Brad Hudson wrote:That's possible. I don't know. I listened to a podcast interview of Robert Sapolsky recently. I was struck by one of the things he talked about. He described studies where the participants were given a test with the opportunity to cheat in some manner. They weren't told that cheating was an option or that cheating was part of the study. What they saw was that the people who cheated made heavy use of their pre-frontal cortex, while the honest subjects did not. His implication was that, as others have claimed, moral behavior is hardwired while immoral behavior requires conscious thought.
If that's true, I wonder how much the frontal cortex is involved in (1) becoming a fundamentalist and (2) becoming willing to kill other humans as a result. If it's not, appeals to logic and reason aren't going to be of much help. Knowing how the process works may help us address it.
I'm not sure how we get suicide bombers hooked up to fMRI's, but those are experimental details I'll leave to researchers.
That's pretty interesting. What would be a real curiosity is if the pre-frontal cortex lit up even if they believed they were doing good, or if it was a dead giveaway that they knew deep down it was wrong.