Paul Griffiths on How Evolution Tracks Truth

The recent philosophy club discussion dwelled some time on how evolution by natural selection might track truth. Paul Griffiths makes the case that evolution has manipulated cognitive processes  in such a way that they tend to track truth and also responds to Plantinga’s EAAN (which I have not found persuasive, though I am inclined to think that one can have warranted religious beliefs even with an evolutionary explanation for those cognitive processes influencing them).

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On the Moral Error Theory: The Argument from Evolution

“Morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes”—Michael Ruse

[The following was presented to the UNF Philosophy Club on December 9, 2011. By no means is it complete and it is my intention to develop a more coherent paper arguing against the Moral Error Theory. I am open to any comments and criticisms]

As we approach the 35^th year anniversary of John Mackie’s, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, it has become an appropriate time to commemorate the arguments put forth along with more recent ones, as well as some criticisms of his argument. Though, to begin outright with the arguments discussed may create some confusion. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid this confusion, it is essential that a brief account of the origins of the Moral Error Theory be given.

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Eliminative Materialism, Bayesian Probability, Beliefs Gone Wild, and LSE Choice Group

Patricia Churchland discusses eliminative materialism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzT0jHJdq7Q

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The Death of Ideas: The Morals of Cheating and Plagiarism: The Problem of The Educated Uneducated

Dr. Vitz has posted several post concerning the cheating, plagiarism and lack of learning that has become a serious problem in academic institutions. These issues are of vital concern for the educators, the students, the nation and even the world, especially the democratic world. In order to address a problem, we must first know the reasons for the problem and what kind of problem it is; and, then, and only then, frame a solution to that problem. The issues that I will address in this post are: roots of cheating, plagiarism and being educated without learning; and I will address if cheating, plagiarism and being educated without learning are a moral issues, are practical issues or if they are both—and how it is what it is.

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Killing a Vegan: Degrees of Subjectivity

Have you ever Stepped on a nail and not felt it–then: Pain Strikes you. You’ve been standing on the nail for a minute, but because you had your mind focused on the hottie walking by, you didn’t notice it. This is revealing. It reveals that pain (the phenomenological pain) is a process of higher order functions. The “I” becomes aware of the of the pain and then it becomes “I-pain”. In psychology, there is a distinction between aversive reactions and physiological response to a stimuli and the phenomenological pain response to a stimuli. Aversive reactions can take place without pain, but are many times accompanied by pain—emotional or physical, which are processed in the same area of the brain (see last months Scientific American). Now, humans and higher order animals can feel pain, but lower order animals may not feel phenomenological pain because they don’t have the “I” concept or the ability the higher order brain functions to process suffering as anything more than a stimuli and response. When we talk about ethics with animals, we should consider degrees of suffering.

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Is It Ethical to “Make” Someone Behave Ethically?

I’ve been perusing the psychological prescriptions of Martin Hoffman lately, and his suggestions and research raise some interesting ethical questions. Essentially, Hoffman presents some research that suggests that we can, if the proper technique is used, make an individual behave ethically. Before delving into those questions, however, let’s get a grasp on some of the suggestions Hoffman has put forth in his book Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice.

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The Trap…

…is an Adam Curtis documentary about the creation and use of game theory in Cold-War America and how this led to our society’s conception of freedom and of the individual. If you haven’t seen it and if you are at all interested in game theory or political philosophy, then it’s worth watching. Here is the link to the documentary, on Google video. It features interviews with John Nash, Friedrick von Hayek, John Maynard Smith, Jean-Paul Sarte, Isaiah Berlin, Madsen Pirie (founder of the Adam Smith Institute), among others. Even if you ultimately don’t agree with the politics of this documentary or it’s boarder-line polemical tone, the interviews make watching this series (3 hour long installments) worth while.

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Psychological Types and Disorders

In comments on my post about imaging the brains of psychopaths, Mark brings up some interesting things. One of them is whether the DSM even has a category for “psychopaths.” I don’t have my DSM with me at the moment, but I’m guessing the answer is: No.

However, while on the topic of the DSM and psychological disorders, and how the are discovered or invented, I thought I’d link to a post Neuroskeptic has up about the newest revised version of the DSM. The DSM is considered the Bible of psychiatry and the newest version, due out in 2013, has recieved a lot of debate. The question is whether all the debates about the new DSM is a good thing:

Debate is usually thought to be healthy, but I think in this case, it’s a very bad sign for DSM-V. The previous editions, like DSM-IV, were presented to the world as a big list of mental disorders carrying the authority of the American Psychiatric Association. That’s why people called the DSM the Bible of psychiatry – it was supposedly revealed truth as handed down by a consensus group of experts. If not infallible, it was at least something to take note of. There have always been critics of the DSM, but until recently, they were the underdogs, chipping away at an imposing edifice.

