PLATO: I am grateful.
AGATHA: It’s such an honor to have you here. It’s the least that we can do to let you go home with something—aside from the little bit of money that I told you about that you could win, based on how you do in one of the tasks we’ll be asking you to perform.
PLATO: The task that has me decide whether to bet small sums on various repeating patterns, inferring from the feedback whether betting on particular patterns allows me to lose a little money, win a little money, lose a lot of money, win a lot of money, or it makes no difference.
AGATHA, smiling: Exactly. I hope you don’t feel any of this is beneath you. I’m hoping you’ll find it interesting.
PLATO: I am certain I will. I have wanted to have my brain scanned since I first learned about the process on the Internet. In fact, I do not know if this is inappropriate for me to ask.
SHOKET: As I said, feel free to ask me any question.
PLATO: I was wondering if I might be permitted to see an image of my own brain. Is that possible?
SHOKET: No, I’m afraid not. We aren’t doctors, you understand. If you’ve got something wrong with your brain, or you’re worried that you do, we’re not the right people to consult. A lot of people don’t know the difference between neuroscientists, which is what we are, and neurologists, who are medical doctors, which is what we are not.
PLATO: I understand. It was an inappropriate request, and I apologize.
SHOKET: If we let people go off with images of their brain and it turns out they’ve got a tumor or a swollen artery that they think we should have told them about, next thing we know they’ll come back lawyered up.
AGATHA, hurriedly: But as far as being in the brain scanner is concerned, there’s nothing at all to be nervous about. Some people even find it relaxing in there. I do!
PLATO: So you yourself have volunteered as a test subject?
AGATHA: Often. And I entirely understand your wanting to see your own brain. I don’t quite know why, but I feel a little thrill whenever I see an image of my brain. Look, there’s my medulla oblongata and my thalamus and my pons. There’s my amygdala at the tip of my hippocampus right where it’s supposed to be. It looks exactly like any other brain, just like the drawings in the textbooks. I mean, it had better! But somehow it’s not like seeing your lungs or appendix. It’s weirdly gratifying.
PLATO, softly: Yes, so I had imagined it must be. One’s own brain peering at an image of one’s own brain, thinking thoughts prompted by seeing the image of the brain thinking thoughts one now isn’t thinking but remembering.
Shoket, trying to catch Agatha’s eye, laughs particularly loudly.
AGATHA: Anyway, given how you feel, I think you might hopefully get a thrill just knowing that your brain is being seen in action. We’ll be right in the room outside, with a window looking into the imaging room, and even though you’ll be out of our sight while you’re in there, you’ll be able to communicate with us the whole time by way of the intercom system. Also you’ll be holding a panic button just in case anything makes you uncomfortable. The slightest bit of anxiety or unpleasantness, physical or otherwise, you just press the button, and we’ll be there in seconds. The only thing that people sometimes complain about is the loud jackhammer-like noise. We’ll provide you with earplugs to help with that. But it also helps to expect these noises and realize that the contraption isn’t about to collapse on top of you!
PLATO: Might I ask what causes the noises?
AGATHA: Dr. Shoket can best answer that.
SHOKET: The noises are the result of the Lorentz forces in the gradient coils caused by the rapidly switching current in the static field. Do you understand?
PLATO: Not entirely.
SHOKET, smiling: I’ll put it in simple terms. We are going to slide you into a mechanism that is basically a very strong magnet. It will give us data about which parts of your brain are activated as you perform the tasks we’ll ask you to do. It will do this by showing us where the oxygenated blood is. When different parts of your brain are activated, they need oxygen, and this oxygen is carried by hemoglobin. When hemoglobin is deoxygenated, it can be magnetized, and when it’s rich in oxygen it can’t, and this is because hemoglobin contains iron, which is a metal. The hydrogen atoms in the water molecules in your blood, which all line up in the same direction in the strong magnetic field, are then perturbed with a strong radio pulse. As they wobble back into alignment, they give off tiny electromagnetic waves, which differ depending on whether the water molecule was next to an oxygenated or a deoxygenated hemoglobin molecule. The scanner detects those waves and reconstructs where in the brain the oxygenated hemoglobin molecules were concentrated.
