Reddit reviews Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality

A couple of good books that look at this:

The Moral Animal
by Robert Wright

The Origins of Virtue
by Matt Ridley

Braintrust
by Patricia Churchland

Ridley looks specifically at the evolution of cooperation. Wright considers a broader range of questions - for instance he looks at sexual mores and customs - ie. polygyny and monogamy, why men care much more about sexual fidelity than women do, etc. If I had my copy here I could probably find some more to point out and provide some of his ideas.... It's a great book (I also highly recommend his book Nonzero). Churchland specifically gets into the neuroscience of morality.

>The scientific endeavor often relies on intuition and other non-scientific sources of information for it's grounding, to an extent.

If science is partially grounded on intuition, and if this grounding can bear the weight of the edifice of the institution (i.e., if science is more or less valid and reliable), then there must be some justice in intuition after all.

>However, that does not make intuition scientific.

No, it’s much worse than that. The rot is so deep that we must trust intuitions as a prescientific foundation for the activity of science.

>In no case is "I have an intuition" to be taken as scientific evidence.

Depends on the intuition and who is having it. A child having the intuition that the moon really does walk with him when he walks at night (a gut inference derived from visual evidence) is incorrect. That stated, we still owe the child an account of why this appears to be the case (and indeed we have such accounts available). On the other hand, when a brilliant and highly experienced physicist has an intuition, say that a given experimental set-up would be dangerous or that another set-up would work better, that intuition serves as part of a scientific process. The intuition can reasonably set a presumption in favor of or against conducting an experiment.

>Science only entails what can be proven through empirical observation and experimentation. Full stop.

Not all science involves direct experiment. Some claims of science do not admit to direct experimentation (e.g., cosmology, evolution), so we must make allowances for observational science and not just laboratory experiment science. And a lot science is indirect. No one, for example, needed to have an actual photograph of an atom to begin doing atomic science. Very often, what allows for indirect observations are the assumptions of a current theory or model (i.e., scientists don’t just test theories by facts, but facts by theories). What matters is not so much how you got there, but that what you arrived at works.

Let’s circle back a moment to empirical observation. Human science necessarily involves empirical observations (because we cannot stuff the universe directly into our minds). Empirical observations, even reading a dial in a laboratory, requires making use of the five senses. But why do we trust our senses? How do we know what we are seeing is not a mirage? We have, after all, been fooled by mirages before. Our intuition gives us the ultimate stamp of certainty that allows us to (finally!) stop second guessing ourselves and get on to the actual results of experiments. And the intuitions of experienced experimenters are more finely honed than those of neophytes. Intuition is always in the picture, giving a seal of ultimate approval, allowing us to trust what we see with our senses.

So here is your problem. Even in your purified domain of observation and experiment (full stop) we still find the thread of intuition in the picture.

>Ah, so you're saying there's no empirical evidence of humans being cruel or showing disregard for the well-being of others. None.

I don’t need to provide such evidence. After all, if people were perfect angels we would need neither laws nor morality. I merely need offer evidence that all cultures are concerned with the well-being of other conscious creatures, not that they do so for all conscious creatures all the time.

>But here's the thing, even if I accept that, you would still need to give me some evidence that the concern expressed across "all human cultures" is identical and moral, that it is entirely driven by your posited need that all people have for others to be happy, well, and without suffering.

The only thing that need be done is establish that we share the same biology (we do, my condolences to the racists of the world) and that there are universal biological traits (there are) which get expressed and inflected at the level of culture. This evidence is growing more every day.

>There are quite a few arguments that could be had about that. But you're saying it's empirical, so present me with your empirical evidence.

What matters for me to be free of the No-True-Scotsman charge is that is indeed empirically verifiable. I have established that it is, so let’s get that squared away first thing. We’re now moving on to a different objection (i.e., prove it!).

The problem, of course, it what would count as proof. For a purifier such as yourself, who is willing to exclude most of the practice of medicine as non-scientific to protect an uptight definition, I imagine that you could spend the rest of your life raising the bar for evidence.