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More on fMRI’s: A Psychopath’s Brain

There’s an interesting couple of posts over at Psych Central about using fMRI techonology to image the brains of psychopaths. Such techonology, if available, brings up interesting questions all around. One ethical question is one that has already been explored in science fiction–if we are able to tell who is (potentially) a psychopath and capable of horrendous behavior, what should we do? Curtail deviant behavior? Let it happen? What about the rights of the patient/participant in a study?

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Reading Your Mind with fMRI

Researchers say they can now trace your memories and tell which memory is being recalled through fMRI:

FORMATION of a memory is widely believed to leave a ‘trace’ in the brain – a fleeting pattern of electrical activity which strengthens the connections within a widely distributed network of neurons, and which re-emerges when the memory is recalled. The concept of the memory trace was first proposed nearly a century ago, but the nature of the trace, its precise location in the brain and the underlying neural mechanisms all remain elusive. Researchers from University College London now report that functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) can be used to decode individual memory traces and to predict which of three recently encoded memories is being recalled.

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You Make Me Closer to God

By removing part of my brain, that is.

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Do Medications Work for Psych Conditions as They Do for Physical Conditions?

Interesting discussion at Feminist Philosophers.

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Is Freud Back in Fashion?

Neuroskeptic thinks not.

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Call for Papers: “Spirituality in Action: Bringing Transpersonal Psychology to a World in Crisis”

I though this might be relevant for those working on Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and/or Moral Psychology. Best of Luck!

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“The Obama Effect”

Readers who have followed recent philosophical discussions on implicit bias and schema disruption (here, for example) may be interested in this study reported at The Situationist attempting to test whether having an African-American president has changed the way African-American students perform on tests, and whether it has enhanced their ability to overcome stereotype threats that decrease academic performance.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

Readers who haven’t followed the discussions on implicit bias and schema disruption or who aren’t familiar with the relevant psychological literature may wish to follow the links at the end of the entry at The Situationist.

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A Situationist Interpretation of MLK Jr.

At The Situationist. Here’s a snippet:

To be sure, King is most revered in some circles for quotations that are easily construed as dispositionist, such as: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Taken alone, as it often is, that sentence seems to set a low bar. Indeed, some Americans contend that we’ve arrived at that promised land; after all, most of us (mostly incorrectly) imagine ourselves to be judging people based solely on their dispositions, choices, personalities, or, in short, their characters.

Putting King’s quotation in context, however, it becomes clear that his was largely a situationist message. He was encouraging us all to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle situational forces that caused inequalities and to question (what John Jost calls) system-justifying ideologies that helped maintain those inequalities.

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Conference Papers

Congratulations to the students whose papers have been accepted for presentation at the 12th Annual Northeast Florida Student Philosophy Conference at UNF on February 7th:

“How to Motivate the Maxim that ‘Ought Implies Can’ to Defend the Principle of Alternate Possibilities”
Sean Armil (University of Florida)

“On the Limitations of Formal Methods”
Wataru Asanuma (Florida State University)

“A Defense of Lewisian Contextualism”
Yael Benjamin (University of Massachusettes at Dartmouth)

“The Impact of Chalmers’ Theory of Consciousness on the Theistic Argument from Consciousness”
Andrew Brenner (University of North Florida)

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Knobe and Gopnik on Bloggingheads

Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Alison Gopnik (UC-Berkeley) talk about how children think, about scientific thinking, and plenty more!

Note: Further commentary at the Splintered Mind.

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The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Experiment is standard in psychology classes and a hypothesis Stanley Milgram raised has been increasingly taken up and examined by philosophers, “[O]ften it is not so much the kind of person a man as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” This hypothesis, the situationist hypothesis, is sometimes seen as a threat to certain conceptions of virtue, as well as some philosophical views of rationality, action, personality, moral responsibility, and moral psychology.

The Milgram Experiment was designed to test the hypothesis—also raised by Hannah Arendt, whom Milgram read—that horrible events, like the holocaust, do not require an especially evil group of people conspiring together. Rather, they require that normal people simply do what they are told.

Neuroskeptic, a neuroscientist blogger, writes about little-known aspects of the Milgram Experiment, for example, that participants were paid $4.00 each, a description (and photo) of the confederate whom participants “shocked”, and that recent experimental results show findings similar to Milgram’s.

