Well, all of my posts change your brain, because everything changes your brain. But this one might make a rather bigger impact than usual.
According to a new paper in Psychological Science, reading a short article which argues that free will is an illusion causes measurable changes in brain function: Inducing Disbelief in Free Will Alters Brain Correlates of Preconscious Motor Preparation.
The authors took 30 people and randomly assigned them to read one of two passages from this book. One of the quotes was a fairly forceful attack on the concept of free will, saying that all of our actions are determined by our genes and environment. The other, placebo extract, was the same length and talked about conciousness but made no reference to free will.
After that, all the volunteers were given EEG while performing the Libet Task. This was invented by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, and it's famous as evidence against free will. Basically, the task just involves pushing a button, and you can make an entirely free choice as to when to push it. You then report, with the help of a clock, the moment at which you decided to push it.
What Libet found, using EEG recording, was that there's an electrical change in the brain, a negative voltage called the readiness potential, which starts about 2 seconds before you move. However, most people report "deciding" to move just 200 milliseconds before the actual button click - long after "their brain decided to move", in terms of the readiness potential. Maybe.
Anyway, in the current study they found that reading about determinism reduced the size of the readiness potential, although it still happened:
So ironically, reading an argument against free will reduces the size of a phenomenon which is itself used as an argument against free will... it's enough to make your head spin. The authors say that this fits with earlier work showing that "The early RP...is restricted to movements that are executed with the 'introspective feelings of the willful realization of the intention to move at a particular time'."This is interesting, but there's a few caveats. The result was nicely significant with a p value of 0.011, but we're not shown the data from individual participants, only the group averages so the effect might be driven by one or two outliers with huge or absent readiness potentials.
Also, it's possible that the effect wasn't about belief in free will as such, but just some kind of distraction. Maybe being confronted with the idea that free will is an illusion just shook the participants up and got them thinking hard, distracting them from the task. To their credit the authors did try to control for this by also measuring EEG responses to simple visual stimuli, finding no effect, but ideally I'd want to see a control consisting of a very controversial, non-free-will article.
In case you were wondering, here's the start of the readiness-potential-reducing passage:
“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.It goes on, but I'll stop there... for the sake of your brain.
Most religions hold that some kind of spirit exists that persists after one’s bodily death and, to some degree, embodies the essence of that human being. Religions may not have all the same beliefs, but they do have a broad agreement that people have souls. Yet the common belief of today has a totally different view. It is inclined to believe that the idea of a soul, distinct from the body and not subject to our known scientific laws, is a myth.
It is quite understandable how this myth arose without today’s scientific knowledge of nature of matter and radiation, and of biological evolution. Such myths, of having a soul, seem only too plausible. For example, four thousand years ago almost everyone believed the earth was flat. Only with modern science has it occurred to us that in fact the earth is round.
From modern science we now know that all living things, from bacteria to ourselves, are closely related at the biochemical level. We now know that many species of plants and animals have evolved over time. We can watch the basic processes of evolution happening today, both in the field and in our test tubes and therefore, there is no need for the religious concept of a soul to explain the behavior of humans and other animals...
Rigoni D, Kühn S, Sartori G, & Brass M (2011). Inducing disbelief in free will alters brain correlates of preconscious motor preparation: the brain minds whether we believe in free will or not. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 22 (5), 613-8 PMID: 21515737
80 comments:
Gazzaniga showed already in the sixties definitively using open brain experiments that conscious awareness trails 0.5 seconds to 1 seconds after the act.
Making the whole notion of free will dubious to say the least.
I'm always amazed at the insistence of mankind to believe he's a free agent.
To my mind this is caused by millenia of social imprint that we are made in the image of god. As such extra super special with extra hot sauce and a supersized ego.
And i wrote the conclusions of this study way back already, i call plagiarism. :)
I don't see the relevance of consciousness here. Why can't a free decision be made unconsciously, and then reported on as a conscious experience?
Like the commentary on a football match, the conscious mind is always dealing with events in the past.
I don't think "will" is the problem. Anyone who has kept a cat knows that animals have wills of their own. The problem is "free". Without a clear definition of "free", the thing is not worth discussing.
As for the "nothing but nerve cells" argument, a book is "nothing but" paper and ink. Yet each book contains different information. It is the information that makes the book important, not the chemistry of the ink.
DC
Interesting. And concerning the subject, a deterministic and pure logic universe is no argument against free will.
Say you have a game of chess. For every move there is basically an infinite number of steps to think ahead although the number of actual possible moves in one turn is limited. Intelligence isn't in the moves but in motivation. An infinite intelligent chess player playing against a likewise opponent trying to figure out the best possible move could as well start writing out all digits of Pi, since every thought step he takes invokes new possibilities. This never stops.
The Mandelbrot set fractal is a fine example on how complex our universe is. The fractal is a graph of a relative simple function f(x)->x^2+C in the complex number field. You can zoom in deeper and deeper anywhere within the figure, only to discover new patterns and symmetries. This never ends.
I'm not sure that these results say anything much about free will one way or another. All it really says is that some of our decision making (particularly that involving simple movement)is not a function of higher consciousness. Whether those decisions are purely deterministic or whether an equivalently free will exists at the unconscious level we don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised if all our behaviour is completely deterministic (or probabilistic), but I don't think we've got the tools to accurately make that determination.
Every scientific theory in the entire history of the world has been either:
1. deterministic
2. stochastic (contains randomness)
Now, which type are you rooting for to provide "free will"?
Cool post. But was it reading about determinism, or the actual belief/lack thereof which altered the RP? For instance, I already was a determinist prior to reading the quote. Will it affect my RP or not? The experiment I think would be better repeated with an additional control group of established determinists. If the effect is a result of a change in belief structures (as opposed to some kind of shorter term priming effect), they should surely show no change?
Bit dodgy of Crick to cite the we-used-to-think-the-world-was-flat exemplar of scientific progress, it's all a little embarrassing given many people did know the world was round, from simple observation of the horizon. Thank you, Andrew Dickson Wright. Better to have gone with geocentricism.
Keetje, I'm really not sure I understand your argument. What has the complexity of the universe as apparently exemplified by chess and a mathematical function have to do with free will? (Btw, there are not infinite possibilities in a game of chess: from any state of the game there are only a finite number of further possible states: a game could in principle proceed indefinitely, but this would be via repeated returns to the same state.)
I have so many questions. Thanks for posting this.
