"You shouldn’t blame lying on the brain", according to Prof. Richard Gunderman writing
in The Conversation
. Gunderman notes the media interest in a recent paper about how brain activity 'adapts' to lying. CNN, for instance, covered the study with the headline: "Lying may be your brain's fault, honestly". Gunderman doesn't like this idea:
There is the suggestion that a behavior such as lying can be explained "mechanistically." Saying so implies the brain is a mechanism that can be accounted for in purely mechanistic terms. In fact, however, calling the brain a machine vastly oversimplifies it... no analysis of the brain as gray matter, electrical circuitry, or neuro-chemistry makes the leap from machinery to our experience of the world... as any reader of Shakespeare knows, a lie is something far richer than any pattern of brain activation.
Hmm. Gunderman seems to be saying that because of the mystery of consciousness, ...
