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Rudy Garns

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facebook neuroethics trolley social-networking cogsci

shared by Rudy Garns on 01 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 01 Feb 09
     
    there's some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook "page" and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren't used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions. (The Frontal Cortex)
Rudy Garns

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20moral.html

ethics evolution morality primates

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language.
  • Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.
  • human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • other chimpanzees would console the loser.
  • Social living requires empathy
  • reconciliation
  • human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders.
  • Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task
  • Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them.
  • These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.
  • People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.
  • eciprocity and fairness
  • reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached
  • Morality, he writes, is “a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values.” The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies “in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval.”
  • Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others.
Rudy Garns

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21cnd-brain.html

brain ethics morality neuroethics neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • native revulsion
  • ventromedial prefrontal cortex
  • active during moral decision-making
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline
  • emotional system
  • utilitarian cost-benefit analyses
  • ventromedial area
  • ventromedial area
  • blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward
  • strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.
  • direct action to kill or harm someone
  • Those with ventromedial injuries were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train
  • navigate social interactions
  • brain stem
  • amygdala
  • emotional memories,
  • social emotions that we can feel, like embarrassment, guilt, compassion that are critical to guiding our social behavior,
  • ension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion
  • ancient principle: respect for the life of another human being
    • Rudy Garns
      Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07
       
      It would be interesting to see whether other primates use the ventromedial cortex for similar responses to dilemmas involving conspecifics.
  • increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives
    • Rudy Garns
      Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07
       
      I wonder what would happen if you adjust the identity of the sacrificable person. What happens if person is a stranger versus a family member? They do run the "smother your baby" dilemma. Does it make a difference if it is a stranger? What about alternative to the other five victims? What information is the VMPFC working with?
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