Henry County... help Martin win on the 2nd! Come out and canvass

Kevin Waller is doing a great job of keeping people in the loop...
From his email today:

Team,

We are doing canvassing to support the Jim Martin Campaign for US Senate both Saturday and Sunday. The election runoff is in just 11 days. It is a close race. The victory will be to the one whose team makes the most calls and knocks on the most doors. People are registered, we just need to get them back out to the polls.

Ms Cathryn Chatters (985) 703-0164 and Mike Burns have taken the lead on this initiative.

If you want to participate and help put someone in the Senate that is going to help President Elect Obama make a difference: come on down.

Days and Times:

Sat from 10 am - 6:00 pm (two hour increments)
Sunday from 2 pm -6:00pm (two hour increments)

Rally Point: At the Sands Bar and Grill, #38 Macon Road, McDonough, GA (just off the square).

Fact Checking the run-off

Peach State Piffle
November 21, 2008
The Georgia Senate run-off is filled with misleading claims from both sides.
Summary
Georgia voters are being hit with misleading ads from both sides as Republican Sen. Chambliss battles Democratic challenger Martin in a Dec. 2 run-off election.

Chambliss claims in an ad that Martin would work to raise taxes on "nearly every small business in Georgia." In fact, only around 2.4 percent of small businesses nationally earn enough to be affected by the tax plan Martin favors.


Chambliss also says Martin “refused to return $100 million of surplus taxes” to Georgians. That’s false. Martin voted in favor of the tax relief bill in question.


A Martin ad claims Chambliss “opposes a middle-class tax cut.” In fact, he supported cuts for middle-income taxpayers. What Chambliss voted against was an amendment that also would have increased taxes on corporations and others.
In one exchange, Chambliss accuses Martin of supporting the largest tax increase in state history, while Martin says he supported the largest middle-class tax cut in state history. It turns out both are right, as we explain fully in our Analysis section.

Common Dreams for the day...

Friday 11.21.08
Headlines...
Report: Sun Setting on The American Century
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21

UN: Gaza on Brink of Humanitarian Disaster
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21-5

Death Bloom of Plankton A Warning on Warming
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21-0

California Officials Unveil Plans to Turn San Francisco into Electric Car Capital
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21-2

Congo: A Touch of Hope in The War without End
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21-8

Economy Hitting Women Hardest, Say Experts
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21-6

Thousands Protest in Iraq Against US Troops Pact
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/21-1
and more...

****************************************************
Views...

Tom Engelhardt | The Pentagon's Argument of Last Resort on Iraq
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21-2

Norman Solomon | A Media Parable for 'the Center'
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21-4

Heather Wokusch | You're Scaring Me, Obama: Let the Bush Years Die
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21

David Sirota | Tuning Out the Braindead Megaphone
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21-0

Paul Krugman | The Lame-Duck Economy
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21-5

Nancy Van Ness The Granny Peace Brigade Campaigns to Close All US Military Bases - in Latin America and Around the World
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21-1

Laura Flanders | The Hunger News
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/21-3
and more...

****************************************************

Newswire...

The Real News Network: What Does The West Owe Afghanistan?
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/11/21

Peace Action West: Peace Movement Raises Concerns About Possible Obama Defense Secretary
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/11/21-0

Institute for Public Accuracy: The End of Racism?
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/11/21-1

SOA Watch: Thousands Gather This Weekend at Fort Benning, Georgia to Say: Yes We Can Stop Torture and Close the School of Assassins
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/11/21-2

incompatibilism...

Is the burden of proof on incompatibilists?
A few people have responded to my 2007 PPR paper, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” co-authored with Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. But most of the responses have focused on the experimental results that suggested incompatibilism is not as intuitive to non-philosophers as incompatibilists have claimed. While I (unsurprisingly) think these results are illuminating, I also think that the more interesting parts of that paper came before and after the discussion of the experiments themselves. And I don’t think anyone has responded to the arguments we offer in those parts--perhaps illustrating that I’m wrong about those arguments being interesting, but I’ll be charitable and hope that it’s because those arguments were drowned by the flood of excitement about the experiments. ;-}

In any case, Shaun Nichols asked me recently if anyone had a response to our (interrelated) arguments that the burden of proof should be on incompatibilists (rather than compatiblists) and that there is little reason to accept libertarians’ more demanding conditions for free will unless they are motivated by widespread intuitions supporting them. I am hoping some of you might offer food for thought about these arguments. Below I have cut from pp. 30-33 of the article to summarize some of these arguments. I would love to hear where people think we went wrong (or right).

