morality originates in the oxytocin-vasopressin network in mammals. One outcome is stunners like this: “The social life of humans, whether in hunter-gatherer villages, farming towns, or cities, seems to be even more complex than that of baboons or chimpanzees.” Now, why in the world would that be? We never get a clear idea how Churchland think morality works, though we do get more than a glimpse of her politics. Go here for more.

“Evolution of cognition might be down to brain chemistry”, Andy Coghlan reports, (New Scientist, 28 March 2011): Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai, China, and colleagues analysed brain tissue from deceased humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques to study the concentrations of 100 chemicals linked with metabolism. In the human prefrontal cortex, the levels of 24 of these were drastically different from levels in the corresponding brain regions of the other primates. In the cerebellum, however, there were far fewer differences between humans and the other animals, with just six chemicals showing different concentrations. This suggests that, since our lineage split off from other primates, the evolution of metabolism in the thinking and learning parts of Read More ›

In “Idle Chatter: This Is Your Brain on Art – Can neuroscience explain art? (The Smart Set , March 17, 2011), Morgan Meis recounts V. S. Ramachandran’s neuroscience theories that, he says, explains a lot about art: Ramachandran identifies what he calls nine laws of aesthetics. Let’s look at one of them — law number two, which he calls Peak Shift — to get a sense of what neuroscience brings to aesthetics. Peak Shift refers to a generally elevated response to exaggerated stimuli among many animals. Ramachandran refers to a study in which seagull chicks were made to beg for food (just as they do from their mothers) simply by waving a beak-like stick in front of their nests. Later, Read More ›

Today is Thursday, and here is your regular dose of No Free Will?:

Scientists from UCLA and Harvard — Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman — have taken an audacious step in the search for free will, reported in a new article in the journal Neuron. They used a powerful tool – intracranial recording – to find neurons in the human brain whose activity predicts decisions to make a movement, challenging conventional notions of free will.

– How Free Is Your Will? A clock face, advanced neurosurgery–and startling philosophical questions about the decision to act (Daniela Schiller and David Carmel, Scientific American, March 22, 2011)

The basis of many “no free will” assertions is that people often make a decision before they are consciously aware of it:

Even with the above caveats, though, these findings are mind-boggling. They indicate that some activity in our brains may significantly precede our awareness of wanting to move. Libet suggested that free will works by vetoing: volition (the will to act) arises in neurons before conscious experience does, but conscious will can override it and prevent unwanted movements.

That’s hardly a new discovery, and were it not so, “split-second” decisions would be impossible. Hamlet can dither; the rest of us can’t.  The idea that it poses a challenge to the existence of free will is marketed almost exclusively by those who have a problem with the concept. The authors here more or less recognize the flaws in the typical reasoning when they write, Read More ›

It is your fault.

In “The Brain Is Not an Explanation,” Wray Herbert (Psychological Science March 23, 2011) tries to bring some rationality to the interpretation of brain science here:

Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked. This headline appeared in The Guardian a couple years ago above a science story that began: “Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain.” The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics’ brains, and the Guardian report concluded: “There may be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people.”

Sure, that’s it. It’s not my fault, it’s Russell Stover’s. As it happens, however, Read More ›

“Will the real Baby Einstein please stand up?” is the hedder on a university media release aimed at pop science central:

When it comes to what causes genius, nature may be ready to pull a stunning upset over nurture. University of Alberta researcher Martin Mrazik has put forward the argument that an increased presence of a naturally-occuring hormone could mean that genius is determined before birth.In a recent article in Roeper Review, Mrazik and a colleague posit that genius may be caused by prenatal exposure to an excessive level of testosterone. Mrazik notes that there is evidence that this high exposure facilitates increased brain connection. This hormonal “glitch” in-utero, Mraizk notes, would explain why children are born with an affinity for certain areas such as math, science or arts.

I was invited to e-mail or call for details.

Now, the nice thing about Roeper’s thesis is that it is undemonstrable. Read More ›

At Wired Science’s Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg tells us, “Adult Brain Activity Stirs Before Birth” (February 16, 2011):

Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry.Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains.

As to why they do it, Read More ›

In “New Insight Into the Brain’s Ability to Reorganize Itself” (ScienceDaily, Mar. 19, 2011), we learn “It’s amazing how the brain is capable of reorganizing itself in this manner,” says Murphy, co-senior author of the study and researcher at U-M’s Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute. “Right now, we’re still figuring out exactly how the brain accomplishes all this at the molecular level, but it’s sort of comforting to know that our brains are keeping track of all of this for us.” In previous research, the scientists had found that restricting cell division in the hippocampuses of mice using radiation or genetic manipulation resulted in reduced functioning in a cellular mechanism important to memory formation known as long-term potentiation. But in Read More ›

Here’s an introduction to Henk Rijkers’ review/profile/interview with me about The Spiritual Brain (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary) in a Dutch Catholic newspaper. The book covers the failure of materialism to fulfil its promises and offers a look at a non-materialist approach to neuroscience, hence the controversy.

Update: Here’s the complete text.

You’ll need Google Translate (just below Navbar) to follow that, so I thought I’d post a few English language comments I made: Read More ›

Here, courtesy Thomas Lewis: Answer on NeuroscienceIs there a standard for distinguishing one type of love from another? As one of the authors of “A General Theory of Love,” I’ll take a stab at it. From the perspective of neuroscience, there are 3 basic forces that attract and bind people to one another. Each one is related to activity in certain brain networks. The 3 are: 1. Sexual desire. 2. Romantic infatuation 3. Attachment. We are informed, with respect to attachment, that it is a process of physiologic attunement and affection and affiliation. The basic and most fundamental form of attachment is that between mammalian parent and offspring, and other forms are elaborations of this basic mammalian caretaking and nurturing Read More ›

First Things first thunkit? No, but is among the first to catch on. I see where, at their “First Thoughts,” blog, Joe Carter has picked up on Raymond Tallis’ outing of “Darwinitis”of the mind, in New Statesman. Tallis’s punctures into the balloons of neuro-this and neuro-that and “evolutionary psychology” resulted in interesting comments. It also got picked up at Arts and Letters Daily, billed as

Brain-science enthusiasts promise a more peaceful and prosperous world. Great, right? Maybe not. Raymond Tallis punctures neuromania…

Since the recent death of its point man, Denis “literary Darwinism” Dutton, it may now be possible to name nonsense as such and get picked up there much more readily.

If you want to see the type of thing Tallis is skewering:

Neuro-this (How evolution and neurology explain why people voted for Sarah Palin … ) Read More ›