Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote discusses the conflict between scientific understanding of the brain and traditional ideas about free will and morality.
Paul Bloom's quote highlights a significant philosophical debate concerning the nature of consciousness and moral responsibility in light of scientific discoveries about the brain. If the brain is understood as a complex system of components rather than a singular entity, this challenges our conventional beliefs about character, praise, blame, and the existence of free will, inviting a reevaluation of how we view human behavior and morality.
Themes
ScienceConsciousnessMoral AgencyFree WillPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the implications of neuroscience on morality.
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If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
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I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
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We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
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Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
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