Neuroscience and Justice

This article in Edge prompted my response here.

Heterophenominological Ensemble of Dispositions

This is the spacial and temporal organization of human brains. In split brain person's we see subjects left hands responding to the right lobe and right hands responding to left hands. But only the action of the right hand can be described in a coherent fashion because only the left brain produces verbal reports (narratives) about what is happening subjectively. If the right brain makes the left hand do something different from the narrative, the left brain just expands the narrative fiction to include whatever the left hand is up to no matter what the right brain's motivation or observed behavior.

"We have this thing over here, in the left side, that we've called the interpreter. It's not in the right hemisphere, you can't get the right hemisphere to do this kind of thing. The interpreter is just weaving the story, the narrative that makes sense out of these modules that are constantly bombarding us with information, with actual behaviors, with felt states, with everything. We've got to tell a story about what's going on and that's what we think this narrative function does."

The account of free will we can use comes up in the Q/A from our peer Dr. Pinker. Good times.