Morality is modified in the lab | Hacker News Reader

Morality is modified in the lab

news.bbc.co.uk

26 pointsaeurielesn10 comments

"You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."

Where do people think that high level behavior comes from, if not the lower levels?

"You think of WoW as being a high-level program, but I replaced your CPU with the one from my phone and look, it doesn't work."

You make a great point. If morality is a high-level behavior, which is seems to be, then it should be fairly easy to disrupt. Just monkey with any of the several moving parts that combine to create the emergent property of 'morality', and the emergence shouldn't happen, at least not in the same way.

It's not astonishing, it's to be expected.

I don't think "morality" is equivalent to "processor".

In his example, morality is WoW, and the analogy is sound. By disrupting the low level activity, you prevent high level processes from emerging.

Try to degauss your cell phone, just to see what happens...

Mmm. The CPU is the whole brain, and WoW is the totality of human behavior; so a more correct analogy would be: "I disabled the arithmetic co-processor and look, this character behaves erratically -- while the rest of the game seems unaffected".

Original article (full text): http://www.pnas.org/content/107/15/6753.full

I would be very interested in this applied to psychophathic individuals since they apparently lack moral judgement.

I'm no longer keeping track of TMS research, but from what I know (up to date as of 1 year, minus the fog of not having slept last night):

The plasticity induced by rTMS is relatively short lived (10-60 minutes, usually), especially for high frequency stimulation (that potentiates the activity of the stimulated zone, which would perhaps be useful if we wanted to activate the TPJ of for psychopaths). To get maximal stability, you have keep people in a quiet room, because distractions / other activities tend to dissolve the effects of the stimulation.

You may get longer lasting results using a thêta burst paradigm.

All in all, TMS is mostly a research/diagnostic tool. TMS-based treatments are yet to be discovered (discounting irrelevant, anecdotal case reports).

Unlike a lot of articles reporting on science, this one doesn't make any gigantic claims. They note that morality can be manipulated in the lab, not that scientists have cured evil or that science has found a way to reprogram your mind.

Even better, they quote the scientist's ideas on potential next steps for this line of work and do a decent job of detailing the actual procedures used in the research.

There's a lot of crummy science reporting out there, so when a good job is done, it should be noticed. Good job, BBC.

Have a curious question. What is morality? I mean how do I explain that e.g. to a machine? I have no background in AI or psychology but taking this research.

Definition of morality, e.g. "concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct"

So if we have morality which is in one part the outcome of a situation what is the other part which makes up morality?

Morality = Outcome + X

What do you think?

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