PLATO: So by tracking the changes in the blood you can get a dynamic picture of the brain in real time as it functions?
SHOKET: That’s just about right.
PLATO: Only it’s not exactly in real time, since the changes in blood flow are much slower than the changes in activity in the brain itself. So when you look at the signal, you’re looking at the level of activity averaged over two seconds. Since cognitive processes take place on the order of hundredths of a second, two seconds is a significant amount of blurring.
SHOKET, visibly startled: You seem to understand something of the science.
PLATO: I try. Your science interests me very much. The papers that have come out of this laboratory touch on problems that concern me.
SHOKET: You’ve read my papers?
PLATO: I read first “My Amygdala Made Me Do It: How Neuroscience Eliminates Right and Wrong.” Then I read “There’s Nobody Home: How Neuroscience Eliminates the Self.”
SHOKET: Those are two of my best.
PLATO: I read them both with great interest. But in each paper, I felt that there was something essential that I was missing. I could not quite follow how you got from your data to the philosophical conclusions you drew.
SHOKET: A writer can only write. He can’t make a reader understand what’s written.
PLATO: This is very true. I have often reflected on the way in which writings always fail both the writer and the reader. Writings give the appearance of being intelligent, but if you question them with the intention of learning something about what they’re saying, they always just continue saying the same thing. Every argument, once it’s in writing, is bandied about everywhere, equally among those who understand and those who have no business having it in their hands (Phaedrus 275d).
SHOKET: It’s funny that you should say that. When my collected papers were published as a book, they got a moron to review it in a major newspaper. This was a person who had no business even reading my book. He didn’t understand anything I was saying. He wasn’t even a real scientist.
PLATO: A piece of writing doesn’t know to whom it ought to speak and to whom not. When it’s ill treated and unfairly abused, it always needs its father to help it, since it isn’t able to defend itself by itself (ibid.).
SHOKET: You’re right about that also. And then it’s considered bad form if an author protests a review that was written by an imbecile who had no business even reading his book. The author is just supposed to passively take it, and let the idiot get the last word.
PLATO: Yes, the writing needs its father. Which is why I have come to you, the father, to help me understand what I am missing.
SHOKET: See, that’s honest. That’s the way it ought to be. You’re not a scientist so you can’t follow everything I’m saying, but you acknowledge my expertise. If people recognized the expertise of the expert, there’d be far fewer problems in the world.
PLATO: I agree.
AGATHA: But Plato is the expert in philosophy. So perhaps the relevant expertise is his?
SHOKET: But the data I presented were scientific, not philosophical. “Philosophical data” is as oxymoronic as “military intelligence” or “airline food.” Laughs.
AGATHA: But “philosophical conclusions” isn’t an oxymoron, and the conclusions you drew were phil
osophical. The inference is mixed: one half lies in scientific expertise, the other half in philosophical expertise.
SHOKET, laughing: That sounds like something they teach you to say over at the Cognitive Science Center. I’m not sure that I even grasp the meaning of that phrase “philosophical expertise.” It’s not exactly an oxymoron, the way “philosophical data” is, but I still don’t get it.
PLATO: I do.
SHOKET: Well, I suppose you’d have to claim that you do. How else could you justify yourself?
PLATO: True.
SHOKET: I’ll tell you the way I see it, and then you can tell me where you, as the philosophical expert in the room, disagree. Philosophers hold down the fort until the cavalry, who are the scientists, arrive. That’s a useful and maybe even heroic thing to do, to hold down the fort, but it’s only once the cavalry gets there that anything gets done. Once the scientists arrive then the work begins. Because before that, let’s face it, it was all bullshit. I hope you’re not offended by my using that word?
PLATO: Bullshit? It is a useful philosophical term. I had a friend who would have loved it.
