Nature and person
Recent
Gene editing: potential and ethical considerations
summaryGene editing: We are currently able to change the sequence of genomes. This session reviews the molecular foundations of gene editing, its current and forthcoming technical possibilities, and the philosophical and ethical issues it raises.
Author: Ujué Moreno
Vulnerability. The depth and grandeur of the wounded body
summaryToday's culture, which values appearance so much, has trouble understanding the greatness of a wounded body. The opening of a wounded body makes it possible to enter a world of deep relationships beyond equality, contractual, utility, duty or paternalism.
Author: Javier de la Torre Díaz
Mind-brain relationships and neuroscience- neuroscience dialoguePhilosophy
summaryThe interdisciplinary study of the mind-brain relationship allows two approaches: from neuroscience to Philosophy, and from Philosophy to neuroscience. The application of these relationships to ethics and social dependence is explored.
Author: José Manuel Giménez Amaya and José Angel Lombo
The contemporary desire for a technified salvation
summaryAging must be seen in the context of the whole of human life. The current reductive vision does not see the natural purpose of corporeal life, and thinks that the physical aspect of man must be technically optimized, leading to a human void.
Authors: Jorge Martín Montoya, José Manuel Giménez Amaya
Neuroscience and quantum mechanics
summaryThe relationship between quantum mechanics and neuroscience is discussed. Models that attempt the connection between brain activity and conscious experience by means of quantum mechanics are presented. And the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problem is clarified.
Author: Javier Sánchez Cañizares
Some considerations on the problematic relationship between brain and freedom
summaryThe purely scientific study of freedom faces internal contradictions derived from what science itself can achieve, which invalidate any attempt in that direction. A methodological solution is pointed out in order to adequately approach the problem.
Author: Juan Arana Cañedo-Argüelles
Neuromorphic Computing and Nanotechnologies
summaryNeuroscience knowledge can be combined with new nanotechnology techniques to build systems that capture and compute by mimicking the brain; this "neuromorphic computing" is a promising area of Artificial Intelligence advances.
Author: Bernabé Linares-Barranco
Psychology and Christianity: A goal-Model of the Person 
summary: This seminar presents an integrated Catholic Christian goal-Model of the Person: a view that is informed by Christian faith and by reason and the psychological sciences. This better understanding of the person will enhance theory, research and practice in mental health.
Author: Paul C. Vitz
A biological theory of freedom
summaryReview by Juan Arana of the book Joaquín M. Fuster, Cerebro y libertad. Los cimientos cerebrales de nuestra capacidad para elegir (Barcelona, Ariel, 2016. 375 pp.); sample his explanation of human freedom, naturalistic but without scientific simplifications.
Author: Juan Arana.
Some utopian considerations on the problem educational
summaryThe recent technological progress makes it necessary to provide specific scientific-technical training, which decisively shapes the system educational. It explores the possibilities of an education which, in this context, can provide people with human density.
Author: Juan Arana
The future of human being: neuroscientific and philosophical perspectives
summaryThe vision of humanity's future is currently shaped by science and technology. This is not only a contemporary conditioning of our thinking, but a deeper limitation to our correct understanding of what it means to be human.
Author: Saša Horvat
Ethics for machines: how to teach your robot to behave itself
summaryCan we teach ethics to machines? Artificial intelligence is explained, and how a computational system can modify its behaviour by learning from the environment, or from human beings.
Author: Gonzalo Génova.
summaryPhilosophical reflection on some fundamental dimensions of creativity: it concludes that there are no compelling reasons to differentiate between scientific and artistic creativity and examines the possibility of creativity through artificial intelligence.
Author: Carlos Blanco
summarySummarises the book Origins of Man. It starts from the biological understanding of the human being, to look for the origin of culture and other peculiarities: affectivity, conscience and freedom. The naturalistic vision of man is not able to explain the origin of these facets.
Author: Francisco Rodríguez Valls
The will to love that makes a difference
summary sample human love has characteristics that cannot be reduced to love that has biological utility; this love refers to the recognition of the intrinsic value of the human being, of his dignity, and can only be explained with spiritual categories.
Author: Marciano Escutia
God in the brain? Religious experience from neuroscience
summary: Neuroscience can consider studying religious experience; this approach can also be of great interest to Theology. Both lines open up an interdisciplinary field of study that allows us to reflect on Theology in relation to the sciences and as a requirement of thought.
