Magnetism Can Sway Man's Moral Compass 586
Hugh Pickens writes "Discovery News reports that scientists have identified a region of the brain which appears to control morality and discovered that a powerful magnetic field can scramble the moral center of the brain, impairing volunteers' notion of right and wrong. 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,' says Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. 'To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing.' Young and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate an area of the brain just above and behind the right ear known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ), which other studies had previously related to moral judgments. Volunteers were exposed to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for 25 minutes before reading stories involving morally questionable characters, and being asked to judge their actions. The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves. The scientists didn't permanently remove the subjects' moral sensibilities and on the scientists' seven point scale, the difference was about one point, averaging out to about a 15 percent change, 'but it's still striking to see such a change in such high level behavior as moral decision-making.' Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality, and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
Potential abuse of research? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, as for the broader use, yeah, this research does indeed suggest that, for instance, somebody with a tumor or lesion in the area that the researchers were scrambling might well be "insane" in the sense of having impaired moral cognition, without overt psychosis or anything similarly dramatic. That isn't really "abuse" though. That's an enhancement of our understanding how how the brain works.
However, I'm not sure that the "Yup, I have a permanently defective capacity for moral cognition" defense would be something that you would pursue unless you, in fact, do. Indefinite commitment to a secure psychiatric facility isn't exactly a walk in the park, even compared to prison.
Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score:5, Funny)
>>> "Your Honor, I had a giant morals-scrambling magnet pressed against my head at the time"
That's what she said.
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>>> "Your Honor, I had a giant morals-scrambling magnet pressed against my head at the time"
That's what she said.
No, She said "Your Honor, he had a giant morals-scrambling magnet pressed against my head at the time"
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It's important to note that the research focused on moral judgements about the *intentions* of actions, not on the actions and outcomes themselves. So, a person with a disrupted brain might not see a problem with wanting to steal a car, but they can still fully grasp the weight of actually stealing the car. Since moral judgement is lost on some people anyway, the normal effects of punishment should still be as effective, with or without disruption via magnetic field. Ergo, using this as a defense is abou
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My guess is shortly after it shows up on House M.D. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for that link! For years now I've been hearing people talk about house this, house that, and I thought, "When did house music make a big comeback?" Now, thanks to your informative link, I know that House is a TV show.
Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score:4, Informative)
And "Wilson" is "Watson." There are many more parallels with the Sherlock Holmes series, according to the creators of "House."
How long till it's built into helmets? (Score:3, Interesting)
Very useful feature that.
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Very useful feature that
What, a 15% increase in focus on actual outcomes rather imputed intent based on extremely abstract (and in fact utterly impossible) hypothetical situations? What would that be useful for, exactly?
The questions the ask are full of magical reasoning: someone walks over a bridge you "know to be unsafe". What on earth does "unsafe" mean in this context and with what degree of certainty to you "know" it to be so? Does "unsafe" mean "everyone who walks over the bridge will die? Apparently not, because the ma
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What, a 15% increase in focus on actual outcomes rather imputed intent based on extremely abstract (and in fact utterly impossible) hypothetical situations? What would that be useful for, exactly?
Hand out "end justify the means" helmets to all of the soldiers you command, and you'll get less backtalk and desertion when it comes time to burn villages, rape children, and gun down peaceful protesters for the glory of the republic.
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Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't sound like a sound defense. Moral judgements have nothing to do with legality; there's nothing immoral about smoking pot, for example. Whether you're talking about Druids, Christians, Jews, Hindus, any religion, none have any injunction against smoking pot. Smoking pot harms no one. The marijuana laws were passed by lies (see the propaganda movie "Reefer Madness"). Laws are subjective; they are NOT based on morality. Adultery is immoral (and harmful), yet there's no law against it in my state.
What confuses me, (and I RTFA just because it did confuse me, and TFA gave no answer) is what kinds of moral delimmas did they present?
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm -- not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
I can't think of anything that's morally wrong that doesn't cause harm. Did I read the wrong FA?