[After showing that incompatibilists have tended to claim their view is commonsensical and compatibilism is counterintuitive and then explaining why we think ordinary intuitions matter to the free will debate, we say…]

It is especially important for incompatibilists that their view is supported by ordinary intuitions for the following three reasons. First, incompatibilism about any two concepts is not the default view. As William Lycan explains, “A theorist who maintains of something that is not obviously impossible that nonetheless that thing is impossible owes us an argument” (2003: 109). Either determinism obviously precludes free will or those who maintain that it does should offer an explanation as to why it does. The philosophical conception of determinism—i.e., that the laws of nature and state of the universe at one time entail the state of the universe at later times—has no obvious conceptual or logical bearing on human freedom and responsibility. So, by claiming that determinism necessarily precludes the existence of free will, incompatibilists thereby assume the argumentative burden.[note 1]

Second, the arguments that incompatibilists accordingly provide to explain why determinism necessarily precludes free will require conceptions of free will that are more metaphysically demanding than compatibilist alternatives. These libertarian conceptions demand more of the world in order for free will to exist: at a minimum, indeterministic event-causal processes at the right place in the human agent, and often, additionally, agent causation. To point out that incompatibilist theories are metaphysically demanding is not to suggest that they are thereby less likely to be true. Rather, it is simply to say that these theories require more motivation than less metaphysically demanding ones.

Consider an example. Suppose two philosophers—Hal and Dave—are debating what it takes for something to be an action. Hal claims that actions are events caused (in the right sort of way) by beliefs and desires. Dave agrees, but adds the further condition that the token beliefs and desires that cause an action cannot be identical to anything physical. Now Dave, by adding this condition, does not thereby commit himself to the claim that token beliefs and desires are not physical. But he does commit himself to the conditional claim that token beliefs and desires are not physical if there are any actions. On our view, if T1 and T2 are both theories of x, then to say that T1 is more metaphysically demanding than T2 is to say that T1 requires more metaphysical theses to be true than T2 does in order for there to be any x’s. So, Dave’s theory is more metaphysically demanding than Hal’s because it requires more metaphysical theses to be true in order for there to be any actions. Likewise, incompatibilists—whether libertarians or skeptics—have more metaphysically demanding theories than compatibilists since they say that special kinds of causation (indeterministic or agent-causation) must obtain if there are any free actions.[note 2]

Since incompatibilist theories of free will say the existence of free will is incompatible with determinism, these theories, other things being equal, will be harder to motivate than compatibilist theories, which do not require the existence of extra metaphysical processes, such as indeterminism or agent causation, in order for free actions to be possible. As we’ve seen, many incompatibilists have attempted to motivate their metaphysically demanding theories, at least in part, by suggesting that other things are not equal, because our ordinary intuitions support incompatibilist views. This is not to say that incompatibilists must appeal to such intuitions in order to motivate their demanding theories (see §§4.2-4.3 below). Nonetheless, it is certainly unclear why, without wide-scale intuitive support for incompatibilism, the argumentative burden would be on compatibilists, as suggested by Ekstrom when she claims that the compatibilist “needs a positive argument in favor of the compatibility thesis” (2000: 57) and by Kane above [“Ordinary persons have to be talked out of this natural incompatibilism by the clever arguments of philosophers” (1999: 217).]

