Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

also read Descartes’ Error, by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.22 Damasio had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain—the ventromedial (i.e., bottom-middle) prefrontal cortex (abbreviated vmPFC; it’s the region just behind and above the bridge of the nose). Their emotionali

How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?

Looking to the future, some neuroscientists envision a dramatic transformation of criminal law. David Eagleman, for one, welcomes a time when “we may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation [and] eventually think about bad decision making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes