Critical Thinking

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“If I were to ask you, “Why did Bill just get on the bus?” to answer that question you wouldn’t run a neural network simulation and you wouldn’t need to put Bill’s head in a scanner. You could just ask Bill and you might discover that the explanation for his behaviour is that he wants to visit his grandmother, and he knows that the bus will take him to his grandmother’s house. No science of the future is likely to provide an explanation with greater predictive power than that.”

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Steven Pinker: "How the Mind Works"

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“Beliefs and desires have their effects in computation — where computation is defined, roughly, as a process that takes place when a device is arranged so that information (namely, patterns in matter or energy inside the device) causes changes in the patterns of other bits of matter or energy.”

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Pinker, How the Mind Works

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But the claim is not that commercially available computers are a good model for the brain. Rather, the claim is that the answer to the question “What makes brains intelligent?” may overlap with the question “What makes computers intelligent?” The common feature, I suggest, is information-processing, or computation.

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Pinker, How the Mind Works

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“In all human societies, no matter how supposedly primitive, people use a variety of tools; traps; poisons; various ways of detoxifying plants by cooking, soaking, and leaching; methods of extracting medicines from plants to combat parasites and pathogens; and an ability to act cooperatively to accomplish what a single person acting alone could not achieve. These accomplishments show that the mind must be equipped with ways of grasping the causally significant parts of the world.”

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Pinker, How the Mind Works

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“The world is a heterogeneous place, and it is likely that we have several different intuitive theories or varieties of common sense that are adapted to figure out the causal structure of different aspects of the world. We can think of them as a kind of intuitive physics, intuitive biology, intuitive engineering, and intuitive psychology, each based on a core intuition.”

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Pinker, How the Mind Works

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“The different models of morality that have appeared in the literature over the years may be a direct consequence of the different moral situations considered by the researchers who have proposed them: observe humans as they try to solve complex moral dilemmas, and you are likely to propose a model or morality that relies heavily on high-level reasoning; ask them how they feel about disgusting immoral acts, and you are likely to conclude that morality is about gut reaction that require little rational deliberation.”

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgements: Different Prototypes lead to Different Theories

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“This approach to morality is built around experimental evidence that gauges our reactions to the infractions of others. If we restrict the domain of morality to those instances in which we judge others, we are likely to conclude that morality is based on quick, affect-laden responses. But a very different view of moral judgement emerges when we consider other sorts of moral encounters, and it is to these that we now turn. Most notably, if the perspective shifts away from the judgement of others to the analysis of an actor’s own choices, one is likely to conclude something very different about the nature of moral judgement.”

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgements: Different Prototypes lead to different Theories

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“Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kohlberg’s study of the cognitive development of morality started with just such dilemma, refined over the years into the Standard issue Moral Judgement Interview. His explicit goal was to discover how the development of reason influenced moral judgement, and indeed think-aloud protocols and in-depth interviews soon revealed that people could engage in sophisticated reasoning about morality, weigh pros and cons, and reveal stable cognitive mindsets in the way they approached moral dilemmas: While some individuals took into account mostly fear of punishment or rejection (pre-conventional stages), others embraced the rules of society as inherently worthy of respect (conventional stages) and a few seemed to consider what they believed were universal principles and followed them even when they clashed with those of society (post-conventional stages). Despite possible differences in stages of reasoning, these individuals had one thing in common: Their decision seemed based on conscious thought processes that could be articulated.”

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgements: Different Prototypes lead to different theories

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“The paradigmatic example that Greene et al. present is one where you have to smother your own baby to death to prevent enemy soldiers from discovering you and other villagers. Either way the child dies, but if you kill him before he cries, you and the villagers will live. They found that participants who took a long time to respond to dilemmas but ultimately gave the utilitarian response showed greater activation of areas typically associated with mental control.”

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgement: Different Prototypes lead to Different Theories

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“Emotions most likely evolved as quick responses to solve specific environmental problems, but these responses depend greatly on our goals and the manner in which we appraise our current environment and situation. For instance, when we perceive that events are consistent with the attainment of our goals, we tend to experience happiness, whereas if we perceive that a goal is threatened, we experience fear or anger … our emotions vary greatly depending on the sorts of thoughts that we bring to any given situation. So, while the presence of a bear may cause intense fear if we are out camping, it may lead only to mild amusement if we are at a circus.” (MPB, 20)

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgements: Different Prototypes lead to different theories

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“While emotions were once seen as capricious influences that are passively experienced (hence the term “passion”), in many ways the biggest discovery in the modern science of emotion is the degree to which emotion and reason are interrelated. We are able to use our emotions to service our judgements or goals in a variety of manners. For instance, when individuals are viewing disgusting films, asking them to think of the films in unemotional terms can dramatically reduce their emotional response. And at a very basic level, if I am prone to eating mad a certain person, I can avoid that person and thus avoid feeling anger.”