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Stimulating the Cerebral Cortex

Stimulating points on the cerebral cortex with the tip of an electrode can make a subject experience various sensations. A patient may move an arm and experience this movement as external, i.e., not originating from the subject, experienced as a reflex. Some have taken this to show there is part of the mind (higher order cognition, perhaps) immune to physical manipulation because such stimulation does not manipulate the intentions of the subject. Neuroskeptic explains why it isn’t surprising that stimulating points on the cerebral cortex doesn’t affect the intentions of the subject:

[T]o take this as evidence for some kind of a dualism between a form of conciousness which can be manipulated via the brain and another, non-material level of conciousness which can’t (the “soul” in other words), is like saying that because hammering away at one key of a piano produces nothing but an annoying noise, there must be something magical going on when a pianist plays a Mozart concerto. Stimulating a single small part of the brain is about the crudest manipulation imaginable; all we can conclude from the results of point-stimulation experiments is that some kinds of mental processes are not controlled by single points on the cortex. This should not be surprising, since the brain is a network of 100 billion cells; what’s interesting, in fact, is that stimulating a few million of these cells with the tip of an electrode can do anything.

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H.M. Dies at 82

A famous participant in neuroscience research, H.M., died last week. NYT reports:

In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.

For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.

And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped scientists understand the biology of learning, memory and physical dexterity, as well as the fragile nature of human identity. [...]

From the age of 27, when he embarked on a life as an object of intensive study, he lived with his parents, then with a relative and finally in an institution. His amnesia did not damage his intellect or radically change his personality. But he could not hold a job and lived, more so than any mystic, in the moment.

“Say it however you want,” said Dr. Thomas Carew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and president of the Society for Neuroscience. “What H. M. lost, we now know, was a critical part of his identity.”

(HT: Neuroethics & Law Blog)

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Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy

It’s a flurry of podcasts! Here’s information about the conference these podcasts come from:

“Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy” will explore philosophical questions about three specific populations — people with autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and those labeled “mentally retarded.” We will raise ethical and foundational questions regarding both theoretical and practical matters. The areas to be explored include:

Personhood: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the protections and responsibilities we assign to “persons”? Do the implications of such exclusion force a reconsideration of the concept of personhood?

Justice: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the claims and protections granted to members of a political community? If not, how might their interests be represented and given a political voice?

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Evil Smells like a Fart

Via Eric Schwitzgebel I learn of what is quite possibly the best study ever, simply because it uses fart spray so awesomely. However, this sort of study is interesting for reasons beyond the creative use of fart spray.

As I’ve previously noted, explicit use of disgust-based arguments are often found in popular moral and legal debates, and people sometimes argue that a disgust-response itself shows something is immoral or should be illegal. Martha Nussbaum (U-Chicago), in Hiding from Humanity, has argued that the disgust-response doesn’t reliably track whether something is immoral (or unsafe/hazardous) and disgust should never play a role in making something illegal.

Here’s a snippet from Schwitzgebel (read his entire entry here):

Simone Schnall and co-authors (including the always interesting Jonathan Haidt) set up a table on the Stanford campus, asking passing Stanford students to complete a questionnaire on the immorality or not of marrying one’s first cousin, having consensual sex with a first cousin, driving rather than walking 1 1/2 miles to work, and releasing a documentary over the objections of immigrants who didn’t realize they were being interviewed on film. All respondents completed the questionnaire while standing near a trashbucket. For one group, the bucket was clean and empty; for another it was lightly doused with fart spray so that a mild odor emanated from it; for a third group, the bucket was liberally sprayed and emitted a strong stench. Participants in the odiferous conditions rated all four actions morally worse than in the fart-absent condition.

UPDATE: Speaking of Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity, there’s a special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy dealing with this book. Find out more at The Brooks Blog.

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Cognitive Neuroscience, Moral Psychology and Psychopathology

Interesting stuff right here.

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Whatever Makes a Person Human Seemed Somehow Missing*

JJ at Feminist Philosophers posted a recent case of a child who appears to have had little social contact for the first five or six years of her life. As JJ notes, feral children, while thankfully rare, are interesting to theorists for a variety of reasons. Questions about the nature of language, human capacity for language and various capabilities associated with human development are among the issues associated with feral children. JJ has also linked to a paper by Lila Gleitman about language development in which the case of feral children is considered.

*This title is adapted from a passage in the St. Petersburg Times article; second link above.

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