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Author | Topic: Biology is Destiny? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Not so much with the unwittingly, already.Of course we all adhere to a set of common moral principles. It's only when the brain is damaged or religions get involved that we vary. You'd be hard pressed to find any society on the planet at any point in history that thought rape, murder, theft, lying etc was a good thing to be encouraged amongst its own tribe.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: You're fluffing the general point. You won't find any societies that practice those behaviours as general principles, as 'good' things that all should do on a day to day basis. We all know it's wrong to steal your neighbour's sheep, rape his wife, murder the husband and lie to the police about it later. No society could survive it it tolerated those behaviours.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: I'm happy to agree as I said pretty much exactly the same thing in message 13. But we do all have those gross moral fixtures are fittings. They can vary by culture and by individual but we know that they exist. The point I'm trying to make is that if the brain and how it's wired is responsible for how an indivual feels about right and wrong and if it does vary as significantly as say, height and weight varies, then we are not equally culpable for our actions.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
chuck77 writes: Well if you say so. Also, just for laughs, do you have this mans entire history?Do you know 100% that he never looked at child porn before the tumor? This is a yes or no question Tangle. Yes or No? {edit} etc etc including the other handwaving and smoke blowing that follows I guess you didn't read the case history that is included in the paper that I posted. This is what we know. http://www.ahealthymind.org/...y/right%20OFC%20pedophile.pdf You will see that he denies any interest in children before his tumour, but you will also see that he admits to an interest in pornography going back to adolescence. You will see that when he was 16 he suffered a head injury with 2 minutes of unconsciousness followed by 2 years of migraines. You will see his documented extreme behaviour change leading up to his tumour, the MRI scans showing the (enormous) size and position (orbitofrontal cortex) of the tumour and you will see how Fred's behaviour changed after its removal. You'll also want to take particular note of this:
quote: It simply doesn't get any clearer than that. So yes, I, like the authors of the paper, are SURE that the tumour caused Fred's extreme behaviours. Now, perhaps if you wish to say that it didn't, you'll explain why. Edited by Tangle, : just fixing chuck's problem so he can't complain anymore about something he has no need to complain about anyway ;-)
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
I have fixed your quote so that it is clear that I added the fact that you were blowing smoke an handwaving - although it's a little puzzling to me why you think it might be read otherwise.
So, after blowing away the smoke, I take it that this is your core point?
I think i'll stick with this for a moment, not arguing that criminal activity doesn't mean you have no morals, just that this tumor COULD have caused him to DISMISS his moral compass for a time still KNOWING it was wrong. People williningly do things they know are wrong all the time. It doesn't mean the brain eliminates this with abnormalities. If so, you'll find it answered in the paper. However, as you obviously haven't read the paper, here's what it says about it:
Orbitofrontal lesion research suggests that sociopathic behaviour results from a loss of impulse control rather than a loss of moral knowledge. In other words, he knew it was wrong (which is why he turned himself in) but he couldn't prevent his behaviour.
Not citing the authors paper (we try to debate in our own words here, it makes for better debating) as to why you think im wrong without addressing my actual points. I have sited papers, summarised them (in my own words) and debated in my own words. I note that "here" - i.e. the Science Forum - we like to include evidence as well as opinion. So do you still feel that Fred could have stopped himself and how could he have done so? If he couldn't have stopped himself, how is he culpable?
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Reading around this subject a little is quite an eye opener. Current thinking is that morality appears to be a competition between different modules of our brain - parts that deal with emotion and parts that deal with logic. It's the logic or utilitarian part that was damaged (prefrontal cortex) in Fred and it's a fairly recent evolutionary development.