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Hemp was used around the world as a strong and durably fiber in rope and fabric. It grew wild in most of the US. DOW chemicals invents and patents nylon. Within a few short years, marijuana was illegal and half the US covered with herbicide to to stamp out this "terrible weed". The war on drugs was a fabrication designed for the profit of a single powerful company.
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I can't think of anything that's morally wrong that doesn't cause harm.
Cheat in a game of Solitaire? Its "wrong" to cheat, but nothing bad could possibly happen as a result?
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Smoking pot harms no one... Adultery is immoral (and harmful)...
Thank you for neatly disproving your own argument. Both of these things are pure opinion, it is trivial to argue both in either direction.
And, fwiw, the moral dilemmas they posed were of the lines of "sally and alice are at a chemical plant. alice gives sally a cup of coffee and in it she puts what she thinks is sugar but it's really poison. was alice wrong in giving the coffee to sally?" vs "sally and alice are at a chemical plant. alice gives sally a cup of coffee and also adds some poison to it whil
Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score:4, Insightful)
Causing other people to take time out of their lives to scrape you off the asphalt and sew you back together, all while having my taxes and/or health insurance premiums pay for it
See what I mean? People lose their shit along with all sense of causality whenever driving without wearing a seatbelt is mentioned. I would even guess that this guy is in the majority.
And by the same argument, people like this shouldn't leave the house without wearing a helmet, for the benefit of everyone else of course.
Degausser (Score:4, Funny)
Wow...all those years of double daring my data center colleagues to put the hand electric de-gausser to their forehead and turn it on for 30 seconds might have more of an effect than I anticipated.....
Oh, yeah? (Score:2)
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I'm trying REAL hard to remember if I ever took that dare myself...
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Re:Degausser (Score:5, Funny)
...or maybe users are just idiots.
The difference? (Score:2)
volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm -- not whether they were morally wrong in themselves
Short of a Doctorate of Philosophy in Ethics, what's the difference?
Re:The difference? (Score:5, Informative)
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I argue that if nobody is harmed, it's not immoral. Stupid perhaps (like eating cyanide), but not immoral.
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... and your argument would be wrong (no offense). Imagine a friend who is about to be killed. You could kill the would be killer and save your friend or you could let the scenario unfold naturally. Either choice causes harm by either allowing the death of a friend or causing the death of the killer. Even solid consequentionalists like Mill argued that when given a choice between actions, the moral road is not merely to minimize suffering but also to maximize happiness. Given for any choice that an act
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So they've invented an irrationality filter?
Re:The difference? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that isn't the difference they are referring to.
They are referring to the following cases:
1. Driving recklessly outside a school at dismissal time, but not hitting anyone.
2. Driving recklessly outside a school at dismissal time, and hitting someone.
Most people (though not all...) would consider both cases morally equivalent. It's not the hitting someone that is the immoral action, it's the placing them in danger in the first place.
The difference between 'might' and 'did' (Score:5, Informative)
The difference between 'likely to cause harm' and 'did cause harm.' In one question, they asked if it was morally wrong to let your girlfriend walk across a bridge you knew was dangerous, even if she made it to the other side safely. Magnetized folks thought, 'well she made it across, it's morally okay' while other people were more likely to think it was wrong even if she was unharmed this particular time.
Re:The difference between 'might' and 'did' (Score:5, Interesting)
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"Fred invested all of his money into one stock and got 100% return. Bill invested gradually with dollar cost averaging using a fixed percentage of income and got a 35% return. Whose strategy is more sound?
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That's cognitively quite different from assessing risk but not caring. On the basis of what's been presented here, I don't see any data which support the claim that moral reasoning is diminished in these subjects.
It turns out that the problem is not in the research, but in oversimplification by the news media. If you want a more accurate idea of what's going on, take a look at the original papers by Young et [mit.edu]
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The BBC article seems to characterize these test subjects as unable to correctly assess risk.