SHOKET: It’s such a useful philosophical term that you might as well make it synonymous with philosophy, which suggests another metaphor. Science is like a sewage treatment plant. Scientists take the philosophical bullshit and reprocess it into knowledge.
PLATO: That metaphor presents not quite as heroic an image of philosophers as your previous one.
SHOKET: Well, let’s face it. You philosophers used to have authority over a lot of questions, because none of the answers were remotely within sight. So if a person had a question, he went to his local philosopher. Do we have souls, they asked him, and if we do how do they interact with our bodies? What’s the source of morality, they asked him, and how do we know whether the version we have is the right one? And what about beauty? Is it in the eye of the beholder or is it something really out there? And what are meanings? Are they out there, too, and how do they attach themselves to words? Oh, and while you’re at it, could you tell us whether our lives have any meaning, and if so, how we can get us some? I bet people have even asked you these questions.
PLATO: They have.
SHOKET: And I bet you struggled to give them answers.
PLATO: I did. I do.
SHOKET: Of course you did. Nobody had the data you needed to answer the questions. Nobody had the technology to generate the data. So the default was to go to the person who could talk up a storm, who didn’t require anything vaguely resembling evidence to talk his way into a fine-sounding conclusion, even though the philosopher a few villages over was talking up a storm in support of an altogether different conclusion.
PLATO: And now you have secured the evidence that will put an end to the talk-storms of philosophy.
SHOKET: Well, no, not yet, not all the evidence for all the questions, but we’re on our way. We’re so close that it’s a foregone conclusion we’ll get there, as long as enough smart people keep going into neuroscience and the funding continues. But the trend is clear. You can see it emerging over the centuries, accelerating these last few decades, especially with the advancement of brain science.
PLATO: So it is you brain scientists who are most responsible for forcing my early retirement.
SHOKET, smiling: Considering your age, I’d hardly call it early. Nobody is going to call you a slacker if, after 2,400 years, you just call it a day. But to answer your question, it’s not just the brain sciences. You’ve got physics and cosmology closing in on the age-old problem of why there’s something rather than nothing—that’s one you philosophers, not to speak of theologians, have been chewing over for a while. With we neuroscientists explaining consciousness, free will, and morality, what’s left for the philosophers to ponder?
PLATO: Perhaps self-deception?
SHOKET: We call it confabulation, and we’ve got that covered, too. We’ve known how confabulation works ever since the sixties, from experiments with split-brain patients. Patients with epilepsy were treated with surgery that severed their corpus callosum, the bundle of neural fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The surgery prevents the electrical firestorm that is epilepsy from reverberating throughout the whole, and it was, and still is, a treatment of last resort. But it proved a goldmine for neuroscience. We already knew that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and the right hemisphere controls the left, and we already knew that the left hemisphere controls language. What the splits taught us is that the so-called rational part of the brain that controls language is actually an expert at confabulation—making up stories that are plausible but wrong. When the right hemisphere is shown images that the left hemisphere can’t see and it provokes behavior in response to those images, then the left side, even though it has no idea of what has provoked the behavior, is never at a loss for words in “explaining” why he just did what he did. Show the right side dirty girly pictures and the left side will confabulate in all sincerity a pseudo-explanation for all the blushing and the giggling—how hot the testing room is, and how taking tests makes him nervous, and how hilarious he finds it that scientists could make a living from testing the likes of him. That’s confabulation. That’s what serves as “explanation” in the absence of data.
PLATO: So not only can you explain self-deception, you can explain the self-deception of all who try to offer explanations that aren’t scientific.
SHOKET: You hit it on the head. I bet you’re wishing right now that you’d run into me about 2,400-odd years sooner. I could have saved you a lot of wasted effort.
PLATO: You didn’t have any of your wonderful science back then.
SHOKET: That’s true. Be glad that you’ve lived to see it.
PLATO: I am. But even had you had the science back then, you wouldn’t have turned me away from the life I’ve chosen, from the questions that have shaped it. I wouldn’t have wanted to live my life in any other way.