Karl Popper argues that science is not a verification game, but a falsification game. The reason why is that the problem of induction prevents us from ever knowing if an empirical generalization is ever justified (there’s always the “N^th” case just around the corner). Theories are never confirmed, there is just an ever diminishing pile of theories which have not yet been disconfirmed. If so, we can hardly expect that I should have to offer absolute evidence verifying my claim. At most, I should simply point to evidence which is already available. I might suggest [this] (http://www.amazon.com/Braintrust-Neuroscience-Tells-about-Morality/dp/0691156344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459462910&sr=8-1&keywords=braintrust+churchland) , for example, but there is plenty of evidence available.

>And there's the "no true scotsman". Your argument: "Humans all universally hold the same concern, except when they don't, in which case they're monsters and not humans."

No, that’s just your failure to understand the argument. The claim is not that all people (i.e., individuals) are concerned with the well-being of other humans, but that all peoples (i.e., societies and cultures) show such a concern. Within these communities there are always oddballs, but they are the exception not the rule. The mere fact that there are some people who hate music does not disprove the claim that human cultures universally show an interest in this form of art.

>But ok, let's at least entertain your argument as you intend it

Wow, reading the argument as I intended it. What a glorious principle of charity you follow as a reader!

>Do I even need to give counter-examples? I shouldn't need to.

Yes, actually you do. Find me a society and culture that is not minimally concerned with the well-being of members of its own in-group.

What on Earth are you talking about? This isn't about being stoned (which I don't do anyway). It's about being well educated about evolutionary biology and pointing out that your assertion that humans will be like this forever is inaccurate.

What is so difficult to grasp about that simple point?

Further, as I've also pointed out multiple times, understanding the neurobiological reality of the human mind right now has important implications for how we treat our fellow human beings right now in relation to society, the justice system, etc.

That is very real and very much right now.

I'm not sure how to make myself any more clear.

If you're not smart enough and/or educated enough to grasp modern neurobiology and neuropsychology, on top of my explanations that should be explaining clearly enough the ramifications of those modern day objective realities... that's your shortcoming my friend, not mine.

I can suggest a couple books to help you get a better grasp on this subject... two very approachable and enlightening books I can recommend are "The Moral Landscape - How Science can determine human values" by Sam Harris (a doctorate of cognitive neuroscience) and "Braintrust - What neuroscience tells us about morality" by Patricia Churchland

Is there some other way I can get you to grasp that these are contemporary issues of objective scientific understanding of our own minds right now and how they function right now and how that relates to what we believe, how we relate to each other, how our societies function etc right now?

I understand that you feel the chronospecies issue doesn't have any real bearing on issues right now. I've agreed with you on that in every comment I've written. But that doesn't change the validity of everything else I've said, and for some reason you just seem postively obtuse on that point.

I'm seriously not trying to fight with you, so I'm not sure what has you so upset and so stubbornly resistant to grasping the simple objective realities I'm pointing out, which include some that are very much relevant to right now in our modern society.

Patricia Churchland !

Patricia Churchland, professor at UC San Diego in neurophysiology and philosopher of mind, especially her recent book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality.

She has great insights, especially in the challenging process of dragging the enormous weight of philosophical thought since Plato to acknowledge the reality of the human brain/mind as we are learning what it really is and how it really operates.

Much of that thousands of years of philosophy -- including much of religion -- is based on completely erroneous assumptions about the brain. This is similar to the deep philosophical pondering about the ultimate meaning of the reasons why there were exactly five planets and why they moved often forward but sometimes in retrograde motion, and why the stars were fixed in the firmament of the heavens, etc. This entire topic of the great philosophers is now simply ignored.

In the same way, in the future, we have to discard and ignore much of their writings on Free Will, Morality and Abstract Thinking, etc., and thus completely restructure all of our thinking that is based on them.

IMHO, Sam Harris has taken many of her ideas and, because he is a man and because he has written about them more pithily and because he is willing to be controversial while she is more pedantic, he is famous and she is not. (Not to say anything bad about Harris, but Churchland should be given her due.)

Youtube has a number of Churchland videos, including Morality and the Mammalian Brain.