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The Scientific “Debate” Over Free Will
Debates about free will never seem to go out of style, and two recent books addressing free will from a scientific perspective suggest that we are far from achieving any kind of consensus. And while most metaphysical questions don’t carry much practical import, there is a general sense that, when it comes to free will,…
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Materialism and the Void: The Emptiness at the Heart of Modern Culture
Our culture provides such extraordinary opportunities for rich and interesting lives that it is hard to understand how we mostly end up doing so poorly. Our problem is not opportunity, it is execution. And when it comes to building a good life, not just giving us the tools for it, our culture often works against…
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The Virtues of Modern Society for an Ethical Decision-Maker
It’s always fashionable to knock the party you’re at. Our particular party (modern Western culture) does have a lot of problems – and dealing with those problems is very much the subject in hand. Yet it’s neither wise nor truthful to forget about the good stuff, and it’s genuinely important (and encouraging) to realize how…
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The Open Society as the Enemy
The interaction of our embodied selves with the world creates cognitive structures that instantiate preferences, values, dispositions, and skills. Much of this requires neither thought nor justification. One can choose to attach reasons to liking steak more than pork, or blackjack more than poker, but the exercise is post-hoc and unnecessary. This isn’t to say…
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Cognitive Science, Decision-Making and Ethics
Everybody loves a good debate about the mystery of consciousness. Physicists get to invent quantum mechanical explanations of macroscopic phenomena. Humanities folk get to poo-poo the evils of reductionism. Journalists can trot out their full repertoire of both scientific and ethical cliches. Everybody gets to argue. There are good working theories of consciousness that are…
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The Role of Reinforcement Learning in Transformative Decision-Making
Cognitive science can’t settle questions of right and wrong. But it can set the table for theories of rational decision-making and ethics. And the one thing we know for sure about how we think is that, at the most fundamental level, our brains are connection systems that are changed by experience.This matters; transformational experiences and…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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