quote: The study relied on non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to interfere with the right TPJ, temporarily impeding the normal firing of neurons in that region. In one experiment participants were exposed to TMS for nearly half an hour then asked to complete a quiz in which they had to judge characters' actions based on their intentions. In a second test, subjects were hit with a 500-millisecond burst of TMS just as they were evaluating a moral problem.
In both cases, control subjects were able to evaluate the harmfulness and morality of characters' intentions, whereas those exposed to TMS made judgments based purely on outcome. For example, one common question asked whether or not it was morally permissible for a man to allow his girlfriend to cross a bridge he knows is unsafe, even if in the end she makes it across safely. Control subjects found the intention to do harm morally impermissible, but those exposed to TMS largely based their judgment solely on the outcome; no harm, no foul.
posted
rollainm, I think you'll really enjoy this TED talk from Rebecca Saxe, who was the lead researcher on this project. The talk is a bit more expansive.
posted
Where's your qualia now? When moral judgements - surely the epitome of the non-materialistic account of the mind - can be changed by a magnetic field, it's time to give up on dualism.
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Yo, you ain't no Daniel Dennett. Don't be dissing my red color quale! I got qualia up the wazoo. In any case, I can have qualia and not be a property dualist. Besides, the materialistic aspect of moral judgments does not entail materialism with regards to moral objects.
Of course, the whole idea of morality is rather speculative, but whatever.
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quote:Where's your qualia now? When moral judgements - surely the epitome of the non-materialistic account of the mind - can be changed by a magnetic field, it's time to give up on dualism.
What does this have to do with qualia?
I think its fairly obvious, at least to anyone who's ever seen someone drunk, that purely physical changes to the brain can alter human judgement.
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quote:Originally posted by JonHecht: Yo, you ain't no Daniel Dennett. Don't be dissing my red color quale! I got qualia up the wazoo. In any case, I can have qualia and not be a property dualist.
I tend to agree. Part of this is really dependent on how one defines qualia. I don't think any of us would be willing to say that subjective experience doesn't exist. I separate a bit from Dan Dennett on this point, in that I can say that there is something very important and currently not understood about the nature of the phenomena we call qualia, while still holding a completely materialistic view of the universe.
I don't agree that the hard problems of consciousness don't exist, and the research being done by Rebecca Saxe doesn't in any way change my views on that.
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quote:Because I think physical things can influence nonphysical things.
Doesn't the "physical things can influence" part negate the "nonphysical" part? Isn't that what physical means?
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Wouldn't that be a circular definition? Physical things are things that can be influenced by physical things?
That definition would also mean God, by essentially every Biblical portrayal of him, is physical by virtue of responding to prayers by physical human beings. And then souls would be physical by virtue of being influenced by God.
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quote:That definition would also mean God, by essentially every Biblical portrayal of him, is physical by virtue of responding to prayers by physical human beings.
This is a fairly robust criticism of the supernatural - that to the extent that it can influence the physical world, that influence could be measured. The inability to demonstrate that influence empirically suggests that the influence doesn't actually exist.
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: Because I think physical things can influence nonphysical things.
Great, that means we can measure the 'nonphysical' things. Off you go and measure up some gods, then.
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I'm pretty sure that Tres would say that he has empirically experienced and measured God's influence. I'm not sure why you think that he couldn't.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: err...how is it different?
Think of fish stories - "It was *this* (holds hands way apart) big!" - that is experiencing. Measuring is when you put the thing on a scale and take a photo.
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I have the suspicion that physical and natural are being conflated. If this is the case, then I agree that God and miracles can be considered natural, as opposed to supernatural, if natural is defined as occurring within the system.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: err...how is it different?
Think of fish stories - "It was *this* (holds hands way apart) big!" - that is experiencing. Measuring is when you put the thing on a scale and take a photo.
I'm not really following this. In the first part, you seem to be focusing on telling someone else about it, not the experience of catching the fish. Is telling the "fish story" what you consider experiencing the fish?
In the second part, I don't get how taking a picture is part of measuring. To me, putting it on the scale and comparing it against the standard would be measuring. Are you saying that if you put it on a scale, but didn't take a picture, it wouldn't be measuring?
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I'm confused, was the question "Would you allow your girlfriend to cross a bridge you knew was unsafe even if you knew she would cross safely?"
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I believe that the people were presented with a vignette about a guy allowing his girlfriend cross a bridge he knows is unsafe and then asked to judge the morality of his action. I'm unclear if it is established that he actively desires his girlfriend to get hurt on the bridge or is just negligent.
