The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

The "Consciometer"?

In Slate, David Dobbs predicts:

Science will [within the decade] possess what might be called a "consciometer"—a set of tests (probably an advanced version of a brain scan or EEG) that can measure consciousness the way kidney or lung function is now measured.

He also insinuates that religious conservatives might not like such a test because of the precision that such an instrument would bring to debates about such wide-ranging debates as abortion, stem cell research and Terri Schiavo.

For my part, I think conservatives will love the Consciometer because finally they'll be able to prove Howard Dean wrong.

Intuition and Enhancement

Reason's Ronald Bailey poses some interesting questions about enhancement drugs.

Moral Vertigo in a Brave New World

While we're on the topic of the anterior cingulate cortex, here is Reason's Ronald Bailey on the phenomenon of "moral vertigo":

As history amply demonstrates, the public's immediate "yuck" reaction to new technologies is a very fallible and highly changeable guide to moral choices or biomedical policy. For example, by 1978, more than half of Americans said that they would use in vitro fertilization (IVF) if they were married and couldn't have babies any other way. More than 200,000 test-tube babies later, the majority of Americans now heartily approve of IVF. Globally nearly 50,000 heart transplants have been performed, and 83 percent of Americans favor organ donation. The contraceptive pill is legal in all states and millions of American families have used them to control their reproductive lives. And smallpox is the first human disease ever eradicated. What the polling data and history clearly show is that as people's understanding of new technologies increases, most of them overcome their initial fears and end up welcoming new technological advances rather than rejecting them.

The Neurology of Moral Choice and Moral Disagreement

Carl Zimmer has a "reprint" of his Discover article, "Whose Life Would You Save?," about Princeton cognitive scientist Joshua Greene's work recording and analyzing the neural activity of human subjects engaged in ethically-charged decision making. A taste:

As Greene?s database grows, he can see more clearly how the brain?s intuitive and reasoning networks are activated. In most cases, one dominates the other. Sometimes, though, they produce opposite responses of equal strength, and the brain has difficulty choosing between them. Part of the evidence for this lies in the time it takes for Greene's volunteers to answer his choices about causing personal harm. When people decide that personally hurting or killing someone is appropriate, it takes them a long time to say yes--twice as long as saying no to these particular kinds of questions. When our emotional network says no but our reasoning network says yes, Green suggests, we gets trapped in a moral struggle. When two areas of the brain come into conflict, researchers have found, an area known as the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, switches on to mediate between them. Psychologists can trigger the ACC with a simple game called the Stroop test, in which people have to name the color of a word. If subjects are shown the word blue in red letters, for instance, their responses slow down and the ACC lights up. ?It?s the area of the brain that says, ?Hey, we?ve got a problem here,?? Greene says. Greene?s questions, it turns out, pose a sort of moral Stroop test. In cases where people take a long time to answer agonizing personal moral questions, the ACC becomes active. ?We predicted that we?d see this, and that?s what we got,? he says. Greene, in other words, may be exposing the biology of moral anguish.