Monthly Archives: July 2007

For some time now philosophers has been dealing with the intersection of neuroscience and ethics. Even the more far-out economists of the world seem eager to jump on the band-wagon and declare the end of Ethics, as that would clear the way for their particular view of the world to become unchallengeable. It seems now that these economists will have to deal with neuroscience posing the same sorts of challenges to accepted doctrine in their field. George Lowenstein of Carnegie Mellon University has published, in Neuron, some interesting research that casts serious doubt on DU as a way to explain intertemporal choice. In Loewenstein’s MRI study, with Brian Knutson of Stanford University and Drazen Prelec of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he discovered new evidence that ontradicts conventional economic theory, which states that people make decisions based on immediate pleasure versus saving their buying power for some future pleasure. The subjects in the MRI study… Read more

    Nascent political movements tend to contain several different types of people, each with their own aims. It also seems that almost any moderately successful (in terms of popular knowledge of its existence) movement invariably develops these opposed factions whom all claim to be the true voice of the movement, and, in most cases, spend so much time fighting amongst themselves that none of the aims of any of the groups are ever achieved. For the purposes of my own thinking about these movements, I have broadly broken the groups into three factions, each of which is identifiable by their means. I have tentatively termed them the critics, the revolutionaries and the reformers. Critics These tend to come first in any movement, and may predate the common conception of a “movement” by decades or even centuries. The Critics tend to see themselves as philosophers, and are either viewed as they wish by the rest of the world, or if not, as harmless wackos. In any case, it is… Read more