That's cognitively quite different from assessing risk but not caring. On the basis of what's been presented here, I don't see any data which support the claim that moral reasoning is diminished in these subjects.
It turns out that the problem is not in the research, but in oversimplification by the news media. If you want a more accurate idea of what's going on, take a look at the original papers by Young et al [mit.edu]. For example:
In that example, risk is quite accurately assessed. In the first case, no one was harmed, thus, no risk. In the second case, accidental though it was, someone was harmed and there was obviously risk.
I'd call that a failure of moral reasoning. Young even uses the phrase 'moral reasoning' multiple times for names of his papers, on the very page you link to.
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Sometimes, the difference is simply luck.
You have two snipers. Both intend to shoot blameless strangers in a parking lot. One is very good and hits their target. The other is inept and misses.
Are they both morally wrong?
Apparently, if I understand the assertion, folks without the magnetic manipulation would consider both "wrong". But folks who have had the magnetic treatment would have increased odds of judging the inept sniper to be blameless, since no actually harm occurred.
So... (Score:4, Funny)
So it isn't just a bad cliche when in the movies the bad guys always run a car salvage/crushing yard with the big electromagnet cranes.
Not going to RTFA; explain? (Score:3, Insightful)
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
What distinction are they making between the two? There are philosophies that would hold the two ideas as identical.
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There are philosophies that would hold the two ideas as identical.
So, people who held such a view might analyze the situation the same way, regardless of the applied magnetic effects.
Ah, control groups. So useful.
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There are philosophies that would hold the two ideas as identical.
But those philosophies are only held by people with too much magnetic stimulation.
I am a bit confused about his correlation disclaimer. Is he saying it's possible that people who had the less judgmental morality caused the magnetism? Or that some external factor caused them to become more judgmental and more likely to get their brains magnetized? It seems to me that unless they were lazy and didn't do any proper controls (which would be trivial in this case - just don't turn on the machine), that appl
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Of course morality causes magnetism. I know for a fact strong moralism repels me!
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The particular example I heard was: a person pours a cup of coffee for their friend, but puts some powder in it before serving. Here are two scenarios:
1) The person believed the powder was poison and intended to poison their friend, but it turned out to be sugar and no harm was done, or
2) The person believed the powder was sugar and intended no harm, but it turned out to be poison and the friend was made sick.
Many people would agree that the action in the first case is immoral, despite the fact that no harm
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No action is morally wrong (or right) in and of itself.
That is just absurd.
Actions are not, cannot be, moral nor immoral without a subjective interpretation. There simply is no objective standard of morality.
Article is a dud on morality; its human perception or consciousness which is being altered.
A human may have a subjective notion that some act is immoral 'in itself' and this subjective notion is a false representation of reality.
What this magnetic field seems to do is to restore a more accurate appraisa
As explained on NPR this morning (Score:5, Informative)
Person A accidentally breaks five tea cups while cleaning. Person B purposefully breaks one tea cup.
Most people would say that B's actions were "more wrong" than A's.
People who had their RTPJ disrupted said that A was "more wrong" because of the extent of the damage.
Another example they gave was that people with their RTPJ disrupted would say that accidentally poisoning someone was worse than attempting to poison someone and failing.
More fascinating (Score:2)
More fascinating, at least to me, is the area of the brain that works against "ends justify the means".
FTS:
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
I don't know if this has been known before, but the fact that there's an area of the brain that judges actions as moral apart from their consequences is fascinating. It makes sense to judge actions based on known outcomes, but what's the evolutionary advantage to being moral in the abstract?
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You have a better chance of getting laid by the bimbos in Philosophy 101?
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Well obviously. I took that as a given.
But besides that, presumably we had this moral center before we had Philosophy 101.
Ummm, sample size? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tinfoil is now inadequate (Score:2)
Mu-metal is the new preferred material for protective headwear.
