To Science, Morality Isn’t Special

Nothing Either Good Or Bad?

You’re a 10-year-old girl in Africa, lying nervously on your back with your lower body fully exposed. You don’t know why, but the grown-ups nearby keep assuring you that the tradition they’re about to carry out is to prevent you from becoming one of those immoral outcasts. They are concerned with one thing only: keeping you pure – your virginity must be preserved.  Being a female and all, you mustn’t pleasure yourself. With your consent, what is about to happen to you is called a clitoridectomy – partial or total removal of the clitoris. Without your consent – and almost surely, you have not granted it – it is called female genital mutilation (FGM).

Conquering All Mysteries By 100 Billion Rules and Lines and Brain Cells

The starry heavens above and the moral law within — these were the two things that Immanuel Kant claimed were immune to scientific investigation. Equally untouchable was the vague abstraction known as consciousness. That was in the 1700s. This book-length book of a post will be split into two parts, each covering the hot buttons of consciousness or morality, both within the framework of neuroscience. Here’s the sparknotes version: consciousness can be explained solely in terms of orderly neural activity and is fully measurable; and, morality is and ought to be understood in light of the brain states of conscious creatures. We can — and do – have a neuroscience of both, because we’re not in the 1700s anymore.

Part 2 on morality will be posted shortly.

The Miracle of Neuroscience: A Life of Grad School, Research, Science Literacy, and What These Really Mean

Scientists are bipolar masochists in white coats. And we are okay with that.

This post will be somewhat atypical. No science-heavy references, no hard data, no hypotheses — nothing new. It’ll be just one general and optimistic story for the non-specialist, a story and opinion that celebrates neuroscience to the bone.

Imagine taking a scalpel and making an incision on an anesthetized patient’s head. As the blade glides down a shaved patch of gelatinous skin, the blood underneath begins to flow out and glistens a bright crimson. It quickly dries to a rust on the scalpel and gauze. Some yellow cubes of fat almost bursts at the seams of the skin around it, and white skull finally comes into sight. Flakes of bone fly around as you drill a hole open. As soon as the hole gives way, the pinkgrey custard that is your brain appears. It is engulfed by a spider-web of of purple bloody veins. Congratulations! Before you, finally, is the seat to everything that is You, and there is nothing You-er than your mind, than your brain. So, let’s study You.

Lady Gaga was a Geneticist: Why “Born this Way” Accurately Interprets the Biology of Homosexuality

Intro:
It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M
Just put your paws up
‘Cause you were born this way, baby

Test tubes with DNA and canvases with brushstrokes. Einstein and Shakespeare. Science and humanities. These two cultures have been polarized throughout most of history, benefiting little, if anything, from each other.

This is Your Brain on Happiness

When people think of “science,” they naturally think of atoms, planets, robots — things they can touch and see. They know that subjective experiences such as happiness are important, but they believe that such experiences can’t be studied scientifically. That belief is dead wrong.

Good Ideas Have a Lot of Sex

Here’s a proposed answer to the question of where good ideas come from, presented in style, courtesy of the RSA. In an attempt to revolutionize how education is delivered, the RSA has been converting lectures from all disciplines into visually stunning stories. This one is presented by science writer Steven Johnson, author of Mind Wide Open and Where Good Ideas Come From :

The end of the world, parenting, and stars

Short post:

Ever wonder how to prevent the end of the world? Or how to be a good parent? Or how Newton invented calculus just to prove a point? With characteristic wit and excitement, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson answers 10 questions for Time Magazine and shares a few gold nuggets of scientific wisdom.

Imagine having him as a professor (why freshman year WHY)? This is how to make science accessible to everyone — by sharing Tyson’s passion for doing science and understanding how reality unfolds. Scientists break nature apart, one unit of reality at a time, and put her back together to figure out how she works… and enthusiastically present the findings with lots of hand motions.

That’s the purpose of science, fa sho.

Brains, magic tricks, and Neil Tyson

NOVA scienceNOW deserves all the funding it gets. Here’s an absolutely wonderful segment on how the brain works, aptly titled “How does the Brain Work?” It’s 50 minutes long and undoubtedly worth watching, as it is a clear example of science education at its best. Besides, host Neil Tyson is as good of a speaker as it gets, and there are even a bunch of nifty magic tricks that expose the brain’s gullibility (or evolution’s genius, depending on how you look at it.)

!!!

There’s also some real life mind-control in humans! And, you know, robots playing jeopardy and stuff, too. Watch here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/how-does-the-brain-work.html

Why Neuroscience Will Win

Oh no they deh-ent.

Creationists and Intelligent Design Iterators of “True” Science (IDiots) have given up on attacking evolution and now have taken aim at neuroscience. The article is reproduced fully over at NeuroWhoa! The ring-leader is psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D.:

YOU cannot overestimate how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… [how] materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.

Bill and Bill on Religion

I love Bill O’Reilly as much as the next person (omg jk’z), but this is a fantastic back-and-forth between O’Reilly and Maher, in characteristic fashion, on religion and how to interpret the Bible.