A person in the audience suggested taking firefighters, who sometimes face dilemmas very like this (Do I try to save life-threatened person A or seriosly injured Baby B), and hooking them up to scans and seeing if their brains work differently—The hypothesis being that they would make decision in dilemmas more ‘rationally’ and less ‘emotionally’, as a result of their experience and training. Or the pre-disposition that led to them becoming fire-fighters in the first place.
Of course, just like with Military Training, the Firefighters may have biases about what they consider to be rational.
For instance, most would probably save the injured baby at the expense of an uninjured adult or child. Yet, the baby has less immediate worth than the adult or small child, as these latter two are conscious and self-aware in a way that the baby is not.
Yet, almost instinctively, humans tend to go for the baby. Of course, genetics has wired us to be that way.
That’s true (that they have biases) although I understand the training is attend to the nature of the injury, and practicalities of the situation—eg danger to the firefighter—rather than the age of the victim.
However what one might expect to see in firefighters would be ethical dilemmas like the trolley problem to trigger the cerebral cortex more, and the amaglydia less than in other people.
Perhaps.
Unless of course the training works by manipulating the emotional response. So firefighters are just as emotional, but their emotions have been changed by their training.
This is the sort of problem Kahane was talking about when he said it is very difficult to interpret brain scans.
It worries me that we do not have more emphasis placed upon mustering out our Armed Forces members to undo some of the training that they receive, simply because their emotional biases have been so changed that it makes it difficult for many of them to re-integrate into society.
I think that we are developing a similar problem with Police, who are used to interacting primarily with the worst parts of society, and then developing a bias that the rest of society has similar behavioral trends as that lowest common denominator they are used to seeing.
I will have to re-read the Kahane comments about interpreting brain scans...
A person in the audience suggested taking firefighters, who sometimes face dilemmas very like this (Do I try to save life-threatened person A or seriosly injured Baby B), and hooking them up to scans and seeing if their brains work differently—The hypothesis being that they would make decision in dilemmas more ‘rationally’ and less ‘emotionally’, as a result of their experience and training. Or the pre-disposition that led to them becoming fire-fighters in the first place.
Of course, just like with Military Training, the Firefighters may have biases about what they consider to be rational.
For instance, most would probably save the injured baby at the expense of an uninjured adult or child. Yet, the baby has less immediate worth than the adult or small child, as these latter two are conscious and self-aware in a way that the baby is not.
Yet, almost instinctively, humans tend to go for the baby. Of course, genetics has wired us to be that way.
That’s true (that they have biases) although I understand the training is attend to the nature of the injury, and practicalities of the situation—eg danger to the firefighter—rather than the age of the victim.
However what one might expect to see in firefighters would be ethical dilemmas like the trolley problem to trigger the cerebral cortex more, and the amaglydia less than in other people.
Perhaps.
Unless of course the training works by manipulating the emotional response. So firefighters are just as emotional, but their emotions have been changed by their training.
This is the sort of problem Kahane was talking about when he said it is very difficult to interpret brain scans.
It worries me that we do not have more emphasis placed upon mustering out our Armed Forces members to undo some of the training that they receive, simply because their emotional biases have been so changed that it makes it difficult for many of them to re-integrate into society.
I think that we are developing a similar problem with Police, who are used to interacting primarily with the worst parts of society, and then developing a bias that the rest of society has similar behavioral trends as that lowest common denominator they are used to seeing.
I will have to re-read the Kahane comments about interpreting brain scans...