Author: José Manuel Giménez-Amaya
Author: Thomas Fuchs
The neural circuits of consciousness
Author: Carmen Cavada
Brain rhythms, complexity and consciousness
Author: Julio Artieda
discussion on the book Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel
Author: Lourdes Flamarique and Enrique Moros
Human intelligence and artificial intelligence: perspectives
Author: Manuel Alfonseca
Neuroscience and faith: The belief system as an interdisciplinary site meeting
Author: José Víctor Orón
summary: From neuroscience, the attempt to explain out-of-body sensations and religious experiences has often been attributed to neurological alterations, or even genetic predispositions. These scientific explanations do not allow us to deny human spirituality.
Author: Luis María Gonzalo Sanz
Is quantum mechanics relevant to the scientific understanding of the mind-brain problem?
summary: Brief summary of the quantum models that attempt to explain consciousness, the purely physical determinants of this explanation, and a conclusive vision of quantum mechanics within the mind-brain problem.
Author: Javier Sánchez-Cañizares
Has the notion of the soul become obsolete?
summaryA synthetic description of the notion of the soul: the relationship with the living being in action and with its unity, the peculiarities of the human soul, the simplification of Cartesian dualism, the concept of the soul in the scientific sphere and the questions of method for its study.
Author: Santiago Collado
Hasn't the notion of the soul become obsolete?
summaryBasic questions concerning the concept of the soul: how it explains the peculiarities of living beings - structure, development, movement - and their unity, the peculiarities of the human soul and the enrichment of this concept in the Christian tradition.
Author: Santiago Collado
Brain activity and diagnostic caution
summary: An article in the New England Journal of Medicine reports brain activity in response to verbal communication in patients in a persistent vegetative state. This data makes it necessary to be cautious when diagnosing this state.
Author: José Manuel Giménez Amaya
summaryIt describes how reflection is linked to the human condition, the current influences that affect it negatively, the basic attitudes that need to be cultivated to foster it, contemporary challenges and the importance of not losing the capacity for wonder.
Author: Jutta Burgraff
Brain and soul: new ways of looking at an old problem
summaryThe main ideas that I would like to transmit in my chapter are as follows:1. The neuroscience is a biological discipline, which was aimed in its foundation as an interdisciplinary common research. That is, in my opinion, the main reason for showing a great ability of growing in knowledge integration as we have seen and experienced in the last forty years.However, one of the most remarkable hints in this integrative development could be summarized in the following question: why the humanities studies have recently been of great interest for the neuroscience itself ? 3. To answer this crucial interdisciplinary enquiry, I will try to give you an idea about how difficult it has been for this neurobiological discipline to fully develop an explanation of the human being as a whole from the unique perspective of the functioning of the nervous system.4In a final approach and in contrast with the above-mentioned in n. 3, I will attempt to illustrate how coherent and consistent are the recent neurobiological discoveries (specially related to the field of the systems neurobiology) and the anthropological view of the aristotelian-thomistic philosophical tradition.
Author: José Manuel Giménez Amaya
summary summary about Noam Chomsky and his theories (Chomsky, linguistic scientist and socio-political activist, Chomsky and human nature, the limitations of science, the origin of language) and a possible way out of his naturalism, based on the work of C. S. Lewis (a liberating, rational and complementary proposal , the rise of the spirit, the fall of the spirit).
Author: Marciano Escutia
Consciousness, the great frontier
summary: Machines have reached heights that were unimaginable not so long ago. But scientists like engineer Manuel Alfonseca warn of their limits. Consciousness is the main wall that separates them from humans.
Author: Jesús Rubio
From Physics to Mind. Roger Penrose's philosophical project
Author: Rubén Herce Fernández
From Neuroscience to Neuroethics. Scientific narrative and philosophical reflection.
summaryReview of José Manuel Giménez Amaya and Sergio Sánchez-Migallón. From Neuroscience to Neuroethics. Scientific narrative and philosophical reflection. Eunsa. Pamplona (2010). 183 pp. The work reflects on new scientific developments in Neuroscience and Neuroethics, looking at the limits of experimental sciences and the current need for interdisciplinary approaches.
Author: José Ignacio Murillo
Easeful Death. Is There a Case for Assisted Dying?
summaryAbsolute autonomy of the patient, the need to legally accept the financial aid to suicide, invalidity of contrary arguments.
Author: Antonio Pardo
summary: Exposition of the ways of analysing reality (the subject, the form, the spirit and the subject, and a brief analysis of the Christian doctrine.