1. Is there any variation on the Libet task that doesn't rely on self reporting? I prefer experiments that don't rely so much on introspection.
2. How does an experimenter tease apart all of the RPs? Maybe there is an RP for thinking about when to decide, then an RP for thinking about trying to remember the position on the clock for the report after doing the task. and if someone talks, or subvocalizes, an RP for that. or someone moves their leg. etc. How do they know which is which?
3. Is there research out there that studies RPs for non motor tasks? Perhaps simple cognitive tasks like a recall test? (though I suppose you would have the problem of the participant doing a motor task when they begin to write down an answer).
4. I am curious as to whether this would persist over the long term, though I realize how hard that would be. But consider the case where these participants were in a psychology course where students were tested on this material. You'd have essays and exams to see how much they absorb and remember the material. If you could get at their attitudes over time to see whether they were persuaded one way or the other, and if you could administer this task over time, and perhaps many semesters later, it would be interesting, no? Maybe the effect goes away and people return to whatever their baseline was.
Following the same reductionist logic:
Computer is just a bunch of transistors connected by wiring - and the fact that electric potential on some of the transistors changes seconds before output on display is produced means that there is no complicated decision making controlling software - everything is governed by voltage differentials between various areas of CPU.
I think there is some problem here with interpretation because "free will" is a loaded term. Instead, I think of this as one way in which a concept is operationalized (detecting a signal pattern) and then drawing conclusions from that.
I am interested in other ways in which researchers have measured how long it takes for a person to be aware that they have "made a decision" in however way that is operationalized.
The Libet tasks seems to be one, what are others?
Stuart: That's a great point about people who are already determinists. My bet would be that they'd be entirely normal so long as they've been one for a while and are "used to it".
One can be conscious and still have no free will, IF the free will definition is confined to "the capacity to make independent decisions based on cognitive functions"
Otoh if you define free will a some new age metaphyscial cosmic event you can argue till the cows come home, because metaphysics are just words without content. Mental masturbation.
Abstract concepts, sloppy in their definition, half understood and badly applied.
Nice for a debating team, totally pointless if you want to reach some conclusion.
This experiment nicely illustrates the conceptual confusion in the Libet task.
For a start, the idea that you can time a neural process with reported external stimuli is laughable (what is the expected latency from making the decision to registering the visual perception?). It is also pretty naive to think that a small mean difference in overall electrical activity somehow neurologically localises the decision in time. And finally, it is pretty hard to see how a deterministic system could fail to have neurological events preceding the decision (conscious or not) since that's the whole point of a deterministic system - and there is constant fluctuating electrical activity to show this.
If you believe in magical non-deterministic 'free will' that is somehow able to affect the brain while being non-causal or deterministic in its mystical platonic realm then dealing with a tiny timing difference is the least of your conceptual problems.
@pj
You cut sopemone head open, you kepe him conscious, you stick an electrode in some part and ask the patient to tell you what he experiences.
Gazzaniga found that even movements of limbs were not perceived consciously till.05 seconds after the event.
The patient could see/feel his limb moving, but still only reported it well after the event.
It stands to reason. The brain has a finite speed, before everything has been processed,evaluated and cross-referenced takes time.
Since the larger part of your body is under primary control of your limbic system you're bound to be aware of what it made your body do till after the fact.
Since that system houses all the basic survival mechanisms it's the first on practically everything that involves interaction and leaves the neocortex to figure out what happened.
Often as not is gets it right.
Also your cognitive functions are subject to influence , if you like the color blue it's not because you cognitively decided you like blue, but because the limbic system has its own preferences and makes them via subtle manipulation of your body.
The neocortex reads that, interprets that and splices that into your conscious flow.
Basically, in the down to earth sense of the phrase, you have no free will.
Just more or less influenced decision making.
pj: I don't think the conceptual confusing is in the Libet task. It's a perfectly good task to measure the processes in decision making. The conceptual confusion is in the concept of "free will", as you say in your last para.
@ petrossa:
Ref?
I know the work of Gazza pretty well, he never did such an experiment. You are probably referring to Libet who has done such experiments. However, the outcome was totally different than you describe.
But whatever, I think most people here are pretty far of the mark, except for one anonymous poster.
Anyway, I think the following is good to keep in mind:
Point 1) Both stochastic theories and deterministic theories exclude free will.
Point 2) There can be no unconscious free will. How can you choose, when you are not even aware of the options?
Point 3) Libet's experiment proves nothing. As one anonymous correctly pointed out: this only speaks to this particular setting, and to an average effect in this setting. So to go from "when you do a f*ck-all task you are sometimes just relying on unconscious urges" to "you are always completely driven by unconscious urges" is a giant, and giantly wrong, induction.
At any rate, cool study though. Especially funny that people who believe less in free will, seem to gain more of it :)
@pj: Though I am no neurologist, I think that we should distinguish between the Libet test qua proof/disproof of free will (or something similar) and the Libet test as applied here. I agree that it seems problematic to use reported observations of time to temporally locate neurological events absolutely; however in the experiment being reported what matters really is the relative difference. If sufficient sampling has been done, and statistical significance reached, then the difference certainly shows something has changed.
Where the problems lie to me is in the assumption that the difference is directly associated with the argumentative content of the read passage. For instance, if we assume (as I implied above) the readers are all expected to find the passage challenging, does this RP change simply reflect having one's beliefs challenged, rather the actual belief challenged? Do people who have deterministic views have shorter RPs, or is it just that the people whose beliefs were challenged may have had a physiological response, a minute surge in adrenaline say, which in my lay knowledge would provide a rational reason to expect a speeding-up of all processes related to decision-making; maybe it could therefore be that even average error due to use of reported time that PJ mentions has changed. Again, this would be easy enough to test for with different controls. Skim's questions, above, really.
But to dismiss the finding simply because of opposition to the use of the concept 'free will' in neurological enquiry — a position I certainly endorse — strikes me as premature. The interpretation of the results may need looking at, but if the results are stastically significant, then there is something wanting explanation, surely?
This paper looks a lot more like psychological hocus pocus than evidence for or against the concept of "free will". As you point out, the control group here is terrible as it does not properly recapitulate the experimental manipulation. There are simply too many alternate explanations, like some kind of cognitive dissonance occurring in the experimental group as they try to interpret this information.
Another issue with these imaging measures is that the units are arbitrary. What does a larger or smaller potential mean? Are variations in these potentials predictive of anything? They could just be measuring a lot of noise that is completely unrelated to this idea of free will. As they fail to control properly for alternate variables (some random piece describing consciousness and a visual distraction task, really!?), this problem becomes distinctly apparent.