Finally, if it were shown that people have intuitions that in fact support incompatibilism, it would still be open to foes of incompatibilism to argue that, relative to ordinary conceptions of freedom and responsibility, their view is a benign revision towards a more metaphysically tenable theory.[note 3] Incompatibilists, on the other hand, do not seem to have this move available to them in the event that their view is inconsistent with pre-philosophical intuitions. After all, it is difficult to see why philosophers should revise the concept of free will to make it more metaphysically demanding than required by ordinary intuitions (see §4.3).[note 4] So, if incompatibilism is not the intuitive view, or if no premises that support incompatibilist conclusions are particularly intuitive, then there seems to be little motivation for advancing an incompatibilist theory of free will.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See Warfield (2000) for an explanation of why the proper incompatibilist view is not the contingent claim, “If determinism is true then there is no freedom,” but the stronger claim, “Necessarily, if determinism is true then there is no freedom” (169). See also Chalmers (1996) who writes, “In general, a certain burden of proof lies on those who claim that a certain description is logically impossible…. If no reasonable analysis of the terms in question points towards a contradiction, or even makes the existence of a contradiction plausible, then there is a natural assumption in favor of logical possibility” (96).

[2] Even though hard determinists or skeptics about free will are not committed to the existence of libertarian free will, they are committed to the libertarian conception of free will since their arguments require this conception to reach the conclusion that free will does not (or could not) exist. Hence, skeptics, like libertarians, require motivation for the accuracy of this conception, and they often do so by suggesting that incompatibilism is the commonsensical or intuitive view (see, for instance, Strawson 1986 and Smilansky 2003).

[3] See Vargas (forthcoming). Compatibilists may also be better situated to offer error theories to explain why people sometimes express incompatibilist intuitions even though this need not commit them to incompatibilist theories. See, for instance, Velleman (2000) and Graham and Horgan (1998).

[4] There is a fourth reason that some incompatibilists should want their view to be intuitive to ordinary people. Peter Strawson (1962) offered a compatibilist argument to the effect that we cannot and should not attempt to provide metaphysical justifications for our practices of moral responsibility (e.g., praise and blame), which are grounded in reactive attitudes such as indignation and gratitude. He suggested such practices are subject to justifications and revisions based only on considerations internal to the relevant practices and attitudes, but not on considerations external to the practice, including, in his view, determinism. But incompatibilists, notably Galen Strawson, have responded to this argument by suggesting that the question of determinism is not external to our considerations of moral responsibility (see also Pereboom 2001). That is, they claim that our reactive attitudes themselves are sensitive to whether human actions are deterministically caused. As Galen Strawson puts it, the fact that “the basic incompatibilist intuition that determinism is incompatible with freedom … has such power for us is as much a natural fact about cogitative beings like ourselves as is the fact of our quite unreflective commitment to the reactive attitudes. What is more, the roots of the incompatibilist intuition lie deep in the very reactive attitudes that are invoked in order to undercut it. The reactive attitudes enshrine the incompatibilist intuition” (1986: 88). If it turned out that this claim is false—that most people’s reactive attitudes are not in fact sensitive to considerations of determinism—then this particular incompatibilist response to the elder Strawson’s argument would fail. While there are other responses to Peter Strawson’s views, we interpret some of the claims that incompatibilism is intuitive as attempts to shore up this response that our ordinary reactive attitudes and attributions of moral responsibility are sensitive to determinism. And we accordingly view any evidence to the contrary as strengthening Peter Strawson’s suggestion that determinism is irrelevant to debates about freedom and responsibility and, accordingly, as weakening incompatibilism.

Chomsky

Good point by David Brooks...

Today's op-ed column "The Insider's Crusade"

Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced "fresh faces" to change things. After all, it was L.B.J. who passed the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, because he is so young, Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.

I hate the "reformers" who want to "change Washington." I'm systemic by nature. I see dead people as that kid in the sixth sense said.

You want the smartest in the class, you want the most vetted politico in the legislature to deal with parliamentary maneuvers that might stymie your agenda. To bring "change" is actually counter intuitive. The smart competent people aren't the ones who have gotten us into this mess to begin with.

The populist screed of ending the corruption 9 times out of 10 tends to be just that... a screed.

