"Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets"

By: Maria Odete Madeira

“Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets (...) By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.”

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/moral-control-0330.html

In the above quoted article, it is imperatively stated that “Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets” and that “By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.”.

Any living systems can be affected by electromagnetic fields. In what regards human organisms, of course that these are affected by electromagnetic fields in their cognition, of which the ethical judgment and the moral judgment are examples, this is not any Eureka moment.

Electromagnetic fields, a dog bite, an earthquake, hunger, the need to go to the toilet, common cold, a headache all of that affects an organism’s cognitive production, towards fundamental judgments. Anything that affects a body, affects the body’s cognitive functions. What's the surprise? Where’s the Eureka moment?

In an interconnected network a “disruption” of a local region of the network can have effects upon the whole system, but that does not legitimize a reduction of the system to that specific region, which is what is done in the research work that is reviewed in the article and reinforced by the review itself. This reduction is a scientific error.

What seems evident is that the people that have produced these experiments practice applied science, compromised by schemes of control, without considering the concepts and nature of the systems with which they are working.

Matters like the nature of human cognition, in proto-conscious and conscious aspects (reflection, reflexivity, reflexibility), towards judicative valorative judgments of survival, in situations of border with homeostatic processing, linked to mechanisms of risk evaluation for situational systemic self-references of rhythmic enactive intentionality, in abstract and concrete planes, articulated with the respective languages, none of this was considered in the research, nor in the article that reviewed it.

Other fundamental matters, linked to the nature of human cognition, such as the perceptive and affective porosity and the arbitriu, implicated in the systems of exchanges of matter, energy and information between an organism and the situational living web in which it is immersed, towards systemic effects of locality and nonlocality that are synthesized in any cognitive judgment, must be considered in any study that addresses human cognitive judgment, of which a moral judgment is an example. No human judgment can be reduced to black boxed input-output systems.

Conclusive statements like: “Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets”, “By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations(...)” and “(...) You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior (...) To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing (...)”, all of these statements are scientific nonsense, “intellectual impostures” of an applied science that intermixes a bad Cartesianism with a bad Behaviorism, contaminated by an illusion of control.

on the strange loop...

By: Maria Odete Madeira

A strange loop is a feedback circle, linked to the systemic identity, as self-computable rotative dispositional dynamics, in which the system folds upon itself, without leaving itself, maintaining the constituent and constitutive systemic integrity.

A strange loop is rotatively projective. The projective rotativity is assumed, in the notion of systemic identity, at the level of the ontological dynamics of projectivity, intrinsic to the systems, signalized at the level of the effectivenesses that act upon the effects, and are postulated at the level of the causes, as formative capabilities that act upon the preservation of the integrity of the systems in survival interfaces.

On Parson’s Quasi-Concrete Objects

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Abstract existents are object/figures of thought and of reason, they may have, or not, simultaneously, correlationable concrete existence/examples.

In relation to the concrete/abstract the term “quasi” does not apply.

The term “quasi” can be applied to the relation between the potency/act, in which, in the potency, the intensity towards the act can generate, in the propension/tendency, displaced in the horizon of possibility, a situation or process of latent state, in which, in epistemological and ontological terms, the usage of the term “quasi-concrete” could be adequate.

But, regarding abstract objects, the term “quasi-concrete” is not applicable.

On the logos of the things...

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The things have to be “listened” to, perceptioned, interpreted and understood in their rotative topoi. We have to see what is in the things and not what we want or wish to think about them.

The sun has its logos, the stars, and the planets, an ant, a stone, a spider... each has its own logos that explains it, as such, and that logos does not depend upon us human observers... it is its logos and its truth.

If we interest ourselves, if we want to know what things are, we have to make an effort to synchronize our rotative rhythms with the rotative rhythms of the things that we want to know, to make emerge a gravitic point of systemic synchronization in order to listen to them... perceive them... understand them.

On Truth...

By: Maria Odete Madeira

(Worked from Heidegger’s thinking)

If the discourse speaks the truth, which as a word («truth») that it is, it states, about the discourse, that it is true, because it speaks the truth. Truth?

What is, thus, understood by «truth»? This word «truth», elevated (?) and spent and worn out, that designates that which makes true something that is true, but what is «the true»?

It is said of something, that it is true if that something has an effective (actual) reality, thus, it could be said of the things that are true, that they are effective (in act), which leads one to state that the contrary of the true, that is, the false would be a non effective (in act) reality, however, it is the case that the things that are false, are also effective (actual), as realities of which it is said that are not true. Being effective (actual), therefore, characterizes both the true and the false (Plato, Parricide).

But if both (true and false) are effective, what can distinguish the true from the false? The character of authenticity? The true will be the authentic and the false the inauthentic. This authentic resends towards something anticipated and constantly considered as authentic of a reality and that is in conformity with that same reality.

Thus, of a statement, it is said to be true when that which it states is in conformity with the thing that is stated in it, and about which the statement itself is. What is in conformity is what agrees, then, being true and truth mean (in the statement) the agreement of something with what was previously thought about it and the conformity of the thing with that which is intended in the statement.

There is, thus, a double character in the concordance such that the truth is the resembling of the thing to the knowledge (veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus) and, also, such that the truth is the resembling of the knowledge to the thing (veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem). The truth, thus conceived, presupposes the truth of the thing in the statement and always means a “to conform to”…, concordance, compatibilized order, synchronized order… relations, proportions… systems…

Unus – Unitas – Religare: Autonomy

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Unus is the Latin term for unique, indivisible, irrepeatable. It is a name to designate an individuated form, any form,that, as such, possesses an identity that is in conformity with an idea (eidos) of unity, from the Latin unitas/atis, defined as a systemically available property to be exemplified by any identity, be that identity: ente, entity, process, situation, relation, or simply thing (res).

The unity is, in itself, described by its internal cohesion, consistency and coherence. All that is unus, or unique, participates from, or has unity, because to have unity is to be unique, irrepeatable. Each ente, or individuated thing (res) is unus, and, thus, unique: ens et unum convertuntur; because each thing, or ente, possesses an identity that relinks (religare) it and determines it in itself and by itself, in what is its autonomy: reference to itself, as rotative self-position of itself.

... the Being is event... the logos-there...

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Dasein was the term that Wolff used in order to translate the Latin term exsistentia, from the verb exsistere, that etymologically denotes origin. In Heidegger, the notion of existence, as dasein, lost the theoretical sense, present in Husserl, as object of thought.

For Heidegger, there was no existence outside the existing things and all existing things (ek-sistence) were rooted in the physis as beings, projectively as beings-towards- death, coexisting in a complex system of references to a future existentially anticipated.

For Heidegger, each entity is one of the modes of the Being, and, each entity, is also its difference, each entity is the being-there (Dasein) referring to itself (ek-sistence) .

The truth of the Being (aletheia) belongs to the Being itself..., to be physis is aletheia. The Being gives itself (es gibt) as Being and Time and, thus, as something that has given itself, the Being is event (Ereignis), the logos-there...