Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote discusses the conflict between scientific understanding of the brain and traditional ideas about free will and morality.
Paul Bloom's quote highlights a significant philosophical debate concerning the nature of consciousness and moral responsibility in light of scientific discoveries about the brain. If the brain is understood as a complex system of components rather than a singular entity, this challenges our conventional beliefs about character, praise, blame, and the existence of free will, inviting a reevaluation of how we view human behavior and morality.
Themes
ScienceConsciousnessMoral AgencyFree WillPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the implications of neuroscience on morality.
More from Paul Bloom
All quotes →Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
Paul BloomRead
If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
Paul BloomRead
I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
Paul BloomRead
We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
Paul BloomRead
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
Paul BloomRead
Similar quotes
The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.
Robert KennedyRead
Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.
Voltairine De CleyreRead
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
John Maynard KeynesRead
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
Thomas MannRead
We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!
Samuel BeckettRead
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,_x000D_ _x000D_ The seasons' difference, as the icy fang_x000D_ _x000D_ And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,_x000D_ _x000D_ Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,_x000D_ _x000D_ Even till I shrink with cold, I smile.
William ShakespeareRead