Wallerstein on Obama

"Obama's Victory - Fear and Hope"
by Immanuel Wallerstein


The whole of the United States and indeed the whole world was watching, and almost all of it was cheering, the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Although, during the electoral campaign, everyone tried to play down the centrality of the racial issue, on Nov. 4 it seemed that no one could talk of anything else. There are three central questions about what most commentators are calling this "historic event": How important is it? What explains the victory? What is likely to happen now?

On the evening of November 4, an immense crowd assembled in Grant Park, Chicago, to hear Obama's acceptance speech. All those who were watching U.S. television saw the camera zoom in on Jesse Jackson, who was in tears. Those tears reflect the virtually unanimous view of all African-Americans, who regard Obama's election as the moment of their definitive integration into the U.S. electoral process. They do not believe that racism has disappeared. But a symbolic barrier has been crossed, first of all for them, and then for all the rest of us.

Their sentiment is quite parallel to the feelings of Africans in South Africa on April 27, 1994 when they voted to elect Nelson Mandela president of their country. It has not mattered that Mandela, as president, did not fulfill the whole promise of his party. It will not matter if Obama does not fulfill the whole promise of his campaign. In the United States, as in South Africa, a new day has dawned. Even if it is an imperfect day, it is a better day than before. The African-Americans, but also the Hispanics and the young people in general, voted for Obama out of hope - a diffuse hope, but a real one.

How did Obama win? He won the way anyone wins in a large, complex political situation. He put together a large coalition of many different political forces. In this case, the gamut ran from fairly far left to right of center. He would not have won without that enormous range of support. And, of course, now that he has won, all the different groups want him to govern as each prefers, which is of course not possible.

Who are these different elements, and why did they support him? On the left, even the far left, they voted for Obama because of deep anger about the damage the Bush regime inflicted on the United States and the world, and the genuine fear that McCain would have been no better, perhaps worse. On the center-right, independents and many Republicans voted for him most of all because they had become aghast at the ever-increasing dominance of the Christian right in Republican party politics, a sentiment that was underlined by the choice of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate. These people voted for Obama because they were afraid of McCain/Palin and because Obama convinced them that he was a solid and sensible pragmatist.

And in-between these two groups were the so-called Reagan Democrats, largely industrial workers, often Catholics, often racist, who had tended to desert their Democratic party roots in recent elections because they viewed the party as having moved too far left and disapproved of its positions on social questions. These voters moved back to the Democratic party not because their outlook had changed, but because of fear. They were deeply afraid of the economic depression into which the United States has moved, and thought that their only hope was in a new New Deal. They voted for the Democrats despite the fact that Obama was an African-American. Fear conquered racism.

And what will Obama do now? What can Obama do now? It is still too early to be sure. It seems clear that he will move quickly to take advantage of a crisis situation, as his new Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, put it. I suspect we shall see a dramatic set of initiatives in the traditional first 100 days. And some of what Obama does may be surprising.

Still, there are two situations, the two biggest, that are largely beyond his control - the transformed geopolitics of the world-system, and the catastrophic world economic situation. Yes, the world received Obama's victory with joy, but also with prudence. It is notable that two major centers of power issued statements on the geopolitical scene that were quite forthright. Both the European Union in a unanimous statement and President Lula of Brazil said they looked forward to renewing collaboration with the United States, but this time as equals, not as junior partners.

Obama will pull out of Iraq more or less as promised, if for no other reason than the fact that the Iraqi government will insist upon it. He will try to find a graceful exit from Afghanistan, which will not be too easy. But whether he will do something significant in relation to the Israel/Palestine deadlock and whether he can look forward to a more stable Pakistan is very unsure. And he will have less to say about it than he may think. Can Obama accept the fact that the United States is no longer the world's leader, merely a partner with other power centers? And, even if he can, can he somehow get the American people to accept this new reality?

As for the depression, it will no doubt have to play out its course. Obama, like all the other major leaders in the world, is a captain on a very stormy sea, and can do relatively little more than try to keep his ship from sinking altogether.

