Neuroscientists Are Just Modern-Day Calvinists…Discuss

Last updated on: July 7, 2011 at 5:19 pm by Amy Julia Becker

Neuroscientists Are Just Modern-Day Calvinists…Discuss 2011-07-07T17:19:21-04:00 Amy Julia Becker

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When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that we choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint, and then born into a world of circumstances that we cannot control in our most-formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment mean that all citizens—equal before the law—possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision-making. The unique patterns of neurobiology inside each of our heads cannot qualify as choices; these are the cards we’re dealt.

Because we did not choose the factors that affected the formation and structure of our brain, the concepts of free will and personal responsibility begin to sprout question marks.

From “The Brain on Trial,” (The Atlantic, July/August 2011), by David Eagleman

I need to re-read this article, but I commend it to you as an example of one end of the spectrum of a variety of important, interrelated debates: nurture/nature; do we have souls?; if we are just “brains in vats,” what happens to individual responsibility?; and so much more. The article does a great job presenting the perspective of neuroscience with very few caveats and very little nuance. I don’t mean that as a criticism, really, because it challenges, in a good way, a lot of assumptions and things I thought I knew. With that said, it leaves so much unexplored and takes extreme examples as those that should inform the much larger middle ground. When the author, a neuroscientist, writes, “Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment,” (emphasis in original) he assumes that if science can’t demonstrate it (the existence of will), it doesn’t exist. It’s not clear that he’s aware of his own assumptions or of what he excludes by this stance.

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