And the third key problem is that "free will" cannot be attacked by neuroscience. The concept of free will is based upon the belief in some kind of soul or mind which is separate from the body, in essence dualism. Neuroscience on the other hand posits a monistic worldview, where the mind is produced as a result of the workings of the brain. This directly implies that if the assumptions of neuroscience are correct, then dualism (and, therefore, "free will") cannot exist. If the assumptions are incorrect, then it may exist. And this all boils down to the so-called conflict between science and religion: scientists attempt to understand reality, and religious authorities attempt to discuss things which "we could not possibly understand". The end result being that the attack of science on free will is a silly waste of time. Because the brain creates the mind, it is clear that free will is nothing by a paradoxical concept which can't really be defined or measured--in other words, it's pretty much supernatural hocus pocus.
I wonder, if I spend my time trying to debunk ridiculous supernatural ideas, will I get better publications?
Anonymous said...
@ petrossa:
Ref?
I know the work of Gazza pretty well, he never did such an experiment. You are probably referring to Libet who has done such experiments. However, the outcome was totally different than you describe.
No i'm not reffering to Libet.
The Social Brain by Gazzaniga.(not to be confused with the Ethical brain)
Clearly written in plain language. Hard to misinterpret. He was pretty amazed by it. It's were he talks about his days working with split-brain surgery.
Actually you do find some of it in The Ethical Brain in the endconclusions were he unfolds his theory on consciousness.
Does anyone here have links to explanation, or even research, on RPs in general, so that I could try to find out more about RPs for other types of tasks, including more cognitive ones?
Also, given that the paper mentions motivation altering with the degree of control people feel they have, I am curious as to how that could be controlled in a lab environment.
For example, measure brain activity during leg press exercises. You can measure activity in different scenarios. One scenario could involve increasing the weight until you get just past the point the person has strength to leg press. This would most likely affect how much control a person feels they have over a task. Plus, you'd have some measure of intent having to do with how much force a person decides to apply.
Another thing about this task would be that you could set it up in ways that don't involve self reporting for the person initiating the task. The person initiates the leg press (or something else, say, a button to start a timer for some contrived reason, etc.) and you are varying conditions that would cause amount of control to change etc.
This gives you some profile of brain activity to look at in a simpler way, without the unreliableness of depending on self reporting, before trying something involving self reporting.
And the leg press and button pushing are all motor tasks.
I'd still like to know whether people have profiled activity for things like learning, memory tasks for short term versus long term, etc.
Oh, and one thing I don't like about this type of work in general. It is primitive. You give people tasks and measure brain activity. conclusions about correlations between the tasks and the activity seem haphazard and tenuous. It seems at the beginning of a science. Poke something here and see what happens.
I'll be happier when the experiments are more sophisticated. though, not being an expert, I guess maybe they are and I don't know enough to interpret them.
"antianticamper said...
Every scientific theory in the entire history of the world has been either:
1. deterministic
2. stochastic (contains randomness)"
QM is neither deterministic nor stochastic, therefore QM is not science. QED.
I R smrt, I R rly rly smrt.
Anonymous said:
"So to go from "when you do a f*ck-all task you are sometimes just relying on unconscious urges" to "you are always completely driven by unconscious urges" is a giant, and giantly wrong, induction."
This is exactly the argument that Searle makes. The fact that I can train my neurons to press a button, or to press the keys of a piano, does not mean that all of my decisions are predetermined.
Another anonymous said:
"I don't see the relevance of consciousness here."
Whether or not we have free will it seems to me that we cannot do without the concept that at least some of our decisions are based on free rational choice. Without the idea of free will rationality itself is impossible. Rationality is based on the idea that I can assert the truth or falsehood of a proposition based entirely on it's truth value alone.
If we say a statement is true because it is true that is different than saying it is true because our neurons fired in a way that determined our response. If all our decisions were predetermined from the moment of the big bang then rational discussion is meaningless and it is pointless to even try to argue with anyone on any subject. Whether or not they agree with you has nothing to do with the truth of your claim. Their beliefs were "hardwired" from the beginning of time.
It follows then that your own beliefs are not based on their truth value. You believe what you believe because your neurons have determined that you will believe in this rather than that.
You are a zombie.
@Brenda
"...some of our decisions are based on free rational choice... that is different than saying it is true because our neurons fired in a way that determined our response."
I have to disagree with how it appears you are framing the topic. Our neurons do not "determine" our responses so much as their pattern of firing is a physiological representation of the response itself. Otherwise, you would be right--if my neurons cause this puppet inside my head to think whatever it is they will, then my conscious self would be little more than a puppet. But if those neurons determine my thoughts and actions just as my thoughts and actions determine the activity of my neurons, then we would say that these are one and the same. In effect, the conscious I is in no way separable from my brain. And while I would agree that we can conclude based upon this that your thoughts and actions are in a way "determined" by all those events which have come before, I don't see how this should lead one to believe that therefore one does not have "choice" (at least in the relevant sense) or that this makes you a zombie.
I think that the key issue here is that "free will" does not actually make conceptual sense as it implies that humans have a form of agency which is not derived from worldly existence, but which (presumably) is divinely endowed. This is essentially a paradoxical concept, as it suggests that while I am entirely created by the reality within which I exist, I must somehow have a form of control over my actions which is beyond the bounds of this reality. (How can I have an existence which is separate from reality?) Once we get past this concept of a will which is "free", I do not see why a deterministic universe is problematic for rationality to have meaning. All people come into existence as a result of events which have occurred in this reality. We cannot control these events, nor how they have affected the development of our conscious selves. In this sense, the existence of consciousness is determined by past events, but it does not imply that all your actions are "pre-determined" or that they can be predicted. Your actions come about as a confluence of an infinite series of events which (at least to my mind) are so far beyond conception as to make the question of whether one has made a "free" decision or one which has been "determined" completely moot. I may not be "free" in the technical sense, but I am a unique person who can produce my own conscious thoughts and make my own decisions. While I am driven by factors which are beyond my control, likely beyond control in any sense, this does not uncouple my thoughts from their rational basis. I can still "choose" to make breakfast for myself tomorrow at 9 AM. I just cannot pretend that this choice was based upon anything other than the factors which caused me to be both hungry and prepared to cook food at that time.
The question which I ask would ask is, "By what means could reality function other than thus?"
