Neuroscientists report that they can tell whether your motives are altruistic or selfish using fMRI scans, regardless of whether your actions are altruistic or selfish.
Increasingly we hear that it is not enough to do the right thing for the right reasons: you've got to feel the right way, too. Now we can look forward to a future in which that is enforced and transgressors punished.
3 comments:
No, this is just another source of heat for life to evolve/learn to dissipate.
Eric Hines
See Grim, they take seriously this "mind reading" stuff, even if you consider it impossible for the field of psychology to acquire.
When there is a will, there is a way.
Neuroscience's imaging technologies give us something we can actually see, which is different from psychology's creations. But there's a correlation/causation problem even in neuroscience, which is the mind/body problem necked down. Yes, this set of the brain is firing or not firing. How do you prove that, in a given case, the mind is experiencing sympathy (or not)? What if the person in question denies feeling sympathetic (or not)? Do you tell him he's wrong?
It won't bother those interested in control, for whom the fMRI is enough to damn you. But it will bother those interested in truth.
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