[FRIAM] Shorthands for Brain-stuff

[Eric Charles]

During last Friday's meeting, there was a discussion about brains and
behavior. We were somehow discussing murders and Bruce brought up an
example of a friend who helps determine (using EEG and MRI) whether the
behavior of the murder had an "organic" cause. People with an organic cause
go to mental-health facilities, those would get the death penalty (roughly
speaking, obviously there in-between scenarios). Nick quickly pointed out
that was some variety of crazy dualism, because all behavior has an organic
cause. A few back and forths revealed a two things that seemed worth
capturing:

1) IF we are really talking about "does the behavior have an organic
cause", THEN Nick is surely correct, and all the EEGs and MRIs are doing is
telling us how obvious/easily-detectable-by-current-means the organic cause
is. In some future world, where our instruments have much, much finer
resolution, we will be able to find an "organic cause" for every behavior,
which means the whole process as currently performed is just silly.

2) However, if that talk of organic causes is just a useful shorthand of
some sort, the process might be perfectly reasonable, just poorly
specified.

3) At some point Bruce said that we were trying to determine whether the
person was capable of premeditation, and that seemed (to me) to create a
window for a perfectly reasonable process, while still acknowledging Nick's
point.

4)  IF we were interested in "can the person premeditate" and we had
separate research showing that certain types of obvious (with current
technology) EEG and MRI results were highly correlated with an inability to
sustain behavior-directed-towards-a-goal, then we could reasonable use EEG
and MRI results to abduct whether or not the person in question was capable
of premeditation.

5)  Of course, if we had a video of the person premeditating, none of the
brain scans would be necessary or relevant --- this would be an example of
the broader principle that, when asking questions about psychology,
behavioral evidence beats anatomical evidence. However, absent such direct
evidence, it is perfectly reasonable to look for known correlates of
behavioral patterns, including neuo-anatomical correlates.

6) Some weird things happen to our thinking if we forget that we are using
the anatomy to make inferences about behavior-patterns. The whole process
makes sense if the thing we are interested in is ability-to-premeditate,
and we are using the neuro-anatomy to guess at that, because that keeps us
clear that the neuro-anatomy is not itself premeditation or the lack
thereof. The whole process is incoherent if we think some mass killers kill
because of the way their brains are, but others mass killers kill and their
brains have nothing to do with it. THAT SAID, it can be a useful shorthand
to talk *as if* we are interested in the neuro-anatomy itself. The useful
shorthand is not only much quicker in a conversation or in writing, it also
adds a false sense of definitiveness to the scientific findings (which is
useful to the scientist), which in turn adds a false sense of
definitiveness to the legal proceedings (which is useful to the legal
system). Challenging the shorthand therefore feels like a challenge to the
basic functioning of science and the legal system that accepts such
science.


<echarles at american.edu>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20201004/f079ec7f/attachment.html>