TALK ABOUT SLIDING DOWN SLIPPERY SLOPES!

It's been said that in politics, two wrongs make a precedent. We're now waiting to see if a second court case goes the same amazing way the Sharma decision went this week in India. In the city of Pune, Aditi Sharma became the first person on record to be convicted of murder based on a brain scan....!

This has caused philosophers as well as lawyers to weigh in. Has modern neuroscience actually reached the point where it can begin supplementing 5000 years of Judeo-Christian ethics in matters of human behavior? The prosecution suggested so when it argued the MBA student had given her former fiance sweets laced with arsenic. She denied it, but a Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test (BEOS) "proved" she was lying.

The prosecution successfully argued the test proved she had "experiential knowledge of the murder." The judge stated, "the expertise of the BEOS operator can in no way be challenged." He sentenced her to life imprisonment

The case is on appeal, but suggests how some neuroscientists are resolutely deterministic in their understanding of the human being. In their view, the mind is the brain and the brain is the mind. In effect, our ideas and our behavior have physical explanations which apparently transcend such traditional constructs as fairness, altruism, love, beauty and free will.

Time and the Indian courts will decide this case. But the ethical cat is out of the bag. Modern secular thinking has been traveling the slippery slope of defining us by our physicality for years. Now the slope grows more insistent. A leading American biologist, Anthony Cashmore, has gone so far as to write in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "Progress in our understanding of the chemical basis for behavior will make it increasingly untenable to retain a belief in the old concept of free will....."

Whoops...are we starting to slip off the slope?