Can you choose ...

... not to read this? Does evil exist? Neuroscientists say no. - Slate Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... correlation doesn't always equal causation: We may know the 13 regions that light up on an fMRI when we feel "empathy" (or fail to light up when we choose evil) but that doesn't explain whether this lit-up state indicates they are causing empathy or just reflecting it.

I am not usually given to quoting myself, but some things I said in a review of Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of seem pertinent:

[Barnes] seems to have swallowed hook, line and sinker what is perhaps best described as mechanistic determinism: “far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off.”

Later on he cites — if not with approval, certainly without demurral — a “specialist in consciousness” who explained over the radio “how there is no centre to the brain—no location of self—either physically or computationally; that our notion of a soul or spirit must be replaced by the notion of a ‘distributed neuronal process.’ ” In other words, the specialist declared, “these words coming out of this mouth at this moment, are not emanating from a little me in here, they are emanating from the entire universe just doing its stuff.”

So “I” don’t really exist, and neither do “you,” dear reader. Nor does “Julian Barnes.” Each of “us” is but the end-point of a chain of causation, just one damn thing after another until one or another of “us” pops up. “We’re” happenings, man!

This means, of course, that one can only compare the output of one chain of causation with that of another. It certainly cannot be said that one output is correct and another isn’t. Both simply are.

So the end-point of the chain of causation that I happen to be couldn’t help “thinking” that looking for a self-center in the brain is a bit like looking for a larynx in the telephone receiver. And what about that “plait of genetic material”? Barnes’ chain of causation evidently forces him to accept the view that Richard Dawkins’ chain of causation forces Dawkins to hold, that we are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

But my chain of causation prompts me to wonder why we should give pride of place to genes. They’re pretty far along in the chain of causation themselves and are every bit as much robot vehicles as “we” are, one more way station on that ever-lengthening sequence of causes that is “the entire universe doing its stuff.” All of which seems to “me” to get “us” — like Mr. Toad — “nowhere in particular.”