@ petrossa: thx for the effort, but that's not a reference. Please point me to page numbers, or a chapter.
At any rate, I think you are just bluffing. The result you claim that Gazza found would be spectacular, yet it is never published in a peer-reviewed journal...
Also, it would be a much stronger result than Libet found, and still no one ever refers to it, rather, everyone refers to the weaker finding by Libet.
@Brenda: I think you may be on to something with your rationality argument. However, you might want to expand it (it is not completely convincing in this short form).
I may be mistaken, but I think your point is something as follows.
Let's imagine the following. I will just perform something like Searle's chinese room experiment. So I will get totally meaningless input, and through a bunch of rules I will produce totally meaningless output.
Now I get to do this fun game with different sets of rules. How am I to decide which of these rule-sets produces true responses?
Actually, without any comprehension of both input and output, this is an impossible task. However, and this is the key argument, if all our thoughts, etc., are just automated responses, then there really is no difference between blindly following meaningless rules, and consciously following rules. In both cases, it is just the rules that determine the outcome. We may have all kinds of illusions in the conscious case, but really, both cases are entirely equivalent. And since it is obvious that in the unconscious case there is no way to decide what is true, the same holds for the conscious case.
Or to rephrase, if it is not the case that our being conscious adds anything to following rules to produce responses, then there is no way to decide which rule-sets produces truer results. So it is impossible to say that emotional arguments are not better than rational arguments.
Yet, the whole of science is based on the assumption that we are able to distinguish true from untrue, and that it is true (and knowable) that ratio trumps emotion. So, science assumes free will (or more to the point: that being conscious of input and then producing output is not equivalent to blindly producing output based on rules). Which in case gives us two options: or science is bogus (and scientific arguments cannot be used to prove determinism), or science is not bogus, and determinism is false.
That is kind of your argument right?
But if I am my brain, and my brain decides to move before I decide to move, then that means I decide to move before I decide to move. >.<
Or freewill is a pre-conscious function of self, and the Libet Task simply flags up the time-lag between an act of freewill and one's conceptualisation of having decided to act.
@anonymous
You mistakenly assume that i care if you accept it or not. You don't want to know it, don't.
The logic is evident though.
All actions are integrated afterwards in the storytellers timeline. There's no way no how that the storyteller can operate in real time.
Just imagine the computing power needed to process all data centrally in real time. Doesn't fit in your skull.
So events get processed parallel, by subroutines, and afterwards the results get integrated and you become 'aware'.
There is absolutely no other way to do this with the +/- 100 million mips of computing power of the brain.
(deep blue had 3 million mips and all it could do is play chess)
But feel free to believe in man's superiority, that conscience has some kind of meaning or purpose.
To me it's just a side-effect that's busy selfdestructing. An evolutionary deadend sidetrack.
Call me in another 100.000 years if we're still around. I seriously doubt if it'll be more then 10.000 at the going rate.
Which makes us a pretty unsuccessful species survival wise. And that is the bottomline, survival of the species.
@ petrossa: if you don't care about sharing knowledge: why post at all?
Anyway: I asked you for a specific chapter or page reference, and rather than giving that, now you decide that you don't care anymore about enlightening me. Too bad.
It's not that I don't want to know that Gazza did these experiments. I'd love to know. I just don't think it's true, but a specific page reference within a book could obviously change my mind.
@anonymous
Never ceases to amaze me people looking to score points rather then argue anything.
I read the book years ago, when it first came out. I am supposed to remember the page? Or go through my storage looking for the book to look for the page?
Accept it or don't. I passed on the knowledge, my job is done. You want to find it? Go buy the book. Go to the library and find it there, read the whole book.
That's what a book does, placing things in context. It's not wikipedia with some random sources which may or may not pertain to the material at hand.
This is going seriously wrong with the snap it up generation of schooling. Read a title here, and abstract there, everywhere but don't read books.
I'm getting old. In my time, granpah said, we had actual books in class which we had to study. We couldn't go online and read a review or a synthesis.
Wikipedia handn't yet fouled up the internet with 3rd rate, biased, false, semi knowledge.
/rant
classy reply Petrossa.
Also, very convincing. Would pass as a ref in any scientific article anytime.
Next time, just tell someone who asks for a ref: just google it somewhere, you lazy kid!
And no, I'm not looking to score points, I just wanted to have the actual ref, instead of wasting my money on a book that probably doesn't even contain the stuff you talk about, since it would be hugely amazing (as I pointed out before), if Gazza really did that experiment, but somehow no-one in the scientific community picked up on it.
Anyway, I guess you just admitted not having the book, and just vaguely recalling this stuff from something you read years ago.
No problem of course, but somewhat misleading to assert this as reliable fact. Both you and I know how shaky memory can be.
brain models that embody freedom are presented at:
www.quadnets.com
see also "New developments in freedom" at:
www.kovsky.com
@petrossa, that was rude and unhelpful.
Many people are avid readers but when it comes to chasing down details want more than just some pop science book to refer to.
If you don't have the book around you could try searching in google books to pull up a result. I don't have good keywords to search on, given that I am unfamiliar with the material, but I did a search on "Gazzaniga" and "movement" which pulled up results. I don't know if the results are related to the experiment you are trying to remember.
One example,
Handbook of cognitive neuroscience By Michael S. Gazzaniga, page 33 has a page with a reference to a paper by Gazzaniga on split-brain monkeys. etc.
"The Social Brain" is not as searchable, it appears, The Social Brain, page 84, page 121. the results are very small fragments.
If you have better keywords for a search inside of the book, you might get lucky than I did depending on how much of the book was scanned and is searchable.
Then maybe there will be enough details for @Anon to go on, or also you might realize you were thinking of some other experiment, etc.
no need to make the ungenerous assumptions you did.
I've put forward a valid argument after:
'The logic is evident though.'
That gets ignored but a big fuzz is being made because one has to do homework.
I wasn't trying to be helpful. So obviously my post wasn't helpful. It was a rant.
I was pointing out that people want their info in bytesizes. That discussion of a theory is impossible if
you don't have some link to somewhere.
If it isn't online to be found within 5 seconds it doesn't exist.
That this is sad reflection upon the direction 'science' is going.
Once it was the territory of open minds who wanted to understand why. Which lead to great discoveries
Nowadays it's the territory of bureaucrats, accountant and weirdo's
Here's a link for you of how 'science' works nowadays.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028124.600-sex-on-the-brain-orgasms-unlock-altered-consciousness.html?full=true#bx281246B1
Take clueless person, put in fMRI, draw absurd conclusions.