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I'm confused, was the question "Would you allow your girlfriend to cross a bridge you knew was unsafe even if you knew she would cross safely?"
No, that would be contradictory. It's not unsafe if you know the outcome in advance.
I think the question is more about whether the choice to send her across was moral, given the outcome (she happens to arrive safely).
Normally people can recognize that the morality of that choice doesn't depend on the outcome, but on what you know at the time you make the choice. It's not OK to send a person across a bridge if you know there's a 30% chance of dying, even if she makes it.
This experiment tended to show that people weren't capable of that kind of moral reasoning if part of their brain was effectively turned off.
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scifibum: Ah thanks, I don't have time to read the entire article now, but that part confused me. I'll definitely check it out later.
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quote: It's not OK to send a person across a bridge if you know there's a 30% chance of dying, even if she makes it.
Is it okay for me to let me wife drive on the highway if there is a 0.0001% chance she'll die? (assuming that there is a significantly lower chance she'll die at home) At what percentage is the risk deemed moral?
Not trying to be a snot, just these kinds of questions are fun, even if they don't really have answers (and I don't expect you to come up with one).
I am fascinated with the study as described here. I may check out the TED talk if I get a chance. The human brain is the most fascinating thing in the known universe, IMHO.
While I would not go as far as to make the claims KoM is making, this sort of thing is indeed why I think there is no need to believe in a human soul. The physical brain accounts for everything we can observe about human behavior, so what's left to attribute to the soul? For me the answer is, of course, nothing.
(I know the religious have their own answers to this that are satisfactory to themselves, I'm not necessarily inviting debate, though it's not unwelcome either)
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"Is it okay for me to let me wife drive on the highway if there is a 0.0001% chance she'll die? (assuming that there is a significantly lower chance she'll die at home) At what percentage is the risk deemed moral?"
It is OK for you to let her drive if it's 100% that she'll die. And it's not OK if there's 0% that she will.
To be quite frank, the claim made about qualia appears to be mostly, if not completely, unrelated to the study to me.
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: Because I think physical things can influence nonphysical things.
Great, that means we can measure the 'nonphysical' things. Off you go and measure up some gods, then.
I think you have my claim backwards. If nonphysical things can influence physical things, then we could measure the nonphysical using its influence on the physical.
But that's not what I said. I said physical things can influence nonphysical things. That just means I can measure the physical usings its influence on the nonphysical. And I definitely can. For instance, I can tell a stove is physically hot if I touch it an experience the nonphysical sensation of burning pain.
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I wouldn't go so far as to say that epiphenomenalism is superstitious... People seem to dismiss these options too readily because they do not fit our pretty picture of reality, but that does not mean that they are epistemically any more suspect than materialism.
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Nah, it's a hopeless rear-guard defense of dualism, one of the last intellectually respectable superstitions.
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quote:Ah, one-way causation. The last refuge of superstition.
I believe there is likely two-way causation. The other direction of the causation is just far harder to prove/explain, and is unrelated to this magnetic field experiment.
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: Not always, and phantom pain is very much real pain.
phantom pain has an exact neural correlate and we know what it is.
edit: to be fair, we have a good idea of what it is, and I don't think there's any reason to assume it's caused by anything nonphysical.
We have an idea, and sometimes, in some patients. However, it is a bit of a "the chicken or the egg" problem. Things outside of the brain cause pain, which can be observed by observing brain activity centers. However, not all pain registers the same, and not all phantom pain shows up on brain scans.
I don't know anyone who thinks that chemical changes DON'T have an influence on consciousness or perception. However, that does not mean that all changes are chemical/physical. Nor does it mean that understanding those changes makes you a better human being.
If anything, a tendency to limit all of human experience to chemical/physiological changes makes you less of one.
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Glad to know I'm less of a human being! I'll make sure to have an appropriately devalued view of life from now on.
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The thing I think you're forgetting, Kwea, is that even if we believe that behavior is deterministic (except where it's random) and the way we work is entirely chemical/physiological, we still have the same kinds of conscious experience that anyone does. "I think, therefore I am" resonates with everybody, and we all experience ourselves making choices and feeling things.
Neural damage might limit someone's human experience, but beliefs about what experience means, and why we have it, do not.
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quote:If anything, a tendency to limit all of human experience to chemical/physiological changes makes you less of one.