Military use, ahoy! (Score:2, Interesting)
I see a future where they'll have strong electromagnets embedded in military helmets, to ease everyone through the more morally dubious adventures overseas. Of course, in order to invent the helmet, you'd have to be already morally compromised, which would require an existing helmet... Or just a psychopath.
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You don't need to be a psychopath to do something that is immoral if you are convinced it is moral or right.
Ie, if the helmet demonstrated an ability to reduce PTSD and anxiety/conflict on the battle field, it would be morally responsible to do so, as it would represent an improvement in military morale as well as better post-military life transition.
The fact that it also impacts one's moral judgement might be good/bad depending on how one sees the situation. Ie, are soldiers' conflicted emotions causing a
Innocent by reason of magnetism (Score:3, Funny)
Your Honor it was not my fault. The Earth's magnetic field in a fit of anomalous abnormally high activity a half-hour prior to the robbery compromised my frontal lobe's capacity to allow me to understand what I was going to do was wrong......
Alcohol (Score:5, Funny)
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Just stop pouring those beers in your ear and you'll be all right.
Re:Alcohol (Score:5, Funny)
The real results of the experiment (Score:5, Funny)
After months of grueling research bombarding test subjects with all manner of loud and annoying electromagnetic devices and being told to lie just right so that the readings aren't disrupted at all, the test subjects all said they wanted to kill all the researchers in a variety of gruesome ways and didn't have any moral conundrum with doing so. As there were no noticeable flaws in the experiment, the researchers concluded that magnetism can sway the moral compasses of human beings. Case closed!
Good news! (Score:2)
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No, just the machine.
and this is why canada is more liberal than the us (Score:4, Funny)
canada is near the north pole, while the usa is closer to the south pole. the more south you go in the usa in fact, the more conservative the opinion
so clearly north pole=liberal, south pole=conservative
so i will now invent my colossal magnetic northern monopole, hide it in an office tower in dallas texas, and forever alter politics towards the forces of reason and morality! and screw up navigation compasses everywhere!
I think this works for radiation too... (Score:2, Funny)
...it would certainly explain why there are so many rude cell phone users :-)
Morality? (Score:3, Interesting)
What does this mean for someone like me, who lives life by my own idea of morality, which is "Do whatever you want as long as you bring no harm to another"?
Maybe they're interpreting "harm" differently.
Moral on different parts of Earth. (Score:2)
if it has, i'm getting out of here, unless of course a big earthquake fixes the problem!!
Morality or empathy? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the MIT article: "they found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions".
They don't appear to have claimed a general change to moral judgments of all types. They're saying that people were less able to make moral judgments that involved modeling someone else's internal state.
What it sounds like to me is, someone found humanity's Asperger switch.
Re:Morality or empathy? (Score:4, Informative)
What it sounds like to me is, someone found humanity's Asperger switch.
(I have Asperger's Syndrome)
AS is so much more than this. It causes 100 little problems that all add up to making your life suck.
From my own personal experience I know that people with AS have trouble reading facial expressions because they're never looking at people faces. This is because eye contact is uncomfortable (i'd call it more like creepy, or heebee-jeebees, it still happens to me). Because it's uncomfortable, they never learn to read it. I've started forcing myself to look at facial expressions in an attempt to read people's eyes. I'm slowly starting to be able to do this.
As other examples, my gait is subtly wrong. I have a hard time identifying the source of certain emotions. And I'm sometimes not to good at reading the positions of my arms and legs.
I think it's more than just a magnetic switch. I think it's a biochemical problem that causes development problems that propagate throughout your life.
Helm of Opposite Alignment (Score:5, Funny)
So this is how you make a Helm of Opposite Alignment!
Lawful Evil, here I come!
Interesting... (Score:2)
So we truly do have a moral compass.
I wonder if it is orientation dependent. If I face north, am I less likely to punch somebody in the face?