One wonders how they did it in the early 20th century. Was everybody smarter back then or did we get more stupid?
@lechatdargent
Actually, no it doesn't. Based upon our current understanding, your brain doesn't "decide to move" prior to the decision actually happening. The brain activity we are measuring (prior to the decision being made) could be conceptualized as the formation of a decision--essentially the processes which must occur for my brain to decide how I will act. My conscious perception of this decision then would only occur after such processes are complete, producing a new state of brain activity which represents my conscious perception of the decision. Or at least, this is how we would hypothesize this process to occur.
But really, what's the counter hypothesis? That our brains exist in a paradoxical state of having both made and not made a decision at the same time? That's just fluff for people who wish to deny that brain activity produces conscious perception.
Pseudonymoniae said...
"I have to disagree with how it appears you are framing the topic. Our neurons do not "determine" our responses so much as their pattern of firing is a physiological representation of the response itself."
That is the claim that epiphenominalism makes, that our conscious minds have *nothing* to do with our behavior. It just goes along for the ride and has no more to do with reality than the froth on a wave. We can imagine the froth *believing* it is doing all the work of making those waves reach the shore, "Boy it sure is hard work!" says the froth. But we know that is an illusion. The froth has NO real effect in the world.
I don't know what else it could mean to say that free will is an illusion. If you deny free will then you must assert epiphenominalism.
"I think you may be on to something with your rationality argument."
It's not actually mine, it's Searle's. These are the arguments he makes in his lectures. I am not a student of his however, just a podcast listener. I don't even necessarily believe everything he says, but I have a hard time refuting any of it.
"Let's imagine the following. I will just perform something like Searle's chinese room experiment. [...] How am I to decide which of these rule-sets produces true responses?"
The rules are givens. The Chinese Room experiment is intended to dispute the strong AI hypothesis (by pointing out that syntax is insufficient for semantics). Which is that conscious minds are computer programs. I think it has succeeded as no one believes in strong AI any more.
(cont)
"Or to rephrase, if it is not the case that our being conscious adds anything to following rules to produce responses, then there is no way to decide which rule-sets produces truer results. So it is impossible to say that emotional arguments are not better than rational arguments."
Consciousness cannot be rule bound behavior. It cannot be a matter of following rules either consciously or not. In order to follow a rule you have to have a meta rule, but in order to follow that meta rule you have to have a meta meta rule and so on.
"Which in case gives us two options: or science is bogus (and scientific arguments cannot be used to prove determinism), or science is not bogus, and determinism is false."
I think that science gives us true facts about the world. I cannot refute determinism. I can only raise questions and point out how much we depend on the idea that we are free rational moral agents able to effect the world. I think that we will eventually, though not in our lifetimes, be able to construct minds from "stuff" but we're nowhere near understanding how brains produce conscious minds. I am quite certain that our consciousness is *not* just a Von Neumann machine implemented in our wetware. Same is true for the cognitive program, same for functionalism too(or token identity, or behaviorism ect.)
I think that the fact that there is something it is like to be me, that I have a first person ontology, and the fact that I feel conscious is enough for me to be conscious. Just as if I feel as if I am in pain, then I am in pain. So too if I feel I am conscious, then I must be. I cannot be a p-zombie.
Lastly
petrossa said...
"All actions are integrated afterwards in the storytellers timeline. There's no way no how that the storyteller can operate in real time."
The story teller, the self, is not merely a passive aggregator but can itself act. I decide to raise my arm and the damn thing goes up. Amazing! It is not the case that we say "Oh well, that's the thing about arms, some days they go up, some days they don't". I can act intentionally in the world, I have intentional causation.
"So events get processed parallel, by subroutines, and afterwards the results get integrated and you become 'aware'."
Parallelism does not solve the Chinese Room problem because what the CR shows is that no Von Neumann machine machine, even a parallel one, can derive semantic content, meaning, from syntax.
Conscious minds have intentionality, we place conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction. If I raise my arm to indicate a vote, "everyone who wants pizza raise your arm", then my raising my arm has semantic content. If however I have a twitch and just happen to raise my arm at that time, then I have not voted. I have to intend to raise it.
But no Von Neumann machine can intend to do anything. Your PC is a purely syntactic device. The whole point, and the power, of a PC is to remove all semantic content and just manipulate symbols. For that very reason no PC or connection machine can become conscious.
@Brenda
I think you mis-understand my post as I clearly state that the conscious mind is one and the same with brain activity:
"[My] neurons determine my thoughts and actions just as my thoughts and actions determine the activity of my neurons".
This statement indicates a monistic theory of mind which directly contradicts epiphenomenalism and is representative of the point I was attempting to get across in the quoted text.
As to the concept of free will, my main concern is with the term "free". In my opinion, it implies a supernatural force of will that is disconnected from the physical reality. There is no reason to believe that our conscious minds work in this way. However, I do support the idea that as a human I do have the ability to make choices, to act "willfully" as it were. However, freedom, in this sense, is bounded by the rules of a deterministic universe, such that all of the events that lead to a given moment in time and all of the interacting events which are occurring at this moment will cause me to act in a way that is perfectly predictable (i.e. a perfect correlation), assuming all of this information is known.
With this in mind, I do not see my actions as being coerced or "pre-determined" as there is no way to predict how each and every event at any level (atomic, molecular, macroscopic) will occur at the time that I make my decision. I think this position on the role of will is somewhere between asserting that free will can exist in a determinist universe and stating that it cannot. This is likely a point of confusion with respect to my previous post.
@Brenda
I see consciousness as a side effect. And that therefore it's totally dependent on the supporting networks that cause it.
This paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008429
I wrote of the authors my views:
"With interest i read your paper on self and the reward system.
I have some thoughts on the subject which I’d like to share. Self being an abstract construct created as a sideeffect by the copious data processing necessary to maintain our specific adaptation of a survival/procreation system it itself has no added value since it’s not really there. It doesn’t depend on any specific brainstructure to operate, it depends on all neural networks humming along. What imho you have found is a part of this underlying dataprocessing system which by its function contributes to the abstract."
and pointed him to my little piece on free will.
he said:
"From: xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xxxxxxxx@rohcg.on.ca]
Sent: zaterdag 14 mei 2011 5:49
To: msn
Subject: RE: Your paper, Is Our Self Nothing but Reward?