This is a remarkably narrow-minded view of what constitutes humanity. It's entirely possible to both have an academic understanding of human experience that recognizes in it only the laws and substance of physics and chemistry while still fully experiencing the emotion, awe, and even reverence for that phenomena that only humans are really capable of.
I don't have to see the roller coaster as anything more than bolts and steel for it to produce a pleasurable or frightening experience. I don't have to view a movie as more than a projection of light through film in order to experience all that a film can produce in me. In many cases, the understanding of the basic physical processes enhances the experience beyond the mystery that proceeded that knowledge.
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quote: In many cases, the understanding of the basic physical processes enhances the experience beyond the mystery that proceeded that knowledge.
QFT
quote:Originally posted by Geraine: This is really cool, but scares me..If a magnetic field can alter a person's sense of morality, could it be used to do other things?
I better buy some Rossum Corporation stock.
Worth noting Geraine, they were able alter peoples' moral judgments of other people's actions, not alter someone's morality. Though when they figure out how to do that, I'll make sure to warn you!
but yes, much of the application for research going on right now in neuroscience certainly has the possibility to be used in scary ways. And many wonderful ways as well.
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quote:Worth noting Geraine, they were able alter peoples' moral judgments of other people's actions, not alter someone's morality.
It seems to me that the brain likely uses the same circuits to judge other people's morality, and the morality of one's own actions. So I don't think the distinction you suggest is useful.
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I'm not sure if that's right. My understanding is that the RTPJ is involved in theory of mind calculations. And that when judging whether someone else committed a moral act or not we use the RTPJ to model that person's brain state and deduce their intent. By disrupting that area of the brain, we are not able to do that and so our judgments are more utilitarian.
It seems to me that input from the RTPJ feeds into whatever areas are responsible for moral judgments, and while you're right that my own ethical actions are somewhat influenced by my understanding of other people's beliefs and desires, there is certainly not a 1:1 correlation.
So I think it IS a useful distinction.
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posted
Are you suggesting that someone might express a different morality for their own actions than for the actions of others? That he didn't do anything wrong when he sent his girlfriend across an unstable bridge but I would be doing something wrong if I acted in the same way?
We usually discuss morality in terms of what is right or wrong regardless of the identity of the individual actors. That's sort of a core element to morality - that universality of it.
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okay, take a look at some of the results from the study. people across the board thought that blame should be attributed when individuals caused other people harm. When no harm was intended, but harm occurred, people on average attributed less blame to the individual who caused harm. But when the RTPJ was disrupted, people judged individuals who caused unintended harm as harshly as those who caused intended harm.
also, relatedly, individuals who attempted to cause harm, but no harm occurred were normally still judged harshly, but when the RTPJ was disrupted, people judged failed attempts at harm as morally permissible.
Their morality was not fundamentally altered. Harming other people was still bad. What changed was how the intentions of the actors were incorporated into their moral judgments.
So given that, I DO think there is an important distinction to be made regarding what was being done here.
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from the more detailed article linked to at the beginning of the above article:
quote:“It doesn’t completely reverse people’s moral judgments, it just biases them,” says Saxe.
When subjects received TMS to a brain region near the right TPJ, their judgments were nearly identical to those of people who received no TMS at all.
While understanding other people’s intentions is critical to judging them, it is just one piece of the puzzle. We also take into account the person’s desires, previous record and any external constraints, guided by our own concepts of loyalty, fairness and integrity, says Saxe.
“Our moral judgments are not the result of a single process, even though they feel like one uniform thing,” she says. “It’s actually a hodgepodge of competing and conflicting judgments, all of which get jumbled into what we call moral judgment.”
quote:Originally posted by scifibum: "I think, therefore I am" resonates with everybody, and we all experience ourselves making choices and feeling things.
I'm going to get yelled at now... I deny that there is any good reason to believe in the self or "I".
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: "I think, therefore I am" resonates with everybody, and we all experience ourselves making choices and feeling things.
I'm going to get yelled at now... I deny that there is any good reason to believe in the self or "I".
true, agreed, but even if the idea of the self is an illusion, it's certainly a persistent illusion! And so given that this collection of atoms that you guys refer to as Strider is able to feel pain and joy and has all sorts of emotions and thoughts, I will continue to value those experiences and thoughts that bring me happiness. I'll sometimes even value the ones that bring me unhappiness!
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: "I think, therefore I am" resonates with everybody, and we all experience ourselves making choices and feeling things.
I'm going to get yelled at now... I deny that there is any good reason to believe in the self or "I".
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