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Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality Hardcover – March 20, 2011

4.2 out of 5 stars 38 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press (March 20, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 069113703X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691137032
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,005,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Not since I read Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong (which, although this puts me in the minority, I happened to have enjoyed), have I been witness to such a comprehensive and thorough debunking of what passes for mainstream science. Sadly for me, Professor Churchland managed to slay several of my favorite thinkers pet projects: Jonathan Haidt [The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom], Giacomo Rizzolatti [Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience], and Marco Iacoboni [Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others]. What's more, Professor Churchland excoriates the likes of Immanual Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Peter Singer, to name a handful. And she does all this with science and logic on her side. She states from the beginning that, "My aim here is to explain what is probably true about our social nature, and what that involves in terms of the neural platform for moral behavior. As will become plain, the platform is only the platform; it is not the whole story of human moral values.Read more ›
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Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality by Patricia S. Churchland

"Braintrust..." is the latest book from self proclaimed neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland, a fitting term for the accomplished author and philosopher. This book is about answering questions regarding moral values from a neuroscientist's point of view. Churchland uses a scientific sound approach to not only seek such answers but to tell us what we don't know about the brain and its relation with morality. This 288-page book is composed of the following eight chapters: 1. Introduction, 2. Brain-Based Values, 3. Caring and Caring For, 4. Cooperating and Trusting, 5. Networking: Genes, Brains, and Behavior, 6. Skills for a Social Life, 7. Not as a Rule, and 8. Religion and Morality.

Positives:
1. An accessible, well-written and well-researched book.
2. The Churchland name might as well be synonymous with neuroscience. Mrs. Churchland an accomplished philosopher herself is married to renowned neuroscientist Paul Churchland and has a son and daughter who are also neuroscientists. As a philosopher and with the aforementioned background, she has the best tools to write such wonderful books.
3. Great use of the most current scientific evidence and theories to answer the aforementioned profound questions. Many scientific studies spread across this book.
4. Great use of illustrations.
5. Professor Churchland is a skeptic's skeptic. What she does best is keeping science grounded to the facts. Scientists are human too and even they commit the fallacy of jumping to conclusions. Professor Churchland throughout the book states specifically when she feels that is the case and does so with compelling scientific evidence. By far the strongest suit of this book.
6.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
If you truly want to understand morality, you could not do better than to start with this book.

I've always had problems with philosophy. I read one school's literature, and it seems to make sense. Then I read the debunking of the first school by another school, and that makes sense too, although there always seems to be something that leaves me groping. I never realized before I read Dr. Churchland's book that what has been bothering me all along is that many previous approaches to philosophy haven't been grounded on any real understanding of how the brain actually works.

I've been especially fascinated over the years by whether there is an innate sense of human morality. I've found previous approaches to this issue to be unsatisfactory--based on simplistic, unrealistic experiments that didn't start from "first principals"--that is, how the brain is structured an organized. Dr. Churchland's careful explanation of the anatomy and chemistry of the brain, how that anatomy and chemistry might support moral issues, was marvelous science writing--simple, direct, and marvelously to the point.

Some of her points are particularly important, and worth noting here:

* The moral cases of the world are typically resolved by constraint-satisfaction. (pg 184)
* Unhitched from the neurobiology of sociality and social learning, conscience, as a metaphysical entity with moral knowledge, loses its footing.( pg 193)
* There is no moral heaven where platonic truths reside.(pg 181)
* Counting on rationality to underpin morality is mistaken. (pg 175)
* The claim that essentially all societies espouse the Golden Rule is misleading.
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