Author: Juan Luis Lorda
Dr Crick's brain. Searching for the soul with the scalpel
summary: Commentary on Francis Crick's book, published at the age of 77, on the brain and consciousness, in which he mixes interesting scientific perspectives with a cheap, anti-religious materialism, unbecoming of a Nobel Prize winner award . Almost all of Crick's book is a popularisation of current knowledge about the brain and, above all, about vision. The ideological burden is concentrated in the Preface and Introduction, at the beginning of the book, and in the last chapter and a short final epilogue: 33 pages in all. Not much. But it is these 33 pages that give the book a provocative and polemical tone.
Author: Mariano Artigas
Libertarianism in the face of experiments "subject Libet".
summary: Benjamin Libet's experiments on the temporal sequence in the electrophysiology of certain voluntary acts have produced a discussion in philosophy and neuroscience. Many authors have seen in them a convincing test against the existence of free actions. More recent experiments, carried out with fMRI or deep electrodes, seem to lead to the same conclusion. However, the argumentation followed by their defenders has received important criticism.
Author: José Manuel Muñoz Ortega
The intelligent organism: misunderstandings about a paradox
summary: Reflections on materialism and its inconsistency based on the thesis of some neuroscientists who pretend to include thought in their scientific scope.
Author: José Ignacio Murillo
Understanding freedom better: an interdisciplinary approach between Neuroscience and Philosophy
summaryThe author presents some philosophical assumptions that are influencing the neuroscientific study of freedom, as well as certain problems that arise from neuroscience itself in its global understanding of brain functioning, neural networks and the neurobiological integration of attention, important phenomena for an adequate neurobiological understanding of freedom. He criticises a purely reductionist view of free will. He comments on the modern concept of freedom and the need for interdisciplinarity to address these issues. sample a subtle persistence of dualism in some of the approaches that study freedom and recovers the concept of life in the understanding of human activity.
Author: José Manuel Giménez Amaya
Interview with Enrique Moros about the book:
The brain. The neurological and the transcendental.
Interview with José Manuel Giménez Amaya: "Genetics does not determine human behaviour".
Author: J.A. Otero Ricart
Interview with José Manuel Giménez Amaya about the book:
From neuroscience to neuroethics
Habit acquisition in the context of neuronal genomic and epigenomic mosaicism
Author: Francisco J. Novo
The ambiguity of "neuroethics".
summary: Lecture given at the conference Closing ceremony of the Master's Degree in Bioethics. Universidad Católica San Antonio (Murcia), 21 January 2011.
Author: Sergio Sánchez-Migallón
summaryArticle on the relationship between neurophysiology and consciousness.
Author: Amadeo Muntané Sánchez
Education and catechesis in the promotion of a culture of life
Author: Ramiro Pellitero
summaryThis article examines some problems related to the notion of emergence when trying to explain the mind with it. Some paradoxes of this notion are also shown and a certain return to Aristotelianism is proposed in order to face these problems. The difficulty of establishing the limits between philosophy and science is mentioned, as well as the connection of this problem with those related to emergence.
Author: Santiago Collado González
The spirituality of the human being
summaryExposition of the Christian doctrine on the superiority of man in the world, and his spiritual nature, image of God, as the foundation of this superiority.
Author: Mariano Artigas
"Genetics is not incompatible with human freedom".
summaryInterview with José Ignacio Murillo in Ambos mundos on freedom, genetic determinism, environmental influence and neuroethics.
Author: Daniel Capó
summary essay on Steven Pinker, the first part of which was published in the October 2008 issue of
issue 119 of New Journal for the month of October 2008.
Author: Marciano Escutia
summary essay on Steven Pinker, the first part of which was published in the October 2008 issue of
issue 119 of New Journal for the month of October 2008.
Author: Marciano Escutia
summaryAn interdisciplinary approach from philosophy and neuroscience.
Author: José Ángel Lombo y José Manuel Giménez Amaya
Intelligence and intentionality
summary: This article explores the difficulties of approaching the problem of intelligence independently of any intentional consideration. To do so, I first examine three classical interpretations of the concept of the mental with the aim of showing their main shortcomings. goal . Secondly, I argue how an adequate phenomenological analysis of perception is an optimal means of understanding the intentional property. Thirdly and finally, I present some interpretative clues about the existence of information in Nature. All this serves to offer, at summary, a better proposal of basic criteria for the recognition of intelligent beings.
Author: Luis E. Echarte
Mind and brain in contemporary neuroscience.
