Most Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong. According to medieval medicine, laziness is caused by a build-up of phlegm in the body. The reason? Phlegm is a viscous substance. Its oozing motion is analogous to a sluggish disposition. The phlegm theory has more problems than just a few factual errors. In the modern age we can chuckle over medieval naiveté, but we often suffer from similar conceptual confusions.
One corner of science where phlegm theories proliferate is the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The oscillation theory of consciousness became popular in neuroscience in the 1990s and still has its adherents. Neuronal oscillations probably do play an important role in the flow of information in the brain, although the exact role is debated. Most people have a set of intuitions about consciousness. But the theory provides no mechanism that connects neuronal oscillations in the brain to a person being able to say, “Hey, I have a conscious experience!”
Again, it flatters intuition. Jared Diamond: It’s irrational to be religious. Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion.
For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky.
The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever. No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational. American Humanist Association. Welcome - The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Richard Garner – Beyond Morality. The Lawyer's Amoral Ethical Role: A Defense, a Problem, and Some Possibilities by Stephen Pepper. University of Denver College of Law1986 American Bar Foundation Research Journal, pp. 613-635, 1986 Abstract: This essay presents a moral justification for the current generally accepted amoral ethical role of the lawyer.
The justification is premised primarily upon the values of individual autonomy, equality, and diversity. Based upon these values, the author argues that the amoral role is the correct moral stance for the lawyer as a professional, is a "good" role. The essay then responds to two of the most frequent criticisms of that moral stance: the first based upon economic inequality and the fact that lawyers' services must be purchased; the second based upon the absence of the "adversary system" context for most lawyer work. Number of Pages in PDF File: 25 Accepted Paper Series Suggested Citation Pepper, Stephen, The Lawyer's Amoral Ethical Role: A Defense, a Problem, and Some Possibilities (1986). Atheism as Lacking a Moral Foundation. On the issue of reclaiming moral language - the sixth component of Sean Faircloth's new political strategy for atheists - atheists should learn to react to the claims that they lack a moral foundation the way Jews react to the phrase "Christ killers.
" We react as if it is a mere intellectual error - requiring a rebuttal in terms of reason and evidence. However, it is more than that. Like the term "Christ killers" it is politically and socially useful. It serves to marginalize a group of people - to promote religious animosity and to brand those who use this claim as "morally superior" to the target group.
When people make certain mistakes, we have reason to ask why they make those mistakes and not some other. Religion is mostly make-believe. They could have adopted a fiction in which the universe contains certain moral truths built into it by God, but which are available to everybody.