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By Eddy Nahmias, PhD Eddy Nahmias is professor in the Philosophy Department and the Neuroscience Institute at  Georgia State University . He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board. On April 2, 2013 President Barack Obama announced the BRAIN Initiative , a 10-year, $3 billion research goal to map all of the neurons and connections in the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative is modeled on the Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced the entire DNA code of the human genome in 2003. Our brains, with 100 trillion neuronal connections, are immensely more complicated than our DNA, so the BRAIN Initiative has a much higher mountain to climb. But let’s suppose that, finally, during the next Clinton presidency, the BRAIN Initiative is completed…. that is, the presidency of Charlotte Clinton, Bill and Hilary’s grandchild. In fact, suppose that eventually neuroimaging technology advance...

When I told my friends I was helping to put together a conference on zombie ethics with the Emory Center for Ethics, I invariably received one of two responses: 1) That’s really cool! Where do I sign up? 2) Sorry, what? If you’re in category (1) and didn’t manage to make it to the conference, read on to find out what happened. If you’re closer to category (2), keep an open mind. There may be more going on with zombies than initially meets the eye. Anatomy of a Zombie Dr. Steven Schlozman ,  an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, delivered the first talk of the morning via Skype. Dr. Schlozman, a zombie fanatic who grew up reading zombie stories and watching movies like Dawn of the Dead , has speculated extensively on what a zombie brain might look like . First, Dr. Schlozman suggests, zombies likely suffer from an underactive frontal lobe that leads to impaired impulse control. Frontal lobe dysfunction might stem from an overactive amygdala, where high lev...

Famed evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has recently gained a lot of public attention for his views on free will. As he sees it, we don’t have it. (See here and here for popular press articles from him on the subject. See here , and here for blog posts on his personal blog in which he slan ... um, I mean, debates some of those who do not agree with him.) According to Coyne, free will, at least ‘free will’ as understood by non-scientists and non-philosophers (AKA “the folk”), requires the unconditional ability to do otherwise. The unconditional ability to do otherwise is the ability to do differently than one in fact did, even if everything up until the moment of doing was exactly the same . The ‘everything’ in that previous clause is meant to be taken literal. LITERALLY EVERYTHING. The unconditional ability to do otherwise requires the ability to do otherwise even if every single molecule in the universe was aligned exactly the same way, even if all your thoughts, desires, belie...