Sharks with frigging evil beams? (Score:2)
implications (Score:2)
Implications are interesting:
1. An army of morally removed individuals, everyone gets an electromagnet attached with a mora-meter, the computer adjusts the necessary dose based on the current situation. So now we see a woman and a child on the battlefield, mora-meter is reading 7.8 on the M-Scale, there is the target of opportunity right behind them and no time to react. Increasing the field strength. Mora-meter is at 1.89. Directive: shoot through the civilians. Outcome: 1 target down, 2 civilian casu
Not morality, superstition (Score:2)
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm -- not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
Sounds like researchers found the seat of superstition, not morality. The volunteers judged actions on the basis of their actual consequences instead of religious mumbo jumbo. That's not just an interesting finding, it's progress. Maybe science has found a way to get the Pope to spend more time protecting children and less time forgiving child rapists.
Doesn't change much (Score:2, Informative)
A small change in moral response, and even then, it isn't as if they turned off the moral center. Looks like they just caused the subjects to focus on the effect of the action than the reasons behind it. It's almost like they muffled some of the higher reasoning functions behind morality and changed the focus from "The person's action resulted in [x], though he didn't mean it to" to "The person's action resulted in [x]".
They didn't kill morality; they hastened the response to a morally vague event. Black an
In other news... (Score:2)
"In other news, scientists discover that repeatedly standing in close proximity to magnetic imaging equipment while it is in use degrades the scientist's ability to determine the moral implications of their testing. More at 11."
"Moral center" or just "center"? (Score:3, Insightful)
What did they do to distinguish scrambling of moral judgement from simple scrambling of judgement? Seems to me that people who are simply having trouble thinking clearly are likely to make these mistakes. Someone whose ability to think at all is impaired might very well assert that the guy who let his girl walk across the unsafe bridge was blameless because they lost track of the fact that he knew it was unsafe.
This is why I hate science journalism (Score:3, Insightful)
The non-MIT articles makes grand claims that are NOWHERE in the real research. The "journalists" makes large claims about the existence of a "moral center" of the brain. The actual study and the MIT summary gives a much more restrained and accurate description. It shows that temporary disruption of TPJ interferes with the complete normal process which draws upon many areas of the brain.
Let's use a train analogy to get away from car analogies.
In order for a train to go from A to B, there must be intact railing the whole way. If we alter a section of the track and derail the train, it does NOT prove that the removed section is the train transportation center of the railroad track. It is essential, but it is only part of the process. The disruption of this area of the brain only shows that it is essential in the complete processing of moral judgement, not the center itself. I'm not talking down this research, only the journalistic representation of it.
Management (Score:3, Funny)
Management Can Sway Man's Moral Compass
And thought... now how is that news?
Correlation... (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, right, because not questioning people may cause a strong magnetic field around one's head... People are so fast to jump to conclusions based on correlation, why did the news report that it is just a correlation when there is no way* it can't imply causation? Looks like some uninformed journalist just read the wikipedia article on logic falacies.
* Except for a flawed study, but that possibility is always present, and not directly related to the measured correlation..
Causation (Score:5, Informative)
"Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
What is it with Slashdotters' completely fucked-in-the-head understanding of correlation vs. causation? The article says exactly the opposite of this summary!
"Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by moving beyond correlation to causation," says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.
And that was completely obvious without even needing to see the article anyway. This is a designed experiment. Designed experiments establish causation. (See Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22, et. al.) Obviously a person's moral judgements aren't causing the magnet that you're switching on-and-off to work. For chrissake.
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I choose to be a meat puppet over a vegetable or fungus puppet anyday
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SARAH PALIN WILL NOT HAVE SEX WITH YOU.
Who knows what might happen after you zap her with that magnet-gun....
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Considering the efficiency of sound waves at swaying man's moral compass I'm not sure this really changes much. With the rates indicated by various Milgramesque experiments, simply appending 'that's an order' may be a far more effective way of disabling someone's moral compass than pointing fancy-shmancy TMS equipment at them.
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Except Milgram showed that a few people are completely immune to coercion by authority. This equipment will probably work on anyone.