The Slate has a reasonable take on a Nature paper;
Three years ago in the journal Neuron, the neuroscientists illustrated their point. Using brain scans, they showed that utilitarian decisions involved "increased activity in brain regions associated with cognitive control." From this and other data, they surmised that the moral debate "reflects an underlying tension between competing subsystems in the brain." On one side are "the social-emotional responses that we've inherited from our primate ancestors." On the other side is a utilitarian calculus "made possible by the more recently evolved structures in the frontal lobes." The war of ideas is a war of neurones. Brain damage, evolution, and the future of morality. This appears to be exactly the opposite of the position you'd expect to find if you were a believer; surely you'd think that the emotional (i.e. moral) response would come latest in the development of mankind - the thing that makes him human. But it actually the rational that seems to have made us different. And it's the rational that makes us do immoral things when our control over it is lost. It becomes rational to do hideous things - which seems to be what Fred was struggling with.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
caffeine writes: Let me try a different approach. Imagine a robot that had been programmed to behave like a human. It could receive the same external stimuli as we do, and had an adaptive programming which could respond to this. It was programmed with certain drives and tendencies to mimic our instincts and biological drives. The programme could learn, it could analyse cost-benefit scenarios and perform calculations. It behaves exactly the same as a human - it can communicate, it can pan rationally, and it can have irrational emotial responses, since these are included in its programming. Being a computer, however, at no point would it have any awareness of its behaviour or the calculations being performed in its electronic brain. In what way would the behaviour of this robot differ from the behaviour of a human? If it wouldn't, then what is the adaptive basis for consciousness? Well that's essentially the Turin test which I suppose is abbreviated to 'if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. Whether or not it's necessary to be aware of our own selves in order to do what we do, is an interesting a mind game (because we can do mind games) but is it a useful question? If we hadn't pre-invented the explanation of a soul to explain all sorts of things without evidence, would it concern us as a question? I suspect not.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
quote: Pfnrrr, so much for the future of conscious machines - that was an intervention by the iPad auto error correction mind.
HAL: Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Hyroglyphx writes: As for the OP's cured pedophilia, his hiding of it would indicate his understanding of its societal "wrongness." It's admitted that he did know that at least some of the things he did was wrong - he turned himself in partly because he feared that he would rape his landlady. But he also exhibitted extreme behaviour that he clearly didn't care enough about but must have known somewhere was wrong eg he propositioned nurses whilst pissing himself or caring that there were others around him. (It's unlikely to be a winning tactic with women, so something else is broken too.) This is going to be a bit more complex than knowing right from wrong - he may well have known that society thinks some things are wrong but didn't feel it wrong himself. With the rape issue, he wanted to rape her but knew it was wrong. I don't know about you but I know that rape is wrong and have a gut revulsion of it so I couldn't do it even if I wanted to. (So much for free will.)Life, don't talk to me about life.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
chuck77 writes: You're arguing that our brain and the way it functions eliminates free will is really funny. More handwaving, perhaps you could answer my question? "So do you still feel that Fred could have stopped himself and how could he have done so? If he couldn't have stopped himself, how is he culpable?"Life, don't talk to me about life.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
chuck77 writes: If he wasn't culpable then BY GOLLY! who was? As the title of the thread suggests, biology perhaps?
If he did not have a sense of right or wrong then what are we discussing? Perhaps this, as also suggested in the opening post?