Hello
Thank you for the thoughtful comments which make good sense to me.
"
Either he is the most kind and gentle person on earth who has nothing better to do then answer random emails from strangers or he really thinks so.
Imo conscious decisions are completely under the influence of the limbic input. You don't take a decision on the storytellers initiative.
You take it based on a trigger.
In my article i use the following analogue:
"Imagine that our awareness is the flow across the Collector and Emitter of a Transistor. The Base in this analogue is the limbic system, tiny fluctuations can have a big effect on our storyteller.
This works well also to explain the difference between low and highly emotional people.
A transistor has a specific gain, that is how much the Base current influences the Collector/Emitter flow. With the same Base current you can have a big influence or small influence depending on that gain.
As such we are totally at the mercy of our limbic system, but in some it shows more then others."
http://petrossa.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/free-will-does-it-exist/
okay, just bought the book online (the social brain by Gazzaniga). I'll probably have it within a week,and then i'll immediately browse through it to see if the experiment petrossa mentioned is in there.
I'll keep you guys posted!
Anon: Is this a pissing contest? You sound hot so why not shag it off?
Petrossa: The author is probably a prick.
I've read what you've written because I respect exquisite minds even if I don't always agree. I'm not an expert on neural networks to comment, but you seem to present a legit argument than the authors in support of what this study is trying to say. De-centering the self and the value of self is something that's still being debated. In Christianity they refer to the Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit to explain for this connection. Having said that, I really hope you don't tell your children: conscience - morals, evil, good, has no meaning or purpose, and survival of the fittest is all there is to life, so enjoy your hedonistic pursuits little ones.
One could regard truth without conscience, as falsehoods covered in bloodstains. Rightly so - some truths kill people. I believe we have a duty to ensure the next generation don't go insane. The 'survival of humanity' as opposed to the 'survival of the fittest' is something religious leaders (including ministers.. members of parliament) and philosophers (concepts like democracy, freedom, evil) work on, and have done so for thousands of years.
Science is but one discipline, the faithful are not. We should respect the fact man has a soul which has been like the foundation of knowledge established for thousands of years.. Plato, Aristotle, classical antiquity and so on. Science is yet to have an argument here, and they should if they're going to debunk the existence of soul in a rational manner. The general consensus among physicists is the possibility of different universes and even aliens. The church takes this to be dimensions for consciousness, life after death, spirits etc. So perhaps science will eventually catch up?
Psalm 115:6&7
Noses they have, but they do not smell;
They have hands, but they do not handle;
Feet they have, but they do not walk;
Nor do they mutter through their throat.
Am I making sense to anyone? Do my cryptic innuendos mean anything to anyone? The free will debate is an ongoing task for theologians/philosophers because they have the expertise and experience to do so. Let's be pragmatic, what practical solutions can neuroscientists offer in a way of explanation for let's say a demon? Sh-t b-tch get away from me you don't exist? Science is not there yet.
This study reeks of a poorly designed Pavlovian experiment. Perhaps they felt too bothered to delve into well established scientific theories on reaction time, latency, choice, noise etc. in relation to consciousness etc. So little did they think about the concept of 'free will', they used Crick's vomit as a definitive guide. The dude who thinks the world is run by evil blue aliens out to galactically zap the world. I'd imagine this book was not only discredited by the world but by 'aliens' too.
This study once again demonstrates how out-of-hand the scientific community seems to be getting. They ought to make budding scientists study meta-stuff like metaphysics - time, consciousness, rational agent etc. and impose guidelines, pass a bill even, penalize self-serving irresponsible crack pots who should know better.
Great stuff. Thanks for making the effort. It's a bit scary reading since he's conducting experiments which would be considered highly unethical nowadays.
I found a link with his older work on split-brain operations:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16062172
There's also a fun part about religion in there. Got his book somewhat 'semi banned' at the time.
this is me, brenda, something changed in how blogger does whatever it does. I don't know why but I can't use my google account.
Pseudonymoniae said...
"I think you mis-understand my post as I clearly state that the conscious mind is one and the same with brain activity:"
I don't believe I misunderstood you. I agree that minds are the result of brains activity, I don't agree that cognitive theorists or AI theorists have it right.
"This statement indicates a monistic theory of mind.."
I disagree with your monism. I'm not a monist or a dualist. I find the arguments against materialism convincing. Dualists look at the world and count two substances, monists count to one. I think the whole idea of counting is wrong. I need to explain these things because invariably the online Village Atheist thinks that anyone who doesn't agree with them must be a religious fundamentalist, like they are.
"As to the concept of free will, my main concern is with the term "free". In my opinion, it implies a supernatural force of will that is disconnected from the physical reality."
I am pretty sure that it would be easy to construct a definition of free will if one accepts a sufficiently deterministic freedom. I believe that _I_ am able to freely act in the world, that I am not a puppet or a sham.
It appears to me that I am able to freely choose among alternatives. This is quite unlike rote behaviors like raising one's arm or pushing a button.
"With this in mind, I do not see my actions as being coerced or "pre-determined" as there is no way to predict how each and every event at any level"
That you cannot predict an event does not imply that it is not pre-determined. Chaos theory describes how a system can be rigidly deterministic while future states are unpredictable.
Brenda
------------------
petrossa said...
You refer to a paper on novelty seeking behavior, advance your pet theory, the author agrees with you, claim victory.
This is an invalid argument structure. It does not follow from the fact that some researcher agrees with you that your argument is true.
[some stuff about transistors]
I don't think consciousness is a transistor or in any way comparable to one.
I do not believe we are puppets, you appear to, congratulations.
Blogger.com has changed something so I am logging in any-mouse-ly
Brenda
------------
Pseudonymoniae said...
"I think you mis-understand my post as I clearly state that the conscious mind is one and the same with brain activity:"
I don't believe I misunderstood you. I agree that minds are the result of brains activity, I don't agree that cognitive theorists or AI theorists have it right.
"This statement indicates a monistic theory of mind.."
I disagree with your monism. I'm not a monist or a dualist. I find the arguments against materialism convincing. Dualists look at the world and count two substances, monists count to one. I think the whole idea of counting is wrong. I need to explain these things because invariably the online Village Atheist thinks that anyone who doesn't agree with them must be a religious fundamentalist, like they are.
"As to the concept of free will, my main concern is with the term "free". In my opinion, it implies a supernatural force of will that is disconnected from the physical reality."