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgements: Different Prototypes lead to Different Theories

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“The ability to override initial knee-jerk reactions and even to use emotion in the service of reason casts doubt on the strongest contention of the emotionalist approach — that morality is mainly governed by quick affect-laden reactions. Our first reaction might be emotional, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be overcome. And if, as we have been arguing, investigators focus on such cases where some emotions and intuitions need to be ‘quieted down’ they are likely to conclude that morality is all about overcoming these initial reactions.

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Morin et al. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgements: Different Prototypes lead to Different Theories

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“Note that although these notions of religion are separable, they do tend to fall together. That is, most of those who characterize themselves as adhering to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religions are religious in the sense that they have certain experiences and that they hold certain beliefs and that they engage in certain practices.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“How could psychology not address such an important domain of belief, motivation, and action? Critically, the psychology of religion can be tidied independently of one’s belief about the truth of religious claims. Regardless of whether God exists, for instance, the question remains as to why so many people believe he does.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“Some would take this further, arguing that religion in general has a corrosive effect of our moral lives. Hitchens for instance, argues that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children”. Watson argued that religion is “a double agent”: “Espousing the highest good, seeking to make all men brothers, religion has produced the Crusades, the Inquisitions and an unending series of witch hunts. Virtually every organized religion has been the excuse, if not the cause, for violent, inhumane, and antisocial acts.””

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“It is not merely that [religious activities] don’t have obvious survival value; it is that they seem maladaptive from a Darwinian standpoint. Religious practices include mutilating one’s body, sacrificing valuable goods, choosing celibacy, and so on. One might have expected any desire to engage in such activities to be weeded out by the unforgiving sieve of natural selection. Why this hasn’t happened is another of the mysteries that any theory of the evolution of religion has to address.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“One of the best-known examples of this approach is the theory that humans are highly sensitive to cues to anomaly and intention; we are constantly on the lookout for other humans and nonhuman animals, for clear adaptive reasons. This leads us to sometimes assume the existence of entities that don’t really exist and hence provides the foundation for animism and deism. As systems that underlie “theory of body” and “theory of mind” are functionally and neurologically distinct. As a consequence of this, we think about bodies and minds as distinct sorts of things, which may explain why we are natural born dualists, why we so naturally believe in immaterial souls, in spirits, and in ghosts and reincarnation.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“One problem with this accident view, however, is its narrowness. At best, it explains religious belief. But it says nothing about transcendent experience, religious rituals, or the social nature of religion.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“One increasingly popular theory sees religion as an evolved solution to the problem of bringing together communities of people; religious belief and practice exist to install cooperation and group feelings, to motivate kindness and compassion to other members of one’s tribe.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“Religion, under this view, is a constellation of behaviours and thoughts that have evolved to benefit groups, and, in particular, to help solve the problem of free-riders. A community works best if everyone cooperations on certain tasks, such as group hunting, care of children, and warfare. But individual members of the community might benefit from defecting, from accepting the benefits of this cooperative behaviour without paying the cost.”

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Bloom: religion, morality, evolution

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“Many of the religious commandments to treat others compassionately and fairly are limited to the treatment of other individuals within the religious community; for instance, the Hebrew Bible’s “love your neighbour as yourself” was intended to apply only to other Israelites… The Qur’an commands, “Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies: They are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them — God does not guide such wrongdoers.””

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Bloom: REligion, Morality, Evolution

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“This topic was first explored in detail in Gordon Allport’s classic book. In his original studies in the 40s and 50s, people’s responses to the question “To what degree ha religion been an influence in your upbringing?” correlated with prejudicial attitudes toward other groups. Subsequent research found that this was true as well in the 70s: Relative to those whites who claimed to have no religious affiliation, white Protestants were more likely to disapprove of interracial marriage, and white Protestants and Catholics were more likely to agree that “most blacks have less in-born ability to learn.” And a recent meta-analysis looked at 55 studies between 1964 and 2008 and found that a small but statistically significant relationship exists between certain forms of religiosity and racial prejudice.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or predacious of her good neighbourliness.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution

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“In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen that the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighbourliness, not religious believing.”

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Bloom: Religion, Morality, Evolution