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By Arleen Salles, Kathinka Evers, and Michele Farisco Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . What is neuroethics? While there is by now a considerable bibliography devoted to examining the philosophical, scientific, ethical, social, and regulatory issues raised by neuroscientific research and related technological applications (and a growing number of people in the world claim to take part in the neuroethical debate), less has been said about how to interpret the field that carries out such examination. And yet, this calls for discussion, particularly considering that the default understanding of neuroethics is one that sees the field as just another type of applied ethics, and, in particular, one dominated by a Western bioethical paradigm. The now-classic interpretation of neuroethics as the “neuroscience of ethics” and the “ethics of neuroscience” covers more ground, but still fails to exhaust the field (1). As we have argued elsewhere, neuroethics is a complex field characterized by ...

Neuroessentialism is the belief that you , your mind, your identity, are essentially just your brain. It gets touted as an example of how science has triumphed, once again, over superstitions of the past - your soul hasn't died , it was just an illusion! Created by the brain. With memory, sensation, speech, and just about every other human attribute found to be located in one gyrus or another, it seems like there isn't anything left that could be outside of the brain. Francis Crick referred to this as the “astonishing hypothesis[1],” and while Stephen Pinker pointed out that for most neuroscientists this idea hardly warranted much astonishment[2], what might be more astonishing is how quickly the idea is bleeding out of the laboratory into popular media.  The basic philosophical foundations of this notion have been around for a long time (as mentioned on the [highly entertaining] podcast “ very bad wizards, ” we've known for a long time that when you remove the head, the mi...

Let me preface this by saying that Incomplete Nature is probably one of the most daring and original published scientific monographs I’ve ever read. Of course, it could also be one of the worst, it's actually impossible to tell. That said, I’ve had Terrence Deacon’s first book, The Symbolic Species , sitting on a shelf at my house for about five years now. I picked it up when I was a sophomore in college, at the second link of a five-year chain that went evolutionary biology → evolutionary psychology → cognitive neuroscience → philosophy of mind → consciousness → causality and information theory → oh-my-God-nothing-is-real. At the time I clearly wasn’t ready for the book, as I read about the first ten pages before putting it down. This was for two reasons. The first is that his books are long, dense, and convoluted, and his sentences tend to loop-the-loop back on themselves and self-cannibalize. This is certainly true for Incomplete Nature , which clocks in at over...