Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality

Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality

Patricia S. Churchland

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 0691156344

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality.

Moral values, Churchland argues, are rooted in a behavior common to all mammals--the caring for offspring. The evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of the brain incline humans to strive not only for self-preservation but for the well-being of allied selves--first offspring, then mates, kin, and so on, in wider and wider "caring" circles. Separation and exclusion cause pain, and the company of loved ones causes pleasure; responding to feelings of social pain and pleasure, brains adjust their circuitry to local customs. In this way, caring is apportioned, conscience molded, and moral intuitions instilled. A key part of the story is oxytocin, an ancient body-and-brain molecule that, by decreasing the stress response, allows humans to develop the trust in one another necessary for the development of close-knit ties, social institutions, and morality.

A major new account of what really makes us moral, Braintrust challenges us to reconsider the origins of some of our most cherished values.

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Emotions, memories, and plans—on the other. And to a first approximation, he did. He outlined the importance of pain and pleasure in learning social practices and shaping our passions, of 6  •  C h ap te r 1 institutions and customs in providing a framework for stability and prosperity, of reflection and intelligence in revising existing institutions and customs.6 He understood that passions and motivations, as well as moral principles, can, and often do, conflict with one another, and that.

To costly signaling, which is a behavior displayed as a way of signaling cooperative intent and reliability. Examples of costly signaling would be sacrifices of goats and chickens, or the renunciation of comforts such as warm baths, or of pleasures such as dancing or sex. Simplified, the idea is that individuals who join a group and willingly accept the group’s renunciations (costly signaling) are identifiable as reliable cooperators. Benefits flow from group membership; costly signaling is the.

Preferred, which they would be given for free. After they made their choice, say apricot, the experimenter, in fussing around to supposedly give them the chosen jam, switched the jars, and gave them the jam not chosen—say blueberry. They were then asked to taste again, and verify their choice, which they most often did, not commenting on the switch. When asked to explain their choice, they said such things as that blueberry (the one not chosen, but received) had always been their favorite, that.

Human studies suggest that fear processing is strongly associated with the amygdala, and textbooks routinely claim that feelings of fear emerge from activity in amygdala circuitry. Nevertheless, three patients who, through a rare disease, suffered a loss of the amygdala on both sides of the brain, have normal recognition of fearful faces and can display fear in social situations.82 The lesions all occurred in adulthood, so it is not known whether a different pattern would exist for someone with.

Matt Ridley argues that once bartering and swapping began, once various artifacts, such as harpoons or body ornaments, were traded among groups, artifactual and social innovation accelerated.15 Evidence for exchange of goods between groups dates to 20  •  C h ap t er 2 about 100,000 years ago, which implies that humans did not engage in exchange for some 200,000 years. The unique value in swapping what I have for the different things that you have was, in Ridley’s view, a turning point in.

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