Fw: a proposal

dear jeff

i hope this note finds you well.

i wanted to ask whether you might be interested in supporting a large scale project aimed at understanding the nature of our moral judgments. The last several years of funding from NSF have generated massive number of projects, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. I have managed to assemble collaborators working on genetics, neurobiology, behavior, development, and evolution, targeting normal populations, patients with focal lesion, individuals with genetic mutations that lead to focal brain damage, children and animals; using wild and creative technologies, including TMS (allowing for focal suppression of brain function), behavioral genetics and imaging, and virtual reality. I don't think this is something that traditional funding will support as it is very large scale. But it has the potential to generate terrifically exciting results, with implications for not only basic research, but clinical applications, politics, law and education. The study centers around the linguistic analogy to morality that i have been pushing. I am attaching a sketch of the project, that i sent to the ex-director of NSF, David Lightfoot. He just stepped down, unfortunately, so who knows what will happen; lightfoot was very invested in the linguistic analogy as he is a chomskyan by training!

it is a sketch, but i thought might be useful as a starting point. i don't know if this is of any interest, but if so, would be keen to talk further.

best

marc

at your convenciene i would be happy to orgaize a day for you to come to palm beach to discuss

jeff, great. do you want to propose some possible dates and times? am in finland now, back on thursday. -marc

great. and in my signature below is information on my calendar in case that helps. marc

any thoughts on dates? marc

What would you like me to tell him?