I'm Away

Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post until I get back. I hope to resume posting on Monday August 31st.

A Summer Camp For The Kids of Free Thinkers and Atheists

No singing of hymns around the campfire for these children. No Bible Study. The summer camp has come under fierce attack by Christian fundamentalists.

"Campers are not told that there is no God; only that they should weigh the evidence. They learn about the scientific method. An amateur biologist invites them to gather creepy-crawlies from a nearby pond. They are told how sensitive each species is to pollution, and asked to work out from this how polluted the pond is. They find several critters that can survive only in clean water, and conclude that the pond is in good shape. The kids are encouraged to explore ethical questions, too. The more argumentative ones sit in a clearing and debate the nature of justice.

"The kind of people who send their kids to Bible camp are appalled. Answers in Genesis, a Christian fundamentalist group, berates Camp Quest for drumming a 'hopeless' world view into young minds. But a humanist camp is less about indoctrination than reassurance that it is all right not to be religious; that it is possible to be moral without believing in the supernatural. Nearly all the kids at Camp Quest say they find it comforting to be surrounded by others who share their lack of belief. Many attend schools where Christianity is taken for granted. Many keep quiet about their atheism. Those who don’t are sometimes taunted or told they will burn in hell.

Atheists are broadly disliked in America." More

Evolutionary Morality: Point & Counterpoint

Some people find offensive the idea that our moral behavior is grounded in the way our brains evolved. That is, evolutionary psychology explains morality as a response to the way our emotions developed over eons. Some of those who take exception believe that human beings should behave ethically, as in the way an adult exercises moral discipline to follow his or her proper upbringing. I express the matter that simply because I have met people who believe it to be that simple--that "resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," to borrow from Hamlet. In other words, act and you will act properly. Just don't think too much.

The classic trolley problem presents the peculiarity of human morality. One version of it goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed downhill toward a large group of people standing at the bottom. To save their lives consider a thought experiment. You have two choices. The first choice: Push a very large man in front of the trolley, thereby derailing it and saving the lives of the people at the bottom. The second choice: Pull a lever that diverts the trolley onto another track where it will crash into a house below, killing the occupant. In either case, one person will die, but many will be saved. Which would you choose? Typically, the choice is for number two as the idea of physically pushing another person is even more repugnant than pulling the lever. For a cartoon offering a different, humorous, version, click here.

Evolutionary psychologists would call this preference a case of evolutionary morality. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging would reveal that of the two thoughts, killing a person with a lever does not arouse in the brain feelings as strong as actually pushing a man in front of a trolley.

With regard to morality, I came across an article which offers the standard view. It cites Stanley Milgram's experiments supposedly revealing the torturer in everybody. Then I found a counterpoint to that perspective.

The standard view. First, this excerpt from the article:

"What makes some of us saints and some of us sinners? The evolutionary roots of morality. It isn't surprising that the best-known experiments in psychology (apart from Pavlov's salivating dogs) are those Stanley Milgram ran beginning in the 1960s. Over and over, with men and women, with the old and the young, he found that when ordinary people are told to administer increasingly stronger electric shocks to an unseen person as part of a 'learning experiment,' the vast majority—sometimes 93 percent—complied, even when the learner (actually one of the scientists) screamed in anguish and pleaded, 'Get me out of here!' Nor is it surprising that Milgram's results have been invoked to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib and others in which ordinary people followed orders to commit heinous acts. What is surprising is how little attention science has paid to the dissenters in Milgram's experiments. Some participants did balk at following the command to torture their partner. As one of them, World War II veteran Joseph Dimow*, recalled decades later, "I refused to go any further." More

The counterpoint. At another link, I found this comment on the above article:

The standard view article's author "accepts a current popular view of ethics: it is rooted in evolution and grounded in emotions. She briefly runs through the stock argument for the claim that morality is an evolved behavior. Roughly put, the argument is that our primate relatives show what we would consider altruistic behavior (like helping each other or enduring hardship to avoid harming others of their kind). Naturally, the primates are more altruistic with their relatives. It is assumed that our primate ancestors had this same sort of behavior and it helped them survive, thus leading to us and our ethical behavior.

Perhaps this 'just so' story is true. Let us allow that it is." More
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*"I'm not certain about it, but I would attribute it to my upbringing, background, education -- things of that sort," says Dimow as quoted in a review by Michael Smith at WebMD. "And I think something [is] happening in one's life that makes them, not an outsider, but skeptical of going along with the crowd. And it's probably helpful to have some determination to think in an unorthodox manner and to question assumptions."

Dimow says his parents told him at an early age that while he should listen to his teachers, he should know that teachers aren't always right. He taught this lesson to his own children. Science just gives us descriptions of what is. What we should do is a matter of ethics.

Michael Gazzaniga--Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

I recall when I was in college and read various descriptions of human beings: Man is the only animal that thinks, or the only one that is moral. The one I like best is Mark Twain's, "Man is the only animal that blushes--or needs to." (Those were times when Man was used as a term to encompass humanity, although today we encounter sentences such as "When we think about God we realize that she is, if anything, abundant.") Of course, each of the "only's" became scratched off the list as more knowledge was gained of our fellow creatures.

