Ezra Klein wants to know “what happened to the the moral case for health-care reform?”
This year, however, it’s not just been the opponents of the policy who have relied on the “mellifluous language of the standard economic theory of markets.” It’s been the advocates of reform. Ask yourself what the administration’s one-line goal is on [...]
Archive for July, 2009
Health Care and Our Limited Moral Intuitions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ezra Klein, Health Care, Josh Greene, Moral Psychology on July 27, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Modeling Control Without Controlling the Model
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Blue Brain, Chung-Chuan Lo, Cognitive Control, Computational Modeling, Computational Neuroscience, Henry Markram, Jeffrey Schall, Neural Networks, Vanderbilt, Xiao-Jing Wang, Yale on July 27, 2009 | 3 Comments »
The great hope of Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project (recently discussed here and here) is that it will demonstrate both that consciousness and agency are emergent properties of an entirely mechanistic system like the brain and how that could possibly be true. Despite Markram’s headline-grabbing claim at TED last week that he’s 10 years away [...]
Angels and Demons
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Dishonesty, fMRI, fMRI Lie Detection, Honesty, Joe Paxton, Joshua Greene, Morality, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences on July 24, 2009 | 5 Comments »
What makes us honest? The process of natural selection that honed our minds is supposedly one of cutthroat competition. We’re quite obviously driven to succeed, but often we choose not to lie or steal or cheat even when we rationally expect no consequences. In the Freudian account, it’s the rational superego that restrains the selfish [...]
Follow-up On Mark Lynch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Mark Lynch on July 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
You might remember my post last week on Mark Lynch’s international relations analysis of the JayZ – The Game spat. Turns out Lynch got quite a bit of (deserved) attention for the piece. He summarizes some of the more interesting commentary and points towards a good interview here. I also can’t stop laughing at the [...]
We Choose the Brain?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Apollo, Blue Brain, Henry Markram, Kennedy, Moon Landing, Neuroscience on July 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
On the heels of of my post this morning speculating about whether neuroscientists could carry the torch of Apollo in the 21st century, Henry Markram of the Blue Brain project (see here for background information and an amazing video) apparently announced at the TED Global conference today that the creation of a full artificial brain [...]
Could Neuroscience Be the New Apollo?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Apollo, Apollo 11, Consciousness, Free Will, Moon Landing, NASA, Neuroscience, Paul Bloom, Possibly strained analogies, The Soul on July 22, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I’ve spent the past few days reveling in various NASA-related media in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s successful landing on the moon, which occurred yesterday. (Strongly recommended is the recent documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, as well as the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and also this [...]
Erratum
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Mistakes - I've made a few on July 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
If you follow dlPFC on RSS, you may have been confused by the previous post. As it turns out, I linked to the wrong study. Here’s the paper I was describing. Which is not to say that the Kennedy School paper I linked to, link here, is not worth reading. It definitely is. So, my [...]
The Behavioral Economics of Congress
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Behavioral Economics, Congress, Health Care, Loss Aversion, The Senate on July 16, 2009 | 1 Comment »
With health care reform seemingly running aground in the Senate, there has been some interesting discussion lately about the many institutional problems facing a genuinely progressive agenda, or even an earnest non-ideological attempt to address some of our absolutely serious problems. Most commentary has focused on the Senate and its (rather bizarre at times) institutional [...]
This Video is Incredible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Consciousness, Henry Markram, Journal of Neuroscience, Neocortical Column, Self-Control on July 15, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Seriously. I’m relatively familiar with the literature here, but seeing it in action is nevertheless pretty amazing.
It’s a short WSJ piece on the research of Henry Markram’s lab, where researchers have created a complete, biophysically accurate simulation of a neocortical column from the rat brain in silicon. The simulation exhibits the sort of independent coordinated [...]
Jay Z’s Geopolitical Brain
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Cognitive Control, dlPFC, Emotions, Evolution, Game Theory, International Relations, Iraq War, Jay-Z, Mark Lynch, Matt Yglesias, Reason, Strategy on July 15, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Matt Yglesias had a post yesterday quoting Mark Lynch’s amusing discussion of the feud between Jay-Z and The Game framed in international relations terms. At the end, Yglesias offers his thoughts:
One thing worth noting is that even when restraint can be identified as the best strategy, it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path. When [...]
