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"You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgmen
by powrtoch 16y ago
"You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."
Where do people think that high level behavior comes from, if not the lower levels?
"You think of WoW as being a high-level program, but I replaced your CPU with the one from my phone and look, it doesn't work."
- joshrule 16y agoYou make a great point. If morality is a high-level behavior, which is seems to be, then it should be fairly easy to disrupt. Just monkey with any of the several moving parts that combine to create the emergent property of 'morality', and the emergence shouldn't happen, at least not in the same way. It's not astonishing, it's to be expected.
- hvs 16y agoI don't think "morality" is equivalent to "processor".
- pygy_ 16y agoIn his example, morality is WoW, and the analogy is sound. By disrupting the low level activity, you prevent high level processes from emerging. Try to degauss your cell phone, just to see what happens...
- bambax 16y agoMmm. The CPU is the whole brain, and WoW is the totality of human behavior; so a more correct analogy would be: "I disabled the arithmetic co-processor and look, this character behaves erratically -- while the rest of the game seems unaffected".