Abstracts
Daniel Dennett, Professor, Tufts University
Friday, May 9, 2008
How Mindless Algorithms Build Minds
Human reasoning and creative thinking is an unprecedented product of evolution, a combination of genetic evolution of brains, cultural evolution of thinking tools, and the co-evolution of both brains and thinking tools, beginning with language and eventually taking a small but momentous step: “going meta” and creating the “space of reasons.” Once we invented “why?” our minds were ready to explore new realms of design space, and to reflect back on the processes that had produced us in the first place. We are the first species to know who we are and how we got here.
Patricia Smith Churchland, Professor, UCSD
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Decisions, Responsibility and the Brain
As we come to understand the role of genes in neuronal wiring, and neuronal wiring in the production of behavior, we are newly confronted with questions about choice and responsibility. Although questions concerning what free choice really amounts to have long been at the center of philosophical reflection, new discoveries, especially from neuropharmacology and neuropsychology, have lent them a special and very practical urgency. In the courts, in the education of children, and in general in daily life, we assume that some decisions are freely made and that agents should be held accountable for those decisions. On the other hand, we see the range of allowable excuses from responsibility broadening as we begin to understand the role of certain neuropathologies in aberrant behavior. These developments take place against the public policy debate concerning the right balance between considerations of public safety, justice, fairness, and individual freedom. From the perspective of neurophilosophy, I shall address some of the broad questions in this arena, including the theological and metaphysical contention that free choice is uncaused choice, and the proposal that pragmatic and scientific considerations can yield the best working basis for assignment of responsibility.
Marc Hauser, Professor, Harvard University
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Modules, Minds and Morality
How do you decide what is morally right or wrong? Historically, there have been two answers to this question. On the one hand, we deliver moral judgments on the basis of a rational, conscious, and deliberate process of accessing principles to justify our actions. On the other hand, our judgments are the result of intuitions mediated by emotions. Though these two processes certainly play some role in our moral deliberations, each suffers from a set of critical problems. I offer a solution: by appealing to an analogy to language, I argue that humans are endowed with a universal moral grammar that generates intuitive judgments of right and wrong based on an inaccessible and abstract code of action. To defend this position, I present data from a large scale, internet study, with over 200,000 subjects, providing evidence for universal principles and relative immunity to cultural variation, including religion, age, education, and gender. I also present data from patient populations (brain damage, psychopathy), neuroimaging and neural deactivation experiments, showing that the integration of beliefs with consequences is crucial to resolving moral dilemmas, but that emotions may only be a byproduct of a cold computation that does all of the work in adjudicating right from wrong.
William Kelley, Associate Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Studying the Self
Understanding the nature of self is central to many areas of psychology, and evidence from multiple domains suggests that information about the self is processed in a substantially different manner than information processed about others. For example, in the realm of cognition, information processed with reference to the self receives preferential attention, such as when people hear their names across noisy rooms, and there is a selective memory advantage for material evaluated with reference to the self. Although social scientists have learned a great deal about the human sense of self, many questions remain. Chief among these is how activity in the brain gives rise to the unitary and coherent sense of self that exists across time and place. Recently, researchers have started to use the methods of neuroscience in their efforts to better understand the neural basis of self. Here we present a series of studies identifying a number of central midline brain structures, notably the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and ventral anterior cingulate cortex in various aspects of self-representation, such as the extent to which these regions are associated with self-knowledge versus the feelings that are generated when people contemplate different aspects of the self.
Adina Roskies, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Free Will — Uniquely Human?
What can neuroscience tell us about decision-making and free will? I discuss some neuroscientific data from monkeys that illuminates the neural basis of decisions under uncertainty, and argue that this simple model can be generalized to more complex decisions made for reasons. This picture accords well with some compatibilist views on free will, and I suggest that what makes human decisions comport with intuitive notions of freedom is that we sometimes have conscious access to the intentional content of the states involved in those decisions. I consider briefly whether such meta-consciousness is essential to freedom, and whether nonhuman animals also have this metacognitive ability.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility
Abstract: The issue of whether neuroscience undermines responsibility, mentioned by Churchland, becomes more practical and concrete within our legal system. Recently many defense attorneys have tried to convince juries and judges that their clients are not fully responsible for their actions because they suffer from various neural abnormalities and malfunctions. If such "brain defenses" are recognized by courts, then these defendants might be found guilty of lesser crimes, they might receive shorter sentences, or they might be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Using some real cases, I will ask whether our legal system should allow such "brain defenses" and whether it should allow brain scans as evidence in legal trials.
Paul Whalen, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Vigilance, Valence and Ambiguity: Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Human Facial Expressions
Any successful neural learning system must include subcomponents sensitive to changes in the predictive value of associative stimuli. This talk will present data concerning the role of a prefrontal – amygdala neural circuit in the detection and resolution of predictive uncertainty. Animal and human neuroscience research has offered much information concerning the role of this circuitry in the acquisition and expression of conditioned responses to stimuli that predict biologically-relevant outcomes. The obvious strength of these conditioning studies is in the control they exert over a given subject’s reinforcement history. But the human volunteer comes to our studies with a reinforcement history of her/his own and this is a related but distinct area of research in its own right. To this end, we present our subjects with pictures of facial expressions of emotion with the assumption that subjects will show individual differences in neural responses based upon individual differences in past predictive value of these expressions. We focus our work on neural responses to facial expression with ambiguous predictive value (e.g., surprised expressions) compared to those with clear predictive value (e.g., happy and angry expressions). We will see that presentation of such stimuli produces activity through a prefrontal-amygdala circuitry that is of interest to affective neuroscientists since it is hypothesized to play a role in the breakdown of emotional regulation prevalent in mood and anxiety disorders.