An approach to their interdisciplinary study
summary: The impressive development of neuroscience in recent decades has highlighted its need to turn to multidisciplinarity to address the challenges it faces. Among these challenges are those that relate to questions that are decisive for the understanding of man. This article argues that in order to address them effectively, cooperation between the sciences needs to be extended beyond the realm of experimental disciplines. As an illustration of this thesis, after an introduction on the importance of neuroscience in our times, one of the most relevant aspects for the understanding of the role played by the brain in human life and behaviour is addressed: the problem of consciousness. The presentation is structured by pointing out the framework in which this problem is posed, and then summarily explaining how Neuroscience and Philosophy have dealt with it. Finally, some suggestions are presented for the fruitful development of an interdisciplinary study that allows each of the sciences involved to make its own contribution.
Author: José M. Giménez-Amaya and José I. Murillo
Neurobiology of action, decision and habitus
summaryPresentation on the neurobiological instructions of human action: voluntary movement, the basal ganglia in the enrichment and selection of actions, and the network of ventromedial cerebral cortex, nuclei of entrance of the basal ganglia and substantia nigra in decision making.
Author: Javier Bernácer
Neurobiology of "attachment bonding" and pregnancy
summaryFunctional neuroimaging techniques show how certain brain areas are activated, while others are silenced, when a mother sees her daughter or son, or hears their voices. It is the correlate of the emotion, which in the presence of her child, in various circumstances, generates in the mother. The brain is organised to mediate the complex maternal behaviour. For this, gene expression is orchestrated by different hormones and neurochemical factors during pregnancy. Maternal behaviour can be reasonably characterised in terms of cognitive-emotional interactions and for which the amygdaloid complex functions as a nodal point connecting cognition and emotion.
Author: José Manuel Giménez Amaya
Neuroscience and freedom. An interdisciplinary approach
summaryFor many neuroscientists and philosophers of mind, the phenomenon of freedom can be fully explained by neuroscience. This paper attempts to show that a careful study of the situation and perspectives of Neuroscience reveals to what extent this thesis is problematic.
Author: José M. Giménez-Amaya and José I. Murillo
summaryArticle on the origin and contents of neuroethics: scientific meetings core topic and positions of Adina L. Roskies, Judy Illes, Martha Farah, Thomas Fuchs, Walter Glannon, Jonathan Moreno and Neil Levy.
Author: Sergio Sánchez-Migallón Granados and José Manuel Giménez Amaya
Author: Antonio Pardo
Russell G. Wilcox presents discussion paper at the University of Navarra
summary: summary from Russell G. Wilcox's lecture: consideration of the precepts of Natural Law is necessary to preserve the integrity of the system of human action as a whole.
Author: Russell G. Wilcox
Scientific creativity and human singularity
summaryInformation sciences have contributed to clarify the meaning of models in scientific research, and this, in its turn, has made it easier to understand in which sense we can speak about scientific truth. Using stipulations we reach a contextual and partial, but also authentical scientific truth. And our creativity allows us to handle theoretical constructs and experimental devices in such a way that we can grasp how nature really is. As the alleged disconnections and even oppositions between science and theology depend in a great extent from the way of understanding scientific truth, the epistemological analysis of the relationships between creativity and truth may help us to advance towards a unifying perspective of knowledge in which, although the differences among science and theology are carefully respected, it is also possible to understand their mutual harmony and complementarity.
Author: Mariano Artigas
seminar Neuroscience and freedom
summaryreview from seminar of the CRYF of December 18, 2007, which summarizes the main discussion paper of Professor José Manuel Giménez Amaya.
Author: José Manuel Giménez Amaya
On the origin of human intelligence
summaryThe brain as an organ of understanding, Can we know scientifically how human intelligence arose, Darwin or Wallace?
Author: Carlos A. Marmelada
summaryExplanation of the technique of cloning by nuclear transfer, its possible animal and human applications, including 'therapeutic' cloning and ethical reflections.
Author: María Iraburu
Testamento fallido.
More shadows than light in the recent book by Eduardo Punset
summary: Review of the book Eduardo Punset. The journey to the power of the mind. The most fascinating enigmas of our brain and the world of emotions. Destino. Barcelona (2010). 364 pp. Contains a critique of the inaccuracies, internal contradictions and exaggerations contained in the work.
Author: Juan Arana
The role of consciousness in triggering intellectual habits
Author: Javier Sánchez-Cañizares
Author: José A. Lombo and José M. Giménez-Amaya
Time, consciousness and freedom: considerations on the experiments of B. Libet and collaborators.
summaryThis article is about the experiment by Libet and his colleagues on conscious decisions and others inspired by it. The discussion concentrates especially on two themes. Firstly, on the relation between consciousness and time. And, secondly, on the idea of freedom that is presupposed in these experiments.
Author: José Ignacio Murillo and José Manuel Giménez-Amaya