Where Obama has some leeway is in the internal U.S. situation. There are three things where he is expected to act and can act, if he is ready to be bold. One is job creation. This can only be done effectively in the short run through government action. And it would be best done by investing in reconstructing the degraded infrastructure of the United States, and in measures to reverse environmental decline.

The second is the establishment, at last, of a decent health care structure in the United States, in which everyone, without exception, will be covered, and in which there will be considerable emphasis on preventive medicine.

And the third area is in undoing all the damage that has been done to basic civil liberties in the United States by the Bush administration, but also by prior administrations. This requires an overhauling both of the Department of Justice and the legal and paralegal apparatus that has been constructed in the last eight, but also the last thirty, years.

If Obama acts decisively in these three arenas, then we might say that this was a truly historic election, one in which the change that occurred was more than symbolic. But if he fails here, the letdown will be momentous.

Many are trying to divert his attention into the arenas in which he cannot do much, and in which his best position would be that of a lower profile, the acceptance of new world reality. There is much about Obama's future actions to fear, and much that offers hope.

Socialism??

"The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities."

Is that socialism? No actually thats Adam Smith... here. read more!

Spread The Wealth? What’s New?
McCain's attack implies that an Obama presidency would lead us toward the Swedish model. Unlikely.

Jacob Weisberg
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Nov 10, 2008
In the last lap of his campaign, John McCain is claiming that Barack Obama "believes in redistributing wealth." The problem with this charge is not that it's untrue. It's that McCain—along with most of his supporters—favors redistribution, too. Government redistributes wealth to some extent by its very existence, since it's impractical for citizens to pay for or benefit from it in equal proportion, even if that were desirable. So long as you have a system of taxation and spending on public goods like education and roads, some people will do better out of the bargain than others. The real questions are whether public policy consciously tries to affect the distribution of wealth, and how much it tries to change it and in what direction.

Redistribution has a "from" side (taxation) and a "to" side (spending). On the "from" side, the notion that government should use taxation to increase rather than decrease equality is hardly Marxist. In "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith begins his section on taxation with the following maxim: "The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities." To ask otherwise, Smith writes, would be obviously unfair.

Until the 20th century, the bulk of government revenues came from tariffs, which are regressive, meaning that they redistribute income away from the poor. The progressive principle was enshrined in American practice with the arrival of the federal income and inheritance taxes. The champion of these policies? None other than John McCain's hero, Teddy Roosevelt. We got progressive income taxes with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. The federal estate tax we have today came in 1916.

McCain is a consistent adherent to his hero's principles. Unlike George W. Bush, McCain supports the retention of an estate tax (he favors reducing it to 15 percent on estates above $5 million). McCain opposes the flat tax, which would repudiate progressivity (though with a $46,000 exemption, it would still redistribute income). Some of us still remember the John McCain who opposed Bush's 2001 tax cut, saying it was unfairly tilted toward the rich.

On the "to" side of the ledger, large-scale redistributive policies owe their existence to the other President Roosevelt. The biggest and most important of these is Social Security. FDR understood that an income-support program that was too explicitly redistributionist would be unlikely to survive politically, which is why everyone who works and pays into the system has a right to benefits. But the Social Security Administration does quietly shift money from relatively richer to relatively poorer—even if some recent research indicates it does so less than intended, largely because poor people have shorter life expectancies.

Curiously, the most prominent proponents of more-aggressive wealth redistribution have been Robin Hoods of the right. Milton Friedman is considered the father of the negative income tax, a 1960s-era proposal to simply give cash to the poor. Richard Nixon pitched a version of this plan in 1973. The idea was that writing checks would be preferable to more bureaucratic programs like welfare. Our most explicit redistributive program today is probably the earned-income tax credit, which supplements the incomes of people who work but don't earn enough to escape poverty on their own. Gerald Ford signed this bill into law and Ronald Reagan greatly expanded it.

McCain has long-favored the EITC, call-ing it "a much-needed tax credit for working Americans." McCain doesn't support the repeal of Social Security or Medicare, or a raft of other wealth-spreading programs like food stamps. And he's got redistributive measures of his own invention, too, such as a tax credit to help people with lower incomes buy health insurance.

