Missing Shades of Grue

Post-Darwinian Ethics?

Our intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalizations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximize the inclusive fitness of our genes and not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment. | h+ Magazine

tags: ethics, morality, post-human, grue, Darwin, evolution, neuroethics

Psychopaths and Rational Morality : The Frontal Cortex

psychopaths and various trolley experiments are giving us new insight into the emotional mess of moral decision-making.

tags: morality, psychopaths, grue, neuroethics

Does moral action depend on reasoning?

A Templeton Conversation: This is the sixth in a series of conversations among leading scientists, scholars, and public figures about the "Big Questions."

tags: morality, reason, neuroethics, grue

David Chalmers And The Singularity That Will Probably Not Come

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Chalmers in action live at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He didn?t talk about zombies, telling us instead his thoughts about the so-called Singularity, the alleged moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in either all hell breaking loose or the next glorious stage in human evolution ? depending on whether you typically see the glass as half empty or half full. The talk made clear to me what Chalmers? problem is (other than his really bad hair cut): he reads too much science fiction, and is apparently unable to snap out of the necessary suspension of disbelief when he comes back to the real world. Let me explain.

tags: singularity, chalmers, AZB, grue

Supercomputing and human intelligence

...As of November 2009, the world?s fastest supercomputer was the Cray Jaguar located at the U.S. Department of Energy?s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operating at 1.8 petaflops (1.8 x 1015 flops). Unlike human brain capacity, supercomputing capacity has been growing exponentially. In June 2005, the world?s fastest supercomputer was the IBM Blue Gene/L at Los Alamos National Laboratory, running at 0.1 petaflops. In less than five years, the Jaguar represents an order of magnitude increase, the latest culmination of capacity doublings each few years. Broader Perspective

tags: intelligence, supercomputing, computation, AZB, grue, processing

Darwin Tried and True » American Scientist

Robert J. Richards reviews WHAT DARWIN GOT WRONG. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. xxii + 264 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. $26.

tags: Darwin, evolution, grue

Retributivism, Punishment, and the Punitive Emotions - Flickers of Freedom

The issue of retributivism and punishment has been a common theme on both the Garden and Forking Paths and Flickers of Freedom. My present purpose is to try to briefly get clear on the salient terms and themes of the debate. Because this is the first of what will be a series of posts by me in the coming months on retributivism, I want to define some of the key terms up front to prevent confusion downstream.

tags: emotions, retributivism, punishment, grue

Chalmers's Fading/Dancing Qualia and Self-Knowledge

...David Chalmers defends what he calls a principle of organizational invariance according to which if a system has conscious experiences then any other system with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. His main arguments for this principle are his "Fading Qualia" and "Dancing Qualia" arguments. The Splintered Mind

tags: mind, qualia, AZB, grue, self-knowledge

Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward : The Primate Diaries

A new study shows that chimps sacrifice their own advantage if they earned it unfairly.

tags: chimpanzees, primates, morality, fairness, grue

Human Uniqueness and the Future: Scientific American

We must adjust to our unparalleled ability to shape the world's evolution

tags: human-evolution, evolution, future, grue

Self-Control Without a ?Self??

...Self-control constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature. Yet there is reason to believe that human and nonhuman self-control processes rely on the same biological mechanism?the availability of glucose in the bloodstream. Two experiments tested this hypothesis by examining the effect of available blood glucose on the ability of dogs to exert self-control. Experiment 1 showed that dogs that were required to exert self-control on an initial task persisted for a shorter time on a subsequent unsolvable task than did dogs that were not previously required to exert self-control. Experiment 2 demonstrated that providing dogs with a boost of glucose eliminated the negative effects of prior exertion of self-control on persistence; this finding parallels a similar effect in humans. These findings provide the first evidence that self-control relies on the same limited energy resource among humans and nonhumans. Our results have broad implications for the study of self-control processes in human and nonhuman species. ? Psychological Science

tags: freewill, self-control, cogsci, grue, 150

What Can Your Dog Tell You About Your Self-Control? A lot

...What is the one thing that connects people with dogs? Believe it or not, it's the biological processes responsible for self-control. | Psychology Today

tags: freewill, self-control, cogsci, grue, 150

Neandertal Symbolism

Abstract thinking may date back further than previously thought. : Scientific American

tags: neandertal, symbolism, AZB, grue, human-evolution

Dendritic Spines and their role in Memory and Cognition

Randy Gallistel and Adam King in their book Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience, claim that addressable memory architecture is necessary to explain complex animal behaviour such as food caching by Scrub Jays or even the human capacity to recollect and reconsider prior beliefs.

Their view is contrasted with non-addressable architecture in contemporary neuroscience. Traditional neural networks suppose that computations in neural tissue are implemented by relaying action potentials between neurons. Gallistel and King argue that the implementation must be sought elsewhere. They offer two neurobiological suggestions of where to look, 1) subcellular, e.g. dendritic spines and 2) molecular, something like re-writable DNA & RNA. Philosophy of Memory

tags: philosophy, memory, neurons, grue, cogsci

Human Evolution and Technology: From Prosimian to Posthuman

As far as I can tell, one can discern four possible theoretical approaches to the evolutionary question of human-technology relations. And since a central theme of transhumanist philosophy concerns the use of technology to engender a new ?posthuman? species ? one that may be phylogenetically linked to present Homo sapiens if the cyborgization route is pursued ? I believe the following distinctions may be of some relevance and value.

tags: evolution, technology, human-evolution, AZB, CDC, grue

The Moral Behavior of Super-Duper Artificial Intelligences

David Chalmers gave a talk today (at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson) arguing that it is fairly likely that sometime in the next few centuries we will create artificial intelligence (perhaps silicon, perhaps biological) considerably more intelligent than ourselves -- and then those intelligent creatures will create even more intelligent successors, and so on, until there exist creatures that are vastly more intelligent than we are. The Splintered Mind

tags: singularity, intelligence, AZB, grue, morality

Andy Clark: Papers Available Online

tags: philosophy, Clark, papers, grue

Randomness as Meaning

How people see coincidence as destiny

tags: randomness, meaning, cogsci, grue

Amnesiacs show that emotions linger long after memories fade | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

A new study suggests that, like everyone else, I recorded these emotional memories independently of the factual aspects of the day.

tags: emotions, memory, amnesiacs, cogsci, grue

Lessening moral judgements by a magenetic zap to the brain.

MRI measurements have shown that the the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) - an area just above the right ear - receives more blood than usual when we think or read about the beliefs and intentions of other people, particularly if we use the information to judge people negatively.

tags: neuroethics, morality, brain, cogsci, grue

Mirror Neurons Join Marilyn Monroe Neurons and Halle Berry Neurons in the Human Hippocampus

Move over, Marilyn Monroe neurons and Halle Berry neurons... The cellular media darlings of action observation and action execution would like to join you in the human hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) areas critical for memory.

tags: mirror-neurons, grue, cogsci

Williams Syndrome Kids Show No Racial Bias: Scientific American Podcast

Kids with the genetic condition called Williams Syndrome have no social anxiety and are highly gregarious--and also exhibit no racial bias in standard social-bias experiments. Adam Hinterthuer reports.

tags: williams-syndrome, cogsci, grue

Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions

# Cells in SMA respond during execution and observation of actions
# Cells in medial temporal lobe respond during observation and execution of actions
# Some respond with excitation during execution and inhibition during observation

tags: mirror-neurons, cogsci, grue