Friday, May 9, 2008
How Mindless Algorithms Build Minds
Human reasoning and creative thinking is an unprecedented product of evolution, a combination of genetic evolution of brains, cultural evolution of thinking tools, and the co-evolution of both brains and thinking tools, beginning with language and eventually taking a small but momentous step: “going meta” and creating the “space of reasons.” Once we invented “why?” our minds were ready to explore new realms of design space, and to reflect back on the processes that had produced us in the first place. We are the first species to know who we are and how we got here.
Patricia Smith Churchland, Professor, UCSD
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Decisions, Responsibility and the Brain
As we come to understand the role of genes in neuronal wiring, and neuronal wiring in the production of behavior, we are newly confronted with questions about choice and responsibility. Although questions concerning what free choice really amounts to have long been at the center of philosophical reflection, new discoveries, especially from neuropharmacology and neuropsychology, have lent them a special and very practical urgency. In the courts, in the education of children, and in general in daily life, we assume that some decisions are freely made and that agents should be held accountable for those decisions. On the other hand, we see the range of allowable excuses from responsibility broadening as we begin to understand the role of certain neuropathologies in aberrant behavior. These developments take place against the public policy debate concerning the right balance between considerations of public safety, justice, fairness, and individual freedom. From the perspective of neurophilosophy, I shall address some of the broad questions in this arena, including the theological and metaphysical contention that free choice is uncaused choice, and the proposal that pragmatic and scientific considerations can yield the best working basis for assignment of responsibility.
Marc Hauser, Professor, Harvard University
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Modules, Minds and Morality
How do you decide what is morally right or wrong? Historically, there have been two answers to this question. On the one hand, we deliver moral judgments on the basis of a rational, conscious, and deliberate process of accessing principles to justify our actions. On the other hand, our judgments are the result of intuitions mediated by emotions. Though these two processes certainly play some role in our moral deliberations, each suffers from a set of critical problems. I offer a solution: by appealing to an analogy to language, I argue that humans are endowed with a universal moral grammar that generates intuitive judgments of right and wrong based on an inaccessible and abstract code of action. To defend this position, I present data from a large scale, internet study, with over 200,000 subjects, providing evidence for universal principles and relative immunity to cultural variation, including religion, age, education, and gender. I also present data from patient populations (brain damage, psychopathy), neuroimaging and neural deactivation experiments, showing that the integration of beliefs with consequences is crucial to resolving moral dilemmas, but that emotions may only be a byproduct of a cold computation that does all of the work in adjudicating right from wrong.
William Kelley, Associate Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Studying the Self
Understanding the nature of self is central to many areas of psychology, and evidence from multiple domains suggests that information about the self is processed in a substantially different manner than information processed about others. For example, in the realm of cognition, information processed with reference to the self receives preferential attention, such as when people hear their names across noisy rooms, and there is a selective memory advantage for material evaluated with reference to the self. Although social scientists have learned a great deal about the human sense of self, many questions remain. Chief among these is how activity in the brain gives rise to the unitary and coherent sense of self that exists across time and place. Recently, researchers have started to use the methods of neuroscience in their efforts to better understand the neural basis of self. Here we present a series of studies identifying a number of central midline brain structures, notably the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and ventral anterior cingulate cortex in various aspects of self-representation, such as the extent to which these regions are associated with self-knowledge versus the feelings that are generated when people contemplate different aspects of the self.
Adina Roskies, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Free Will — Uniquely Human?
What can neuroscience tell us about decision-making and free will? I discuss some neuroscientific data from monkeys that illuminates the neural basis of decisions under uncertainty, and argue that this simple model can be generalized to more complex decisions made for reasons. This picture accords well with some compatibilist views on free will, and I suggest that what makes human decisions comport with intuitive notions of freedom is that we sometimes have conscious access to the intentional content of the states involved in those decisions. I consider briefly whether such meta-consciousness is essential to freedom, and whether nonhuman animals also have this metacognitive ability.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility
Abstract: The issue of whether neuroscience undermines responsibility, mentioned by Churchland, becomes more practical and concrete within our legal system. Recently many defense attorneys have tried to convince juries and judges that their clients are not fully responsible for their actions because they suffer from various neural abnormalities and malfunctions. If such "brain defenses" are recognized by courts, then these defendants might be found guilty of lesser crimes, they might receive shorter sentences, or they might be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Using some real cases, I will ask whether our legal system should allow such "brain defenses" and whether it should allow brain scans as evidence in legal trials.
Paul Whalen, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Vigilance, Valence and Ambiguity: Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Human Facial Expressions
Any successful neural learning system must include subcomponents sensitive to changes in the predictive value of associative stimuli. This talk will present data concerning the role of a prefrontal – amygdala neural circuit in the detection and resolution of predictive uncertainty. Animal and human neuroscience research has offered much information concerning the role of this circuitry in the acquisition and expression of conditioned responses to stimuli that predict biologically-relevant outcomes. The obvious strength of these conditioning studies is in the control they exert over a given subject’s reinforcement history. But the human volunteer comes to our studies with a reinforcement history of her/his own and this is a related but distinct area of research in its own right. To this end, we present our subjects with pictures of facial expressions of emotion with the assumption that subjects will show individual differences in neural responses based upon individual differences in past predictive value of these expressions. We focus our work on neural responses to facial expression with ambiguous predictive value (e.g., surprised expressions) compared to those with clear predictive value (e.g., happy and angry expressions). We will see that presentation of such stimuli produces activity through a prefrontal-amygdala circuitry that is of interest to affective neuroscientists since it is hypothesized to play a role in the breakdown of emotional regulation prevalent in mood and anxiety disorders.