Michael Gazzaniga also compares us to other creatures. In the comparison, he finds that though most of our activity can be found as antecedents in other animals, something in our species has made us unique. This uniqueness can be found by tracing the evolution of the human brain. In easy to understand language, Dr. Gazzaniga explains findings in fields in neuroscience (his own discipline), molecular biology, genetics, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

What follows is an excerpt from a review of his recent book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

" If there is one question that has puzzled humans longer than anything else, it must surely be: who am I? And just what makes me human? In short: why are humans seemingly so different from all other species of animals? Michael Gazzaniga’s new book takes us through a virtuoso cavalcade of research over the last decade in search of the answer. It is a tour de force, because it covers such a wide range of disciplines from ethology and animal behavior to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, at each stage patiently steering the reader through layers of technical complexity to the core gems that lie within.

Mind, if you just want the answer, you could save yourself a long read—Gazzaniga gives it to us in the book’s opening sentences (as it happened, I naturally read it last because it came in a short chapter entitled “Prologue” …):

I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor say, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” It is such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity. Other apes don’t have that sentiment. More in PDF.

Antonio Damasio: Consciousness Is Not Beyond The Reach of Human Intelligence

Yesterday's post had Colin McGinn, in which he asserted that the gap between brain and mind will never be bridged. Not so says Antonio Damasio, who believes that we have the rational ability to understand consciousness in its relationship to the brain.

Damasio has written Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Noted for his hypothesis on somatic markers. Damasio argues that all decision-making involves an emotional component. In fact, when faced with alternatives of high uncertainty and ambiguity, our cognitive processes can become overloaded. At such times, somatic markers can kick in to help us. These markers are chemically stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and provide us associations to help influence our decisions.

As for his view on consciousness, he believes that we should not regard it as an enduring mystery. "Some philosophers maintain that solving the problem of consciousness is beyond the reach of human intelligence. This is very odd and, I believe, untrue. It fits a sensible intuition that the mind is something special and different, separable from the brain, but the fact that the intuition is sensible does not make it right." More

Colin McGinn: Between The Brain and The Mind

Blame it all on Descartes. The mind/body split, I mean. How do you get from "in here" to "out there"? How do you get from something subjective, mind, to something objective, brain? A mind stops being a mind as soon as it is taken from the skull and placed on a table to examine it. At that point it becomes a brain. You can dissect a brain and look at it under a microscope, but you are no closer to that subjective experience of what it feels like to be an "I."

And how about getting from "in here" to "out there"? Is there a little person inside each of us and this person acts as stage director between the inner and the outer? I speak here of what has been traditionally called the self, that which interacts between our thoughts and the world.

Recent research in neuroscience has many believing that soon we will have a working model for the gap between the brain and the conscious mind. Philosophers such as Daniel Dennett believe that we have made too much of the gap, and that it is really not that big a problem. Think of consciousness as emergent from matter, the brain, and somehow the problem is no longer insoluble. Well, okay.

Not so fast, says Colin McGinn, who holds that we can never bridge the gap between mind and brain. He has this to say about that:

"There appears to be what Wittgenstein called an "unbridgeable gulf" between the brain and the conscious mind. The paradox of the mind-body problem is that the explanatory causes of consciousness in the brain are not discoverable by inspecting the brain, and introspection cannot reveal the rootedness of consciousness in brain tissue. Our modes of knowing about the mind-brain nexus don't home in on the glue that binds the two together." More

What's In A Name?

In December of 2008 Heath Campbell, wanted his three-year-old boy's name put on the child's birthday cake. The bakery at the supermarket refused. The refusal made national headlines and, eventually, the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services investigated the parents, then took their children into custody. What was it all about? The name.

The parents had named the child Adolph Hitler, in full, Adolph Hitler Campbell. The New York Times reports Campbell, a white supremacist, once had confederate flags on the walls of his house, and recently became interested in Nazi Germany. The house became decorated with swastikas and other Nazi paraphernalia. He legally changed his children's names. Adolph's one year old sister was named Joyce Lynn Aryan Nation Campbell. The eight month old was named after Heinrich Himmler, though misspelled as Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell.

I am reminded of an old Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue."
My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn't leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

In Cash's song, the name becomes a curse on the boy but in typical Country & Western fashion, all turns out well in the end.

In real life, it is highly unlikely that all will turn out well for these children. With such names they face a lifetime of hardship, rejection and worse. Forensic psychologist N.G. Berrill said naming a boy Hitler could be considered child abuse. "Part of it is the infantile nature of the parents’ behavior," Berrill said. "You can name your dog something weird, but they think they’re making some kind of bold statement with the children, not appreciating that the children will have separate lives and will be looked at in a negative light until they’re able to change their name. It is abuse."

Take one giant step now, from New Jersey to Germany, the country that brought us Hitler and WWII.

The boy and his siblings could never have been given such names there.

Germany has strict naming regulations. Here is a commentary from Der Spiegel:

"Indeed, children must be given names that clearly denote gender and they cannot be given family names as first names. Out-of-the-ordinary designations are likewise verboten. Moon Unit Zappa could not have been German. . . .

Everyone knows Schroeder, Charlie Brown's buddy in the "Peanuts" comics who pounds out Beethoven tunes on his miniature piano all day. Germans too are Schroeder fans, with Snoopy and friends having been around in the German language for half a century. . . .

Schroeder, though, as it turns out, could never have been named Schroeder had he been born in Germany. The moniker is not allowed." More

One account of the Adolph Hitler Campbell news event.