Page 44 - John Monaghan News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

chocolate cake right hand. all right, hands down. how many people found it difficult to raise your hand by yourself? not very many. great, you made a choice. you thought about it. you decided and you acted. and my concept of what free will is the ability to act consistent with your preferences and desires. just that simple. now how many people here feel like you have control over whether or not you like chocolate cake? raise either hands. fewer, right. so there are two different things going on that we often conflate when we talk about free will. one is your predispositions to prefer...

the present to the hospital. one of the things my lab does, we built a really nice trailer in new mexico. here is my trailer. i live in a trailer in mexico. [laughter] this trailer has a really nice mri in it. we work with inmates to volunteer force studies and how to make them better. what we have found is that individuals to have those psychopathic traits, only about a third of all inmates will score really high on the straights. they have reduced gray matter density in these areas. this is the same area where that guy had the tumor. these individuals, control and for all the impor...

criminal side versus the civil side and not surprisingly on both sides "the state wins" because on the criminal side you go to prison and on the civil side, you get incarcerated civilly. >> i don't think that's much of a disconnect. i think -- so i agree with you the test has changed. that's not what i'm talking about. if you look at the kind of distribution of behavior, right, if we think the people at the high end of the distribution have perfect control of their impulses and perfect control over acting on their preferences. i like chocolate cake but it gives me migraines. i try no...

i think -- so i agree with you the test has changed. that's not what i'm talking about. if you look at the kind of distribution of behavior, right, if we think the people at the high end of the distribution have perfect control of their impulses and perfect control over acting on their preferences. i like chocolate cake but it gives me migraines. i try not to have it because it tends to trigger if. maybe i end up on the normal distribution on the higher end. at this end we have people who have complete lack of control over their impulses. what the law currently does it draws a bright...

selections. i think those are all interesting questions, but is there free will? well, the fact that almost everybody in the audience raised either their right or left hand contemplated it and were quickly able to act and respond. that to me says, yes, there is. now what do we want to do about it? now that we understand that those of us in the audience or up here that like chocolate cake may not have control over it, how do we want to account for that if at all in the criminal justice system? to date, we haven't. in the future, we may wish to. >> i agree with that. i think that, firs...