SHOKET: That’s nice, but I’ve scanned the brains of felons who would say exactly the same thing. The rush of dopamine they get when they contemplate certain pleasurable possibilities means they can’t even consider living their lives in any other way.
PLATO: Oh, I can assure you I have always been able to consider living my life in other ways. When I said I would not have wanted to live another life, I did not mean I could not imagine other lives for myself, or give them serious consideration. It was a conscious decision and was not at all like the dopamine-driven brains of which you just spoke. I could give you my reasons for my decision, and, though my reasons may not persuade you to make a similar decision, they ought to allow you to understand why I chose as I did.
SHOKET: You seem to be claiming some sort of free will. I hope you’re not invoking a mysterious non-physical soul, the ghost in the machine. I thought even philosophers had gotten the memo that the ghost has given up the ghost. Laughs.
PLATO, smiling: I am more than willing—whether freely or not—to concede that all of these processes of thought are brain processes. It is my brain that can erect a mental model of the future and think how things will change in that model in response to my doing one thing as opposed to another. And it is my brain that, working out the consequences of possible actions in my mental model, makes its decision. Call it free or not, but this process is very different from the mesolimbic dopaminergic processes that bypass decision-making.
AGATHA, to Plato: It’s just like the image of the two-horsed charioteer you use to represent the human psyche. I’ve often thought how much Dr. Shoket’s research vindicates your metaphor. Neuroscientists metaphorically refer to the prefrontal cortex as the brain’s executive system, which corresponds to what you called the charioteer. The mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway corresponds to the deaf and bloodshot horse, who barely responds to a combination of whip and goad. And when you describe how the “bad horse” pulls in the direction of temptation, how it takes the bit in its mouth so that the charioteer has to re
sist powerfully, well, that resistance is what we’re trying to catch on our brain scans as we ask subjects to imagine various scenarios and how they’d react. What we’re finding is that there are some individuals whose mesolimbic horse pulls so hard that the prefrontal charioteer doesn’t even exert itself. It’s as if the charioteer just drops the reins and lets the bad horse go at it. But that describes only one segment of the population, and we know where to find them, often in maximum-security prisons.
PLATO: This raises the question of whether these driverless chariots can be held morally accountable. What underlies moral accountability is the capacities of the charioteer. There is the capacity to envision the future, and the capacity to deliberate over possible outcomes of actions, and the capacity to assign values to various outcomes, and the capacity to put judgments into action. I can see the argument for absolving of moral accountability those whose brain abnormalities preclude the charioteer from exercising its capacities. Their malfunctioning neurophysiology makes it impossible for deliberation to take place at all. And since it is the deliberating self that must be held accountable I would not hold these unfortunate people accountable. They should be regarded as ill and not evil (Timaeus 86c–e). But I cannot understand extending this absolution to those with functioning charioteers, as you argued in your paper “My Amygdala Made Me Do It.” Here was a gap between your data and your conclusions that I could not follow.
AGATHA: And we even know where some of the kind of thinking that you’re talking about is located. It’s in the default mode network, which includes parts of the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe, and we use it to envision the future.
SHOKET: Yes, and we also use the default mode network for other things, like fantasizing and daydreaming, which sounds more like what you’re describing to me. Because the story you just told about how we come to our decisions? It doesn’t happen that way. It’s a fantasy or daydream, that nice deliberate decision-making that you described. That’s how it may seem to you when you introspect, but that’s just part of the whole business of confabulation. We’ve known for decades that, at the point at which you seem to be deciding on some course of action, the neural machinery leading to your action has long been chugging away. Your sense of agonizing over your decisions and then putting them into play is an elaborate ruse that your neural networks are playing on you, a story to tell both to yourself and to others as to why you do what you do in the absence of any access to the real causal mechanism distributed among your synapses. That decision-making story you’re telling is just like the splits, giggling over the dirty pictures and explaining how they find the scientists studying them giggle-worthy.
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