I am pretty sure that it would be easy to construct a definition of free will if one accepts a sufficiently deterministic freedom. I believe that _I_ am able to freely act in the world, that I am not a puppet or a sham.
It appears to me that I am able to freely choose among alternatives. This is quite unlike rote behaviors like raising one's arm or pushing a button.
"With this in mind, I do not see my actions as being coerced or "pre-determined" as there is no way to predict how each and every event at any level"
That you cannot predict an event does not imply that it is not pre-determined. Chaos theory describes how a system can be rigidly deterministic while future states are unpredictable.
Brenda
-----------
With regard to split brain experiments I think that once the subjects recovered there were two conscious minds present. However one is completely non-verbal.
@ano
There were rare occasions were the language center was bilateral, or on the other hemisphere. You'll find reference in the book. Fascinating stuff. Now that i think about it i'll rebuy it rather then try to find it.
@brenda
I've never made such a claim. Robots. I just penned down the biological makeup of the brain in very very simplistic terms but accurate nonetheless.
The limbic system isn't a robot, it's a conscious entity. Just not vocal.
For that it uses what you call 'you'.
'us' is just vastly overrated.
Stuart Brown: I too am struggling to post here under a signed in account. Here's what I tried to post:
Oh, I'm really enjoying the fight out here. My money's with epiphenomenalism. Brenda, your argument seem to rely quite strongly on John Searle, who to my mind fails quite badly. Firstly, he does not reject epiphenomenalism particularly well (that I have seen, at least); he generally falls back on a 'oh no that can't be right, we don't like the sound of that' argument. Secondly, I find his line about 'non-counting' between dualism and monism that you reflected to be a little facile. Dualism does not have to involve 'counting' in a simplistic way, it is simply the position that non-material processes are responsible for the mind. It is a coincidence that the name for it involves a numerical reference.
The reliance on 'semantic content', the Chinese Room argument seems to me to fail against epiphenomalism; the act can be defined purely behaviourally, the 'semantic content' is entirely in the epiphenomenal qualia. That is, Searle says that the only difference between the Chinese Room robot and the person who speaks Chinese is that when you ask the Chinese Room what is the capital of Mongolia and it replies Ulan Batur it has not 'understood', merely acted as an automaton. Searle fails to explain what this magic 'understanding' is, and where it lies, given that the behavioural difference is indistinguishable.
I'm with those who think Searle is either a dualist or an epiphenomenalist, no matter what he claims, because either we interpret him as saying that 'understanding' and 'semantic content' have a measurable effect on behaviour -- in which case he is defining a non-material system that affects the material word = dualism, or alternatively 'understanding' and 'semantic content' do not interact with the material world, simply supervene upon it, in which case all he is doing is defining the locus by which epiphenomenalism arises.
@veri: Aristotle also thought the sun orbited the earth. Shall we follow him on this too? Your 'innuendos' are hardly 'cryptic', they are more in the way of evangelical proselytising. However, When I meet a demon, I shall be sure to come to you for pragmatic advice. Probably best not to wait by the phone, though.
Brenda here
-----------------
Anonymous said...
"Oh, I'm really enjoying the fight out here."
This is a fight? It seems to me we're having a pretty respectful debate.
"your argument seem to rely quite strongly on John Searle, [...] he generally falls back on a 'oh no that can't be right, we don't like the sound of that' argument."
His claim is that conscious entities are self evident and that this phenomenon requires an explanation. Higher level animals are self evidently conscious, to varying degrees, because they have features similar to our own and we know we are conscious. There is something that it is like to be me or you. There is nothing that it is like to be a database of bits on a hard drive.
"Dualism does not have to involve 'counting' in a simplistic way"
Sure it does, it says there are two substances in the universe, matter and mind. Are you unfamiliar with what Descartes actually said?
it is simply the position that non-material processes are responsible for the mind."
In 300 years no one has satisfactorily explained how something immaterial can interact with material bodies. How exactly can a spirit cause my arm to raise?
"the Chinese Room argument seems to me to fail"
Searle's position is now being taught in cognitive neurobiology depts.
"the act can be defined purely behaviourally"
Behaviorism is insufficient to explain consciousness. See Chomsky's "B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior".
"when you ask the Chinese Room what is the capital of Mongolia and it replies Ulan Batur it has not 'understood', merely acted as an automaton. Searle fails to explain what this magic 'understanding' is, and where it lies"
This is not the objective of the CR. It's point is to refute strong AI. This can be stated more directly as:
"Premise 1: Implemented programs are syntactical processes.
Premise 2: Minds have semantic contents.
Premise 3: Syntax by itself is neither sufficient for nor constitutive of semantics.
Conclusion: Therefore, the implemented programs are not by themselves constitutive of, nor sufficient for, minds. In short, Strong Artificial Intelligence is false."
(continued)
(cont)
"we interpret him as saying that 'understanding' and 'semantic content' have a measurable effect on behaviour"
Of course they do. So... you are claiming that you do not intend or mean to do anything, ever!? Really? You are in a class, the teacher asks those who do not wish to take the test to raise their arms.
Case 1. You are not paying attention and you have a twitch and coincidentally raise your arm when everyone else does.
Case 2. You understand the teacher and don't intend to take the test. You raise your arm to signal your intentional condition.
Case 1 does not have semantic content because there was no intention on your part that raising your arm should signal your desire to take the test. Case 2 does have semantic meaning. Raising my arm is not enough to constitute signaling my intent. I have to actually mean it.
Meaning is _assigned_ to things and events in the world. Humans place conditions of satisfaction, that I intend to raise my arm, on conditions of satisfaction, that I did raise my arm. This is key to understanding language. Intentionality cannot be hand waved away.
@brenda
The paper http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008429 you dismissed without reading it addresses exactly your points, and shows them to be a result of a reward feedback system.
I wish people would read the stuff and not jump to conclusions from the abstract.
The title even says as much:
Is Our SELF Nothing but Reward?
The paper puts forward that conscious acts/decisions are the result of the feedback with the reward system.
As such not free choice, but just the result of circuits interacting.
I otoh dismiss all comments based on metaphysics, especially were one goes NAME says, other NAME says.
Those people didn't have a clue, they started out from the false basepoint that Self is a uniquely superior thing with vast meaning.
And any argument based on a false assumption can be pure logic and still not worth the effort of reading it.
Sorry to everyone who had problems logging in. No idea what's going on, I've got no error messages from Blogger and I haven't changed anything.
