But research shows that applying a little magnetism can change the you in you! Your moral judgements can be manipulated:
Liane Lee Young of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and her colleagues asked participants to make moral judgements about different variations of a number of scenarios. One of these involves Grace and her friend having a cup of coffee during a tour of a chemical plant. In one version of it, she puts what she rightly believes to be sugar into her friend's drink; in another, she puts what she believes to be poison, but what is actually sugar, into the drink; in the third variation, Grace puts poison into the cup, thinking it is sugar, and her friend dies; and in the final variation, she knowingly puts poison into the drink.I saw something like this with my own eyes when my mother underwent brain surgery. Despite assurances from the surgeon that there was nothing to worry about. My mother came out of the surgery with "left neglect" and a cognitive difficiency like visual agnosia. Then it sank in -- to my horror -- how much we are "meat machines" and when the machinery goes bad the "you" inside you changes.
These scenarios differ in the beliefs underlying Grace's actions and in their outcome. Most of us would agree that she acts "wrongly" by poisoning her friend in the fourth variation of the scenario. She was also wrong in the second, because although the outcome was neutral, she attempted to cause harm to her friend. On the other hand, most would agree that she was not wrong in the unfortunate scenario in which she unwittingly poisoned her friend. Although her act was guilty, her mind was not - it was not her intention to kill.
The researchers used an experimental technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt activity in the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), a region of the brain located just behind the ear which has previously been implicated in understanding the behaviour of others. In the "offline" condition, the participants received low frequency (1 Hz) magnetic pulses to the RTPJ or to a nearby control region for 25 minutes before reading the moral scenarios and making judgements about them. In the "online" condition, higher frequency bursts lasting half a second were applied while the participants read and judged the scenarios.
In both experiments, TMS applied to the RTPJ but not to the control brain region was found to impair the participants' ability to make sound moral judgements in some cases but not in others. Judgements of scenarios involving intentional harm or no harm were unaffected, but the scenarios in which one character attempted unsuccessfully to harm another were judged to be more morally permissible. In other words, disrupting RTPJ activity significantly reduced the influence of belief on the participants' judgements, so that they relied purely on the outcome of the scenarios, rather than on the intentions or motives of the character.
3 comments:
My initial thought as I read this; this could be useful research for therapists and psychiatrists to help patients or at least understand why people make the choices they make. I thought this could be a real helpful tool.
Then I thought; this could help the military to make better killing machines or at least obedient soldiers, but I don't know if it's necessary with the conditioning and training that they have at their disposal.
I wondered at the conclusion of your post at the amazing and complicated conditions that come into play as a child grows and develops personality (bad sentence). How much is chemical or interactions with others or experiences? What makes a person see an activity or act as perfectly acceptable while another would be horrified by it? Were they altered somehow, at some point in their life and their perceptions and way of thinking affected? The combination of factors affecting an individual's growth are innumerable.
It is very interesting that the brain can be affected by magnetic impulses... Thank you for sharing this.
I am still inclined to believe that there is a spirit element in men (even as I write that, I wonder why I believe this). I want to believe there is a basic element that makes it possible to be better than our base natures would make us and that we can be good even when life has dealt us a bad hand or when we have been altered physically. That there is still an essence inside that is the real person... But, I often see only "meat machines" as you say. Still, I hope for more than that.
Thomas: I think we all want to believe that we are more than just organized matter. The book The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade looks at the science behind our urge to believe. He ends up with a position much like yours.
I'm a bit more pessimistic on this issue because I keep thinking that our galaxy has 100 billion suns and the currently observable universe has 100 billion galaxies. That makes us pretty insignificant. I, like everybody else, star at the centre of my own life's drama, but when I'm honest I recognize that I'm pretty insignificant and will soon be forgotten.
I think of a flame. When you describe it as we see it, it is alive and dances before it. It has a life of its own. It is mysterious. When you describe it at the level of atoms combining in a chemical reaction the mystery disappears. The details of science are wonderful and in some sense they add another dimension to the world. But it also means that the "secret" is out. Flames are not a spirit from "the other side". They don't have a life of their own. They are purely material.
So my intellectual side is forced to agree to this. But the living breathing me rebels and says that the world is more magical than that. I see meanings everywhere. I see significance. But then I remind myself that the world isn't ethical. Morality is something humans create. We create it in our interactions, in our communities, and in our religions. It is like the flame, it only lives while humans bear witness to each other about the meanings that life has. Once that dies away, once a culture dies, its religion dies, its meaning dies. The world itself is indifferent to our meanings.
As for fears about the military manipulating minds. It probably won't happen because it is too hard. Just like chemical and biological war was abandoned after WWI because it was too difficult to confine the effects to "the enemy" since the chemicals and biological agents didn't differentiate. So we still arm humans to kill humans. Soon we will be arming robots to kill humans. I would worry about this more than using a diffuse and difficult medium like magnetism.
As for your thoughts about what shapes us, this is something a lot of scientists are deeply involved in. With large enough populations they can run statistical significance tests and can give you rough estimates of how much your behaviours are the result of genetics versus experience. The water gets muddied because epigenetics, i.e. genetic effects in the next generation because of environmental effects in the parent, a kind of "Larmarkism" but based on an understood mechanism instead of the "just so" stories favoured by Lamark.
In short, life is complicated. Life is an adventure. And like a good adventure story, it has an end. We all die. The world goes on, but we die. Even the human species will "die" in the sense that it will evolve into something very different from what we are today. It is amazing what 10 or 20 million years can do to a species!
Thomas: I forgot to mention that a far more interesting phenomenon with magnets is the ability to bring out savant-like capabilities in people. This is a speciality of Allan W. Snyder at his Centre for the Mind at the University of Sidney.
Rather than worry about magnetism being used by the military, I would focus on the promise of unleashing human capabilities through magnetic manipulation. If you want to read about the possible positive benefits, read this article from Discover Magazine.
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