Do we have free will? Is there meaning to life? A slew of new books provide some insights into how scientists are supplementing Plato with PET scans, hoping to answer these questions.
In My Brain Made Me Do It: The Rise of Neuroscience and the Threat to Moral Responsibility (Prometheus Books, 2010), Eliezer J. Sternberg examines studies that pinpoint areas of the brain associated with exercising free will and suggests that our ability to decide makes us largely responsible for our actions.
Although we can easily spot and describe the features that make someone wise, defining wisdom is more elusive. In the new book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience (Knopf, 2010), journalist Stephen S. Hall discusses studies that show brain activity corresponding to wise traits, such as moral judgment.
In The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Princeton University Press, 2010), philosopher and psychologist Paul Thagard discusses the reason we are wired to form social bonds: loving relationships can give a sense of purpose to our lives.
This article was originally published with the title Philosophy Meets Neuroscience.
See what we're tweeting about
13 Comments
Add CommentGee, do you think there is brain activity involved with moral judgement, and will mood rings, I mean brain imaging help us understand this better? A loving relationship can give us a sense of purpose? Breakthrough science, that!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe question of free will versus determinism has profound legal and moral implications. Just because you "seem" to have it, does not mean that it exists, at least not to philosophers and scientists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertain observations are trivial. Obviously people do make choices. Sometimes they make non-constrained choices also, and that sense they are free. But we are not free, as Sartre once claimed, to choose ourselves, although we may sometimes reach the interesting conclusion that we have done things, previously, that were wrong, and decide to change that. But all of this is quite compatible with of general deterministic framework. One could say that even if we were not transcendentally free it would be better for us to to believe that we are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt will good to see how this develops.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo these observations also apply to my favorite media personalities and politicians? It's hard to imagine a more carefully scripted existence devoid of free-will...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Free will" is an oxymoron. Your will is simply a product of all the factors that have determined you. The most strong-willed and disciplined individuals are the least free. There is a reason why we call it "determination". Want to be free? Flip a coin. Don't like that option? Then you don't want to be free. (Me neither, actually. I like what the world has wrought in me and what it does through me. But I know I ain't free....)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClearly this is an issue which cannot be decided by neuroscience. Free will is an abstract construct solely meant to describe our ability to make various, often conflicting, choices. Whether one may see the thoughts that underlie this decision making mechanism in real time is rather irrelevant in the abstract sense. Meanwhile, for a reductionist there is similarly little reason to utilize such abstract constructs to describe the biological activities underlying brain function. As a result, aiming to utilize our understanding of the brain in order to reconcile old -hiloso-hical conflicts is a waste of time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe mind was in a sense the last frontier of philosophy. It looks like science is taking the reins in that field now too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is idiotic. Anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence can realize believing anything other than that our behavior, thoughts, and feelings (including moral inclinations, thoughts, ideas, as well as 'self control') are all created, produced, mitigated, structured, and excited by the brain is most likely due to cultural, theologic, and emotional bias. The only moral implication is that perhaps punishments will become more logical in accordance to the crimes they are enacted on account of. Ethics, legality, and justice exist to protect a social norm and better society, not to serve as god.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImpressive comments... except for NortonJohnny's. It seems there is almost a consensus of opinion that FW in the traditional "soul based" religious sense cannot exist in the light of neuroscience and a clearly "deterministic", causal Universe. There is absolutely nothing about ourselves that is "uncaused"... and similarly, we cannot be the cause of ourselves or "causa sui" as one philosopher put it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany great minds came to this conclusion pre-neuroscience and pre-genetics... now it is clearer than ever. Our minds are wholly instantiated by our physical brains... and the myriad connections intracranially and peripherally via the spine and enteric nervous system. The real heavy lifting, neurologically speaking, is in our subconscious anyway.
It is no less a marvel that when unconstrained, we are "free" to make many choices, depending on prior causal restraints and conditioning... but we never, ever have uncontrained, unconditional FW. If so, our lives would basically be a disconnected stream of random events... and evolution would have jettisoned this absurd biological entity before it got off the proverbial ground.
Thankfully, we are A PART OF, not apart from Nature and fully embedded in the Cosmos... inexorably unfolding spacetime.
CHeers!
BTW: if you claim unfettered FW for yourself... then you must grant such an attribute... to your dog... pigs... elephants... whales, dolfins... ravens... not to mention our primate pals. Now, how are your morals holding up?
I am very surprised to read hard line comments like: "... to utilize such abstract constructs to describe the biological activities underlying brain function. ... to utilize our understanding of the brain in order to reconcile old -hiloso-hical conflicts is a waste of time." We can choose to be satisfied exclusively with the reality of sense phenomenal objects and events and with our limited capacity to understand complexity, but humans have an also natural thirst to go beyond those cognitive limitations and explain the invisibility to improve on our biopsychosocial adaptive effort. Try Chapter 14 of my book "An Epistemontological View of Reality." at: http://www.delasierra-sheffer.net/ID7-BPS-info/index.htm It's all free! :-) Dr.d
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiso.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdid you say "studies show brain activity corresponding to wise traits"?
well, now.
For interested readers, go to "International Perspectives on the Philosophy of Psychiatry" website or the series with the same name from Oxford U. press. My own comment on this is that we still have the idea that brain or genes or environment determines behavior, rather than you need to have the environment to activate certain genes to enable learning, that on one level happens in the brain, but also can happen on the level of experience and behaviour. The problem with most neuroscientists is that they apply folk-psychological concepts to a level of reality call "brain" and see what parts of "brain" activate when they test subjects reporting those folk psychological concepts to their own experience and we assume we're all talking about the same subject and assume that named experience has some reifiable zone or activity in the brain which "causes" the experience or behaviour. Bad philosophy of consciousness and behaviour, bad epistemology, bad psychology and thus a not yet full science of cognitive-affective-neuroscience, actually closer to phrenology!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this