The (Much Anticipated) Dawn Of Understanding - Thalia Wheatley
In The Edge they are running a series of short commentaries entitled: "2016 : What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?" (I think they do something like this every year). Thalia Wheatley (Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College) wrote a fascinating (though very short) piece that sets out her vision of understanding reality, our internal reality.
There is no ghost in the machine. And people are starting to wake up to this across society.
She starts:
In neuroscience, few single discoveries have the ability to stay news for long. However, in the aggregate, all lead to the emergence of perhaps the greatest developing news story: the widespread understanding that human thought and behavior are the products of biological processes. There is no ghost in the machine. In the public sphere, this understanding is dawning....
Every year, neuroscience reveals the anatomical and functional brain differences associated with expressing a given trait or tendency, whether psychopathy, altruism, extroversion, or conscientiousness. Researchers electrically stimulating one brain area cause a patient to experience a strong surge of motivation. Zapping a different area causes another patient to become less self-aware. Disease can disorient a patient's moral compass or create illusions of agency. Environmental influences, from what we eat to who we see, provide inputs that interact with and shape our neural activity—the activity that instantiates all our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Finding by finding, the ghost in the machine is being unmasked as a native biological system—like a drawn-out ending of a scientific Scooby Doo.
My favourite lines come in the final paragraph:
It is one thing to convince people that sexual orientation is not a choice. It is quite another to convince people that the dichotomy of biology versus choice made no sense at the start. Who, but the unmasked biological system, is doing the “choosing”?... Choice is simply a fanciful shorthand for biological processes we do not yet apprehend.
Some people recoil at the demystification of humanity and our internal working mechanics, and refuse to believe that this, together with our given environments, inexorably define our actions and "decisions". Some people prefer to defer to a ghost. I still argue with a fellow Tippling Philosopher on this very subject, who is wilfully stubborn, not wishing to strip away majesty and mystery to find mechanics and causal understanding. He feels, in that, we dehumanise ourselves and lose our moral crown.
He's wrong. And arguing from wishful thinking is not the most rational of courses you can take.