"Studies suggest that when damage is done to the frontal lobe before 18 months, people never learn right from wrong," Swerdlow said. "When damage is done after that time, people can learn right from wrong but they can't control their impulses. There is no longer regard for long-term consequences, only short-term gratification." "Nothing puts the brakes on their behavior. They are always in trouble," he said. "If their brain wants something, they take it." Swerdlow said this was the case with his patient. The man knew his actions were wrong "but the pleasure principle overrode his restraint. [snip] "He concluded: "We're dealing with the neurology of morality here." You need to address the fact that the tumour disrupted Fred's ability to choose between what he previously knew as right and wrong. Some wrong impulses he simply acted on, some he managed to fight off long enough to be operated on - who knows, perhaps if he hadn't been cured he would have raped too. Fred may have known that rape is just plain wrong at a gut level (what I'd call a real moral inhibition), or he may have known that society would punish him severely if he did it (no moral inhibition at all - simply self preservation). From the case study it looks like at least some of the latter to me - he actively wanted to rape, he felt driven to do it. If the brain tumour provided the irresistible impulse to do something, where has free will and moral choice gone?Life, don't talk to me about life.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
BTW, im recently getting over a cold and am not responsible for these posts. No one is, actually they don't even exist. Ok, good - you're beginning to get the point. Now try reading this again. I've shortened it to a single sentence for the hard of reading. "Nothing puts the brakes on their behavior. They are always in trouble," he said. "If their brain wants something, they take it." I know you want this to be really black and white - knowing what's right and what's wrong is really simple isn't it? Here's another one of those inconvenient quotes from the original post. "Studies suggest that when damage is done to the frontal lobe before 18 months, people never learn right from wrong," Swerdlow said. So brain damage before 18 months disables free will, how can that be if you think we all have the ability to know right from wrong as - I'm guessing - a god given thing? Two sentences now, try to concentrate. "When damage is done after that time, people can learn right from wrong but they can't control their impulses. There is no longer regard for long-term consequences, only short-term gratification." IF we accept your simple proposition that Fred's knowledge of right and wrong hadn't changed at all but his decisions to act on it had, where has his free will gone? He didn't choose to get the tumour, he didn't choose to have his brain state change so that he couldn't control his impulses and he didn't choose to have pedophilia. In order to be culpable you have to fully know what's right and wrong and have the real ability to choose. If you steal from a shop because someone has a gun to your head, you're making a choice, but not an immoral one.Life, don't talk to me about life.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Im just glad you're not a Judge or a Governor. We'd all be in trouble. This must be groundhog day. You can't be convicted of a criminal offence if you're found to be incapable of free moral choice. That's the law and judges apply it. Here it is again:
Mens rea is Latin for "guilty mind".[1] In criminal law, it is viewed as one of the necessary elements of a crime. The standard common law test of criminal liability is usually expressed in the Latin phrase, actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, which means "the act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is also guilty". Thus, in jurisdictions with due process, there must be an actus reus accompanied by some level of mens rea to constitute the crime with which the defendant is charged ....... As a general rule, criminal liability does not attach to a person who acted with the absence of mental fault. Fred would not have been convicted had he raped someone - but he would have had his liberty removed until such time as society deemed him safe. In other words he would be a patient not a criminal.Life, don't talk to me about life.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
For those interested, there's quite a readable review paper on the neurobiology of moral behaviour here:
http://psych.umb.edu/...kaldy/courses/psy641/pdfs/Mendez.pdf It seems that the idea of morality as a sixth sense is growing with the identification of a neuromoral network within the brain:
Humans have an innate moral sense based in a neuromoral network centered in the ventrome- dial prefrontal cortex and its connections. The neuromoral network works through moral emotions and moral drives, such as the avoidance of harm to others and the need for fairness and punishment of violators; it includes self-other conjoining processes, such as Theory of Mind and empathy, which also involve the ventrome- dial prefrontal cortex. Disorders of this region, such as focal lesions or frontotemporal dementia, disturb personal, intrinsic moral emotions and decision-making. Clinicians must recognize and manage acquired sociopathy and other dysmoral behaviors asso- ciated with disorders of the neuromoral network. Patients with these disorders pose a special problem for forensic neuropsychiatry. Life, don't talk to me about life. |
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
nonukes writes:
You've completely misunderstood mens re. I think not, as you say yourself, mental derangement can make a defendent incapable of possessing mens re(a) - which is exactly my point. If a disease can be shown to have removed a person's ability to act in a moral way, he can not be culpable in law. In the UK at least, Fred would have been fairly quickly judged incapable of even making a plea, let alone having to make a defense of diminished responsibility or higher, one glance at the size of the tumour in his head and medical report would be enough to have him sectioned and treated.Life, don't talk to me about life.
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