Skybird
03-30-10, 03:37 AM
Scientists show that moral judgement of action can be manipulated not by seletive information inpout - but external physical factors such as magnetic fields. Imagining a technology tailored to make people morally accepting bad action, started to frighten me the more I thought about it.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/11/0914826107
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/32/32356/1.html
The English text ist just the Abstract. The German describes the experimental setting:
The subject is shown the following scene: two persons stand at a coffee autmatic machine, and beside it is a dispenser with a shield on it, "poison". The one person prepares a coffee, then pouts some "poison" form the dispenser into it, and then offers it to the other. The other person accepts it, drinks it, and nothing happens.
Under the influence of magentic fields creating low electric power flux in certain brain areals (that have inhibitory or activating effects there), the subject tends to morally judge the scene exclusively by the outcome: nothing happened. In this setting, the subject rates the action of the one person to intentionally offer the other a poisened coffee as morally fine.
"Teaching" persons tolerance for morally wrong actions. That is pure horror. We have seen morally wrong action as collective "duty" in the past, but it needed intellectual manipulation and argument that morally right argument could engage with. But this here is much more hopeless and any resistance to it is doomed to be in vain. Any counter-effort would even be prevented to ever come into existence.
I hope they never manage to create such fields outside the laboratory and on huge scale. Unfortunately I am also convinced that certain circles in the military, and others, try to investigate the possibilities to form such effects on communal public level nevertheless. 20 or 15 years ago, the idea of ELF was a popular thing amongst conspiration theorists, mixing both scientific and historic fact with science fiction. There the behavior of the public should have been manipulated by transmitting certain extremely low frequencies nationwide, like radio broadcasting, to influence the nervous system.
This is an experimental finding that I find as remarkable as the results shown earlier in the past decade that intensity and object of religious belief could not be a question of choice or education or cultural context, but that the desire to believe into things like this may have genetically encoded causes: you are not free to believe or not to believe into religious stuff, but you have no choice to do so. If this is true, why this is so, is another question. Since the univesity of Minnesota has started to publish major statements and results on this matter in the past decade (after 25 years of researching it), two camps occasionally clash with each other, the one saying that God(s) put this genetic control method into our design to make sure we remain to be his/theirs obediently believing creatures (which raises conflict-heavy contradictions with parts of the Christian message itself), the other camp saying that this mechanism may have been formed up to give needed "maintenance" to the complexity of human mind - that can become sick, desperate and suicidal eventually if thinking to live a meaningless live, so a meaning is created to focus that mind again, to keep it healthy, even if the object of that focus is just an illusion the subject just is not aware of. (Maybe comapring it to the need of sleep and dreaming, which both are not factors for physical by psychological "maintenance" - for relaxing your muscles alone, just resting would be enough). We have interesting results from the holocaust research - those prisoners in the death camps that still were capable to see any kind of meaning in their life, no matter what, had much higher chances to survive and to avoid life-threatening diseases, than those prisoners getting so desparate that they lost any belief that there could be any such meaning to their suffering.
A consensus on morals ise an indispensable precondition for a functioning society so that it does not fall apart at the first opportunity. And believing in a meaning may be as indispensable a need for individuals to maintain mental sanity. But both morals and religion can be manipulated, can pervert - and still can serve the job they are there for - collective integrity and individual sanity - even if their objects are manipulated, artifical, or just "changed".
That leads to interesting, sometimes frightening conclusions.
There is no total freedom, and maybe we just overestimate the reality of this thing we call "free will". Fact is we depend on a very fragile balance of many factors to maintain our existence, we depend on many external factors we are not even aware of - and it is easy to threaten us, or to manipulate us without us even realising it.
Strange thing this life is, isn't it.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/11/0914826107
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/32/32356/1.html
The English text ist just the Abstract. The German describes the experimental setting:
The subject is shown the following scene: two persons stand at a coffee autmatic machine, and beside it is a dispenser with a shield on it, "poison". The one person prepares a coffee, then pouts some "poison" form the dispenser into it, and then offers it to the other. The other person accepts it, drinks it, and nothing happens.
Under the influence of magentic fields creating low electric power flux in certain brain areals (that have inhibitory or activating effects there), the subject tends to morally judge the scene exclusively by the outcome: nothing happened. In this setting, the subject rates the action of the one person to intentionally offer the other a poisened coffee as morally fine.
"Teaching" persons tolerance for morally wrong actions. That is pure horror. We have seen morally wrong action as collective "duty" in the past, but it needed intellectual manipulation and argument that morally right argument could engage with. But this here is much more hopeless and any resistance to it is doomed to be in vain. Any counter-effort would even be prevented to ever come into existence.
I hope they never manage to create such fields outside the laboratory and on huge scale. Unfortunately I am also convinced that certain circles in the military, and others, try to investigate the possibilities to form such effects on communal public level nevertheless. 20 or 15 years ago, the idea of ELF was a popular thing amongst conspiration theorists, mixing both scientific and historic fact with science fiction. There the behavior of the public should have been manipulated by transmitting certain extremely low frequencies nationwide, like radio broadcasting, to influence the nervous system.
This is an experimental finding that I find as remarkable as the results shown earlier in the past decade that intensity and object of religious belief could not be a question of choice or education or cultural context, but that the desire to believe into things like this may have genetically encoded causes: you are not free to believe or not to believe into religious stuff, but you have no choice to do so. If this is true, why this is so, is another question. Since the univesity of Minnesota has started to publish major statements and results on this matter in the past decade (after 25 years of researching it), two camps occasionally clash with each other, the one saying that God(s) put this genetic control method into our design to make sure we remain to be his/theirs obediently believing creatures (which raises conflict-heavy contradictions with parts of the Christian message itself), the other camp saying that this mechanism may have been formed up to give needed "maintenance" to the complexity of human mind - that can become sick, desperate and suicidal eventually if thinking to live a meaningless live, so a meaning is created to focus that mind again, to keep it healthy, even if the object of that focus is just an illusion the subject just is not aware of. (Maybe comapring it to the need of sleep and dreaming, which both are not factors for physical by psychological "maintenance" - for relaxing your muscles alone, just resting would be enough). We have interesting results from the holocaust research - those prisoners in the death camps that still were capable to see any kind of meaning in their life, no matter what, had much higher chances to survive and to avoid life-threatening diseases, than those prisoners getting so desparate that they lost any belief that there could be any such meaning to their suffering.
A consensus on morals ise an indispensable precondition for a functioning society so that it does not fall apart at the first opportunity. And believing in a meaning may be as indispensable a need for individuals to maintain mental sanity. But both morals and religion can be manipulated, can pervert - and still can serve the job they are there for - collective integrity and individual sanity - even if their objects are manipulated, artifical, or just "changed".
That leads to interesting, sometimes frightening conclusions.
There is no total freedom, and maybe we just overestimate the reality of this thing we call "free will". Fact is we depend on a very fragile balance of many factors to maintain our existence, we depend on many external factors we are not even aware of - and it is easy to threaten us, or to manipulate us without us even realising it.
Strange thing this life is, isn't it.