CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – A new study of the cognitive processes involved with honesty suggests that truthfulness depends more on absence of temptation than active resistance to temptation.

Using neuroimaging, psychologists looked at the brain activity of people given the chance to gain money dishonestly by lying and found that honest people showed no additional neural activity when telling the truth, implying that extra cognitive processes were not necessary to choose honesty. However, those individuals who behaved dishonestly, even when telling the truth, showed additional activity in brain regions that involve control and attention.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and was led by Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, along with Joe Paxton, a graduate student in psychology.

“Being honest is not so much a matter of exercising willpower as it is being disposed to behave honestly in a more effortless kind of way,” says Greene. “This may not be true for all situations, but it seems to be true for at least this situation.”

Read more at Eurekalert.

Announcing a 2-day workshop on “Ethical Guidance for Research and Application of Pervasive and Autonomous Information Technology (PAIT)” March 3-4, 2010. The workshop will be a culminating event of a year-long process of planning, case development and analysis, and networking among information technology engineers and researchers, ethicists, and other interested persons. The workshop is funded by the National Science Foundation (grant number SES-0848097) and sponsored by Indiana University’s Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

Confirmed speakers include Helen Nissenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Communication and Senior Fellow of the Information Law Institute, New York University; and Fred H. Cate, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, IU School of Law, and Director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Indiana University Bloomington.

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I generally disagree with George here. We can defeat aging, run cars on renewable fuels, address climate change, and develop a sustainable energy source without a fundamental breakthrough like quantum mechanics. It could be the end of scientific revolutions as we know them — it’s hard to tell. We could still have extreme (incremental) progress in science without discrete, paradigm-shifting revolutions.

I really need to read John Horgan’s book, The End of Science. Even though I found him rude in our exchange, I have sympathy for some of his ideas, like the notion that war might be eliminated or that fundamental scientific revolutions may be over.

At the very least, it could be that human-facilitated paradigm shifts are over, and that superintelligence is necessary to tear further holes in the fabric of the Veil of Maya.

But ultimately…

“Nobody actually lives in external reality, and we couldn’t understand it if we did; too many quarks flying around.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky