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Author | Topic: Biology is Destiny? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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There's a guy called Fred, married for many years, normal.
At the age of 40 his personality changes, he starts developing overt and inappropriate sexual tendancies. He starts looking at child porn. He gets kicked out by his wife for making sexual advances to young girls. He is finally prosecuted for a sex offence and put on the sex offender's register. He also starts getting bad headaches and when he finally turns up at a hospital, they find an enormous tumour on his prefrontal cortex. They remove the tumour and his paedophilia is cured. A couple of years later he starts having sexual problems again, he checks in to hospital, they find that the tumour has returned. They remove it, it cures the paedophilia. He's currently fine. So this particular 'evil' was caused by neurology. Perhaps then free will and morality are dependent on the way our brains work rather than how Satan works.
quote: Scientific paper here:http://www.ahealthymind.org/...y/right%20OFC%20pedophile.pdf Article here:http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/brainontrial.htm Biology is Destiny? Discuss Edited by Tangle, : Linguistic improvement Edited by Tangle, : Fixed broken link
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Well rather a lot if you're a believer in the concepts of free will and evil, right and wrong, sin and absolute morality. It's interesting to defense lawyers too, if you can say 'my brain made me do it' you can't be culpable. Of course, the fact that Fred's brain was changed by a tumour is what makes this case interesting and proved how behaviour can be changed by extreme circumstances. But once you accept the fact that brain, beyond our own will, is responsible for behaviour, you can legitimately ask to what extent we are in control of our own actions generally. Edited by Tangle, : Second thoughts....
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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quote: It's fine then :-)
quote: Well that's all fairy tale stuff to me. But in any case my reference to Satan was simply metaphorical, my real interest is in how much of our behaviour is simply outside our conscious control and therefore how can we be held responsible for it? If what we call good and bad behaviour is simply neurology, what on earth is morality?
quote: Leaving Satan aside, you are making my point for me. Drugs are capable of changing mood. To take it a bit further, an extreme bi-polar or schizophrenic person who stops taking his drugs can display behaviour that 'normal' people would describe as immoral and even evil. There's evidence that serial killers at the extreme end of psychopathy have differently wired brains - are they as culpable as murderers with 'normally' wired brains?
quote: Don't you think Fred's moral compass was changed by the tumour?
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Yes, I accept that point. Even if we could have a legal defense of 'my brain made me doi it' the individual would still have to be put somewhere where he couldn't harm the rest of us. But it would (should?) change our views of the crime - Fred would become a patient rather than a criminal and hopefully treated rather differently. But Fred is an extreme, where is the point when we cross the line from culpable to not culpable?
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: In Fred's case he gets a pass on 2 and partially on 3. A pure psychopath would pass on 1. But these are extremes. They point to a much more general issue that it's likely that we will all have your 1,2s and 3s differently calibrated in our wiring - just as we're all different heights and weights organised around a mean. Logically, this means that the playing field isn't level as far as our ability to choose right from wrong is concerned but our laws (and religious folk) assume something quite different - that free will is perfect. (With exceptions for age and illness)
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: I'm leading to exactly the opposite, so I'd like to hear how the religious folk here repair the damage it does to their absolute morality and perfect free will beliefs.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: I think you're in an impossible position here. Until he was 40 Fred behaved normally. He then had the tumour and his behaviour changed. To take just one element of how it changed, he started looking at child porn - something he had not previously done and something we must suppose he found abhorrent both before the tumour grew and after it was removed. So we know for sure that his brain made him do it. This very strongly suggests that his moral compass (whatever that is) changed along with his brain - how else could it have happened. If his morality did not change ie he knew that the thing he was doing was wrong but he did it anyway, why? And how? In psychopathy, we know that they don't have whatever it is that makes normal people empathise, this results in them not understanding why it could be wrong to murder someone and eat their liver. Compass pointing exactly due South?
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Says the law. Being 'of sound mind' or more exactly for criminal law, acting with intent and 'men's rea' is at the centre of our law.
quote: Mens rea - Wikipedia
quote: I'm doing the opposite. I'm saying that because the brain is the source of cognitive processes (if not, where else?) then how it is wired is likely to influence those processes.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
I'm really trying to get beyond Fred and the extreme position he represents. He shows, in an obvious way, how the brain affects personality and behaviour. And we already accept that drugs - and their absence - change personality and behaviour.
What I'm trying to get to is that there must be a gradient between someone much more saintly than me (not hard) and Fred at his worst. And that gradient must be how the brain is wired, both at birth and as we grow. So we're not born with equal 'free will'. If that's the case then the entire concept of absolute morality falls flat on it's arse and with it goes sin and evil and basically everything at the core of most religions - including Christianity.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Then neurology is going to make a bigger dent in the Abrahamic religions than Darwin did. 'All' Darwin did was show that we don't have to invoke a God to explain how species got here. Demonstrating that Free Will isn't actually free or equal and is mutable removes religion's claim on morality, kills original sin and does not require a saviour to sacrifice himself to save us from it. Pretty much game over for theism I'd say.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Sheesh. Well you can, of course, just make stuff up to fill the yawning gap, but really, no, it doesn't solve the problem. The problem being that the main argument is not about damage - that just proves the fact that brain configuration affect moral behaviour - it's the fact that our brains are not identical that's the problem. We must all have different starting positions in dealing with moral problems, for some of us it will be easier than others to behave morally. That is plainly unfair if we are later to be judged on it. (You now have to make up a God that compensates).
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Why go to all that effort when it looks like we're beginnning to get some realworld, actual answers?
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Well, crudely, it appears that the orbitofrontal cortex Is responsible for morality. Not some weird spirit.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: It seems self-evident to me. Our consciousness has allowed us to out-compte pretty much anything on the planet and could take us to others. Surely consciousness - along with intelligence, our ability to plan ahead, empathise, speak and understand others and to put ourselves in their heads is such an obvious competitive advantage it barely needs thinking about? (Even if it does simply emerge fro the development of another useful feature such as language).
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Tangle Member Posts: 9514 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Nope, I'm not getting this. There is an old argument that consciousness is not needed to do what we do ie. there's no competitive advantage of being conscious. But that's just silly - does anyone think that it's possible to build a hospital without consciousness (with all that means)?
quote:Everything about our consciousness happens in our brain - there's nowhere else for it to happen and MRI shows it happening. As consciousness means more or less that we are self aware (our brain telling us who we are - the internal conversation) we know we have it and it's an incredibly useful thing to have.
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