ch5 pshychology

Slide 1: 

1 Rational Well Being is a naturalistic approach to ethics and moral psychology © Gregg Walborn

This naturalistic approach is based in Neuroethics! : 

2 This naturalistic approach is based in Neuroethics! © Gregg Walborn

Rational Well Being accepts the following definition of neuroethics… : 

3 Rational Well Being accepts the following definition of neuroethics… “the examination of how we want to deal with the social issues of disease, normality, mortality, lifestyle, and the philosophy of living informed by our understanding of underlying brain mechanisms.” (Quote is from Michael Gazzaniga’s book The Ethical Brain) © Gregg Walborn

Slide 4: 

4 This naturalistic approach to moral behavior includes… -- Molecular Biology -- Genomics -- Evolutionary & Behavioral Biology -- Cognitive Neuroscience © Gregg Walborn

To Begin With… : 

5 To Begin With… …”everything the brain produces, from the most private thoughts to the most public acts, should be understood as a biological process.” (The quote is from Nobel Prize recipient Eric Kandel in The Principles Of Neural Science, 2002, page 1277). © Gregg Walborn

Slide 6: 

6 Every human being interprets the world from the context of his or her own brain and no two human brains are exactly the same. (See Principles of Neural Science, chapter 62, McGraw-Hill 2000 and A Universe of Consciousness by Richard Edelman for more discussion) © Gregg Walborn The “nervous system extracts only certain pieces of information from each stimulus, while ignoring others, and then interprets this information in the context of the brain’s intrinsic structure and previous experience.”(See “Coding of Sensory Information” in Principles of Neuroscience, McGraw-Hill 2000)

Slide 7: 

7 “Colors, tones, smells, and tastes are mental creations constructed by the brain out of sensory experience” that “do not exist, as such, outside the brain.” Therefore, the representation of these sensory perceptions in terms of words and sentences means these symbolizations are “not a faithful record of the external world but a constructive process in which incoming information is put together according to rules inherent in the brain’s afferent pathways.” Further, sensory perception constructs each person’s perspective of the world from “the standpoint of a specific point in space as well as from the standpoint of a specific point in their own history.” (See “Coding of Sensory Information” in Principles of Neuroscience, McGraw-Hill 2000) © Gregg Walborn

Slide 8: 

8 Biological differences between individuals make a difference in determining harm. Some people are significantly more fearful and anxious than others for reasons having to do more with nonconscious genetic and neurochemical processes in their brains than a willful belief. For example: some people will perceive the potential of threat differently due to: “Unconscious neural processing biases associated with elevated trait anxiety” that “may reflect hard-wired differences that cannot be altered.” (See Etkin, et al, in Neuron Vol 44, Dec. 2004) © Gregg Walborn

Slide 9: 

9 © Gregg Walborn Therefore, even though people may respond “more or less the same way to certain moral dilemmas” (due to a 99.9% genomic sameness) they will vary “on how they think or feel about the issue at hand.” (The Ethical Brain, Michael Gazzaniga)

Slide 10: 

10 Some individuals will feel as though they have been harmed by actions that others would not deem harmful. An example of such a disguised harm involves men who were aggressively punished as children (“spare the rod lose the child” type of punishment). Those men who had “an alteration in the gene responsible for producing monoamine oxidase” were nine times more likely to commit crimes or anti-social acts. (See Jonathan Moreno article “Neuroethics: an agenda for neuroscience and society” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Feb. 2003) © Gregg Walborn

Slide 11: 

11 Meanings “are not objects in a museum to which words somehow get attached.”1 Meanings cannot be universally fixated by lexical connections and their logical consequences because the memories these connections and consequences depend upon are being constantly updated and reconstructed in ways that are never an “exact copy of the information originally stored.” (1 See Representation of Reality, Hilary Putnam, p. 119)(Also see The Ethical Brain by Michael Gazzaniga, Principles of Neural Science and the works of Antonio Damasio and Richard Edelman to name but a few for further discussion). © Gregg Walborn

Slide 12: 

12 The meaning of concepts such as fairness, justice, goodness and well-being often fail to generalize well from individuals to social groups due to variations or alterations in genomic, neurophysiological and cognitive processes that underlie individual differences in personality, behavior and culture. © Gregg Walborn

Slide 13: 

13 For example, some individuals are more neurotic and depressed due to biological differences as to how the instructions of a specific gene on chromosome 11 creates a protein. In this case the protein is built with methionine instead of valine. (see Matt Ridley, Nature Via Nurture, Harper/Collins, page 84) © Gregg Walborn

Slide 14: 

14 Research evidence shows support for the hypothesis that transcription factors that affect gene expression “can in some cases be altered by factors extrinsic to the organism—by, in a word, experience.” Other evidence shows similar influences upon immune system functions and synaptic activity related to learning. (See Matt Ridley, “The DNA behind human nature: gene expression and the role of experience,” Daedelus, Fall 2004). © Gregg Walborn

Slide 15: 

15 Another example is a correlation between IQ and the size of one’s brain. (see Richard Haier Science 6 August 2004: Vol. 305. no. 5685, p. 774) © Gregg Walborn