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> Except Milgram showed that a few people are completely immune to coercion by
> authority.
Milgram used no coercion.
> This equipment will probably work on anyone.
But it won't make them follow your orders. "Here's a gun. I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll take it and kill that guy." "No, that would be wrong." "Put this helmet on." "Ok." "Now again, I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll kill that guy." "Naw. Too much trouble. I'll just kill you and take the money." BAM!
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Ahah! This conclusively links em fields to the phenomenon of em sensitivity lawsuits. The EM fields remove the "sensitives" moral compass and allows them to fake symptoms for financial gain through lawsuits without feeling guilty.
But... But... My soul! My free will! (Score:5, Insightful)
How can magnets impact my moral choices? Isn't my soul supposed to do that? Is my soul a magnet? Maybe free will is magnetic. Or MAYBE, just maybe, those things don't exist except as concepts in the human mind.
Re:But... But... My soul! My free will! (Score:4, Funny)
That reminds me: [innocence.com]
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Or maybe, just maybe, the soul and brain are connected.
Re:But... But... My soul! My free will! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Isn't the soul supposed to be a transcendental component, which is by definition rather not to be influenced by a mere magnet?
It's been said to be influenced by mere diet, or simply by seeing someone naked. Souls are easily altered.
So God will punish me for a bad connection? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... what you call "soul" is nothing but an emergent property of your brain?
Why? What makes you jump to the conclusion that because two things are connected, therefore one must be caused by the other - and specifically that you get to choose which one that is?
Connected does not mean "causal".
If the "soul" (if it exists) is connected to the brain, and the magnet interferes with this connection, why is it surprising that behaviour also changes?
Because, if the soul-mind connection can be interefered with, that negates the moral purpose of the soul as repository for merits and demerits caused by good and bad actions. If your bad actions can result from a bad connection, then the soul (and the self) should not accrue the demerits, bad karma, stains, evil, or whatever you want to call it. Because if they did, then I could go to hell for walking under a strong magnet.
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Right, well, that's the problem, isn't it? I'm just evil from birth in your religion, and nothing I can possibly do can make up for that except begging forgiveness from the guy who set me up to fail.
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Re:But... But... My soul! My free will! (Score:4, Funny)
So, strong magnetic fields can disrupt the soul?
I've always been told I have an iron will...
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What the parent is saying is that there is no such thing as soul.
There is consciousness, there is our mind, there is the unconsciousness and it is all part of our physical self.
Why is this a revelation?
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How can a hypothetical God judge us for our choices, if our choices can be screwed up by a 'bad connection?' Maybe I was going to make the right choice, but a damn supernova sent a magnetic pulse through my head. I'm sorry, but it just seems laughable.
From a Christian viewpoint (sorry, not informed enough to give you any others), by setting the bar for morality high yet still being gracious. In other words, everyone is a sinner, but everyone can be forgiven through Jesus. So, it doesn't matter if you're 99.999% moral or just 85% moral, you're still not good enough by your own merits.
From the more Jewish standpoint, judgments were frequently reduced for those who were tricked or otherwise not aware of their sins. Check Genesis 20 for an example of som
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Conviction is a feeling, it does not come from logic, it drives logic to find supporting evidence and spin a plausible story.
A determinist knows they are part of an unending chain of cause and effect, and the cause of 'communicating an opinion' can have the effect of 'convincing someone of something.'
The mind seeks to create a logical and self consistent story for our actions. If a random magnetic impulse can change my mind, and my mind is primed to create a self consistent story about itself, of course it
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It's only an "excuse" if you would have committed the act anyway, or if you deliberately subjected yourself to it. If I spike your soda with LSD and you flip out and kill somebody, do you really think you should be completely culpable for that act?
If somebody wants to raise this as a defense or mitigating factor in court, then let them. Luckily we have judges and juries who sort through these things instead of applying blanket rules. I seriously doubt that this effect, even if real, could ever cause a littl