My brain made me do it
3/9/202627 min
A man committed a crime. He admitted it. Then something alarming showed up on an image of his brain. The criminal case that followed in 1991 brought neuroscience into the courtroom for good. How does our ever-changing understanding of the brain impact how we approach justice? Guests: Josh May, professor of philosophy, University of Alabama, Birmingham, author of Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science, Anthony Wagner, neuroscientist and professor of psychology, Stanford University Memory Lab, and Adina Roskies, professor of philosophy, UC Santa Barbara. For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! unexplainable@vox.com We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. They say that Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow. So for developers, that looks like Claude Code. It runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring or debugging without you hand-holding it through every step. Anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude, so when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by an advertiser's agenda. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at claude.ai/unexplainable.
Speaker 10:40
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Amy Pedulla· Host1:06
[gentle music] The year was nineteen ninety-one, and Herbert Weinstein was a retired ad executive.
Josh May· Guest1:16
He's sixty-five years old, and he's living in Manhattan in a twelve-story apartment.
Amy Pedulla· Host1:22
I called up Josh May to tell me this story. He's an ethics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Josh May· Guest1:28
Gets into an argument