Reinventing Morality
page 3
The Moral Hardware
In keeping with our computer–brain
analogy, some aspects of the moral decision-making process are fixed;
namely, the platform on which this process occurs. You might call this
the hardware, the physical brain itself. We all process moral decisions
based on different assumptions or beliefs, but the process happens in
the same place for each of us, an area in the front of the brain called
the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is where our emotional
experiences — religious, traumatic, joyous — connect with our
higher-level social decision making to give us a sense of good or bad.
So now that science has found the region
involved in moral decisions, how long before some Silicon Valley
start-up gives us a machine to read good or ill intentions, a veritable
evil detector?
Not anytime in the foreseeable future.
The human brain is an object of unfathomable complexity. To imagine that
it might suddenly be rendered as transparent and simple as the items in
an Excel spreadsheet is to commit hubris. This is why David Poeppel of
the University of Maryland likes to keep expectations realistic. He
studies language in the brain. Just as Hauser is focused on the language
of morality, Poeppel is focused on how vibrations in the ear become
abstractions. It’s next to impossible, he says, to see how a brain
formulates big abstractions, like Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government. He hopes one day to understand the neural processing of
words like dog or cat.
Poeppel’s current work involves
magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that measures the
brain’s electrical signals in real time. He was kind enough to invite
THE FUTURIST to watch some experimentation. We found him in a lab with
some of his brightest doctoral students, several gallons of liquid
nitrogen, a $4 million MEG machine, and a girl named Elizabeth — who was
having her brain activity, her inner-most thoughts, displayed on a big
bank of monitors.
It looked like squiggles.
“What we’re looking at are the electrical
signals her brain is giving off as she responds to certain stimuli,”
Poeppel told me. In the case of Elizabeth, the stimuli were blips on a
monitor and ping noises. The spikes and squiggles on the graph indicated
that she was “seeing” the blips, without her having to make any other
signal.
Poeppel doesn’t believe we’ll ever be
able to hook people to a machine and get a complete transcript of their
thinking. “We aren’t capable of that kind of granularity,” he says. But
what his — and his students’ — experiments with MEG do show is the brain
reacting to stimuli in real time, which can later reveal which parts of
the brain react to which stimuli and how much electricity those regions
throw off.
The way the brain reads little blips may
not seem to be correlated with morality, but it is. Returning to the
brain computer analogy, Poeppel says that the moral rules we follow, the
impulses that tell us when to push the button and divert the trolley and
when not to, are set in a sort of default position when we’re born, just
like the default settings on your PC. “Those are constant, immutable.
They form the basis of morality. And then the switches are set to
particular values as a function of experience. There’s a close
interaction between the universality (meaning the brain hardware) and
cultural specificity (the software).”
One day, MEG research, trolley surveys,
and other aspects of moral science will reveal the key aspects of that
correlation.
Amazingly, even though neuroscience is
still in its infancy, it’s already yielding insights into moral issues,
such as race bias. According to Poeppel, studies have shown that “people
make decisions that reflect race biases even when they’re aware of what
they’re doing.” Race bias is a reaction that rises from lived
experience. What MEG, fMRI, and other neuro-imaging techniques give us
is a picture for how those experiences change the physical brain and how
the physical brain recreates, reimagines, recomputes them all the time.
“Does this reflect very deeply imbedded
mechanisms of decision making? If you’re aware of it, can you neutralize
it, can you override it and reeducate the system? Of course you can. The
brain is plastic. It changes all the time. That’s what learning is. But
we still don’t have a real explanatory theory for how that works.” He
adds, “It’s an area where we will see progress in the years ahead.”
In terms of mysteries of morality, that
progress will likely take the form of more questions than answers.
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