McCain might respond that it's not the principle of redistribution that makes Obama's policies objectionable, but the extent of them. Socialistic Sweden, with its generous benefits and a government consuming about 55 percent of GDP, exists on the same continuum with the mildly distributive United States, where you can't get by on welfare payments and total government spending is in the range of 30 percent of GDP. McCain's attack implies that an Obama presidency would lead us toward the Swedish model.

There's little in Obama's background or writings to suggest he favors more-ambitious redistributive policies. His most expensive new social program is an expansion of health-care coverage that would not create a universal entitlement (as many Democrats want to do) and which has been credibly priced at less, or only slightly more, than McCain's plan. There's little reason to think that Obama would depart from the bipartisan consensus that has favored federal spending at approximately the same level for the past 40 years.

What has changed in that period is the way the market has distributed wealth. Since the 1970s, income inequality in the United States has increased dramatically. Obama, like a lot of fellow liberals, would like to find ways to reverse that trend without diminishing overall economic growth. The old John McCain worried about that problem, too. We may see that guy again, after the election.

Weisberg is editor in chief of the Slate Group and the author of “The Bush Tragedy.” A version of this column also appears on Slate.com.

Photo blogging

Links for the day...

Liberal Activists Have Long Legislative Wish List

Democrats make gains in Georgia Friend RJ Hadley quoted in article!!

Low turnout likely in Senate runoff

The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq — a "free-fraud zone" where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create

Obama's Historic Victory
by Howard Zinn

"Free-Marketers" and the Bank Bailout

The Post tells us how the people who designed the bank bailout were committed to the free market. Interestingly, the key decisions that they made gave the banks much better terms than they could have received from the free market.

Since the post doesn't really know the inner most thoughts of the bailout designers, let's try an alternative hypothesis. They wanted to help the banks as much as possible with public money, yet they wanted to rationalize this give away of taxpayer dollars as somehow consistent with the free market. Their alleged belief in the free market is simply a cover for efforts to aid the rich.

I don't know if this alternative hypothesis is true, but the Post certainly does not know that the story it presented to readers as fact is true. How about we just get the news media to skip the speculation about people's ideologies and just report on where the money went.

It's the Housing Bubble, Not the ***** Credit Crunch!

No one will lend me $1 billion, that's how bad the credit crunch has gotten. There are probably reporters at major news outlets who would print that.

The news media almost completely missed the housing bubble. They relied almost entirely on sources who either had an interest in not calling or attention to an $8 trillion housing bubble or somehow were unable to see it. As a result they did not warn the public that their house prices were likely to plunge in future years.

Having dismally failed in their jobs to inform the public, reporters are still relying almost exclusively on sources that completely missed the housing bubble. As a result, they are still badly misinforming the public, first and foremost by attributing the economic downturn to a credit crunch.

This is truly incredible. Homeowners have lost more than $5 trillion in housing wealth. There is a very well established wealth effect whereby $1 of housing wealth is estimated as leading to 5 to 6 cents of annual consumption. This implies that the loss of wealth to date would cause consumption to fall by $250 billion to $300 billion annually (1.7 percent to 2.0 percent of GDP). If you add in the loss of around $6 trillion in stock wealth, with an estimated wealth effect of 3-4 cents on the dollar, then you get an additional decline of $180 billion to $240 billion in annual consumption (1.2 percent to 1.6 percent of GDP).

These are huge falls in consumption that would lead to a very serious recession, like the one we are seeing. This would be predicted even if all our banks were fully solvent and in top flight financial shape. Even the soundest bank does not make loans to borrowers who it does not think can pay the loans back (except during times of irrational exuberance).

Obviously the problems of the banking system make the situation worse, but the real cause of the downturn is the collapse of the housing bubble, and the reporters who talk about the economy should know this. (Of course, they should have seen the housing bubble too.)

Eric Rauchway vs. Alex Tabarrok on New Deal Unemployment
By Brad DeLong

You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees
In Neuroscience