Roger,
Thanks for sending along the Science quote, which is an absolutely perfect target for a couple of my pet rages. See larding: Goal-directed human behaviors are driven by motives. [NST==>That sentence is all higgledy-piggledy. Notice that we could flip the words “goal-directed” “drive” and “motives” around without loss of meaning. Which means, alas, that the sentence has very little meaning whatsoever. <==nst] Motives are, however, purely mental constructs that are not directly observable. [NST==>Another knee-slapper. Granting to the author the notion that the word “drive” is equivalent to some notion of “cause”, we learn that behaviors are caused by purely mental constructs. How could anything be “purely” mental if it has behavioral consequences. <==nst] Here, we show that the brain’s functional network architecture captures information that predicts different motives behind the same altruistic act with high accuracy. In contrast, mere activity in these regions contains no information about motives. Empathy-based altruism is primarily characterized by a positive connectivity from the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to the anterior insula (AI), whereas reciprocity-based altruism additionally invokes strong positive connectivity from the AI to the ACC and even stronger positive connectivity from the AI to the ventral striatum. Moreover, predominantly selfish individuals show distinct functional architectures compared to altruists, and they only increase altruistic behavior in response to empathy inductions, but not reciprocity inductions. [NST==>I persist in not seeing the relevance of the physiological information to the question of the nature of consciousness or, if one prefers, the question of how it makes sense to talk about consciousness. I assume [from my vast store of ignorance] that computer folks would all agree that there is no necessary isomorphism between the function that a computer performs and the organization of the machine on which the performance is accomplished. I shouldn’t expect that Google Maps uses millions of teensy maps to compute my shortest distance to my goal. Why does telling me that this and that part of the brain lights up when we do this or that kind of thing tell us anything except what we already know – that the brain is intimately involved in behavior. What could possibly be the alternative? The disembodied soul? If these studies are to show that, “Yes, indeedy, the brain is deeply involved in co-ordinating relations between behavior and the environment (like goal-direction, for instance, then, I would have thought that that train had left the station long ago. <==nst] Evidently based on subject self reporting "with high accuracy". [NST==>I assume that if these logical errors are just an example of poor abstract writing, some FRIAM member will call me out for not reading the entire paper. I am ready with my mea-culpa’s. <==nst] -- rec – [NST==>Did you know that GE is coming to Boston Harbor. You will be ideally positioned, there in your boat. <==nst] [NST==>Nick<==nst]
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