A lot of new posts on this thread are also getting marked as spam for some reason. So if you post and it doesn't appear don't worry it's not deleted and I'll approve it asap.
Yup, very nice discussion here. Thoroughly enjoying it. @Stuart Brown: I agree with you, I think Searle is a dualist in materialist clothes. Also, I think he wants to have his cake and eat it too. Either consciousness is irreducible to matter, and materialism is false, or it is reducible,and dualism is false. He wants to believe in materialism and irreducibility of consciousness, a clear contradiction.
On the topic of split-brain patients. Actually I've just conducted extensive experiments with 2 split-brain patients myself, and it is really not that clear cut that there are two conscious entities in there. In fact, Gazza severely overstated the data, and I think a sober assessment would actually suggest that they have functional disabilities, but that there is still just one subject in there. The problem, of course, is that we have no definitive way to determine conscious unity (in the same way that we have no 'consciousness-measuring' device.
But then, back on topic. I think some things get confused here. As Brenda correctly points out: determinism implies predictability in principal. Just because we can't do it in practice is not relevant. Otherwise my stupidity (or incapability) would create someone else's free will.
And as Petrossa rightfully points out, considering our current understanding of matter, materialism excludes free will. Moreover, nearly every neuro-scientist currently does not believe in free will.
However, the emphasis here is on believe. There is currently near universal believe in determinism and materialism in the neuro-scientific community, but there is no proof. We find that brain states correlate rather neatly (although much less neat than the average layman thinks) to conscious states, but this is correlation, no causation or equation.
Last thing I'd like to add: Soon et al., 2008 (Nature Neuroscience) have basically replicated Libet's experiment with fMRI, and found predictors of behavior upto 10 seconds before people acted.
@ano
But all that is circular reasoning. We believe we exist as autonomous agents, so anything we do or think is based on that assumption.
All abstract concepts we come up with are all founded in this assumption.
Our most famous quote says it all: cogito ergo sum.
More circular then that you can't get. The definition defines itself. Evidently that can never be proven wrong.
As such it's not a valid scientific basis, but belief system.
And everyone knows were discussing beliefs leads to.
The only way to get a finger behind is to see the Self for what it is. A massive dataprocessing system producing a complex feedback loop.
Everything more defined then that already implies definition of self by self. Ad inifinitum.
Gazzaniga's conclusions i find very acceptable. Don't forget that split-brain operations in his day were the almost total separation of the 2 hemispheres. It's only later on they started to realize one could do with just a tiny nick.
His experiments and experiences can't be duplicated anymore since most of the subjects are to old, gone or have integrated somehow.
So it's impossible to come to any real conclusion on his work nowadays.
It's a bit like the nazi experiments. Everyone was happy to use the results after the war, but noway can you ethically reproduce them anymore.
All that's left is fMRI which is to me just a confirmation bias machine.
Thanks for the aside on Soon et al. I found Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. which is not open access; however, many articles that cite it are.
brenda in reply
--------------
petrossa said...
@brenda
"I wish people would read the stuff and not jump to conclusions from the abstract."
I am not interested in what someone else says, I'm interested in what _you_ say. You have little to contribute, all you've done is flame people and point.
I think that we pull our own strings and the free rational choice can operate in that situation. I would also remind you that information flows bidirectionally in the brain. Deeper parts can influence the cerebral cortex and it can influence the limbic system in return. Saying that the self is puppet to a reward system seems close to the homunculus fallacy.
"I otoh dismiss all comments based on metaphysics"
Dismissing metaphysics is itself a metaphysical position. It seems common among atheists and unemployed engineers to make logical positivist claims to truth. I think it's a bad idea.
A little mouse named brenda said to another little mouse who said:
Either consciousness is irreducible to matter, and materialism is false, or it is reducible,and dualism is false. He wants to believe in materialism and irreducibility of consciousness, a clear contradiction.
It's only a contradiction if you accept the Cartesian frame that mind and matter are two different things. I would also reject your claim that reductionism is the only alternative to dualism and by implication that all scientific explanation must be reductionist. It is simply a fact that a great deal of science is not at all reductionist. This idea is a modern attempt to reanimate the dead corpse of positivism.
Mathematics is not Nature's own language. Science is not the activity of discovering eternal truths or uncovering the "real world" behind mere appearances.
---------
Petrossa said:
The only way to get a finger behind is to see the Self for what it is. A massive dataprocessing system producing a complex feedback loop."
Well that is a claim that a software engineer would make. So far you've not presented a valid argument as to why it must be true.
Stuart here
-----------
@Brenda: Firstly, my 'fight' coment was meant light-heartedly, apoligies if you took offence. Now to business:
You quoted me saying: "Dualism does not have to involve 'counting' in a simplistic way" and replied "Sure it does, it says there are two substances in the universe, matter and mind. Are you unfamiliar with what Descartes actually said?"
I am indeed familiar with Descartes, and other proponents of dualism. I am also familiar with Searle's line about 'not counting' that you used. I was merely rephrasing the dualist concept in a way that did not actually involve numbers simply to illustrate how facile a line it is. You now seem have suddenly found the ability to count, after all, so I hope we can put this aspect of the matter to rest.
You then quoted me saying "it is simply the position that non-material processes are responsible for the mind," and replied "In 300 years no one has satisfactorily explained how something immaterial can interact with material bodies. How exactly can a spirit cause my arm to raise?" Indeed. I was describing dualism, not endorsing it. I wonder, is 'intentionality' material or nonmaterial? More on this, below.
In response to my comment "
"the Chinese Room argument seems to me to fail" you offered the fact that "Searle's position is now being taught in cognitive neurobiology depts," and I am very pleased for Searle, seriously I am. However, having a mind (or at least a bunch of neurons) of my own, I shall form my own opinion on whether I accept his position or not, regardless of where and by whom he is taught.
You then replied to my comment "the act can be defined purely behaviourally" with "Behaviorism is insufficient to explain consciousness. See Chomsky's 'B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior'." With respect, Chomsky is a Platonist and an idealist, and his opinions on pretty much everything I find totally unsupportable. I suggest you take any page of his writing at random, remove the hedges, the 'abstracting away from's, the groundless generalizations, and see where it leaves you. Behaviourism may not explain consciousness, but it is sufficient to explain meaning. If I shout 'Fire' in a crowded theatre, a whole bunch of amygdalas will leap into action. Everyone may then create themselves a bit of a narrative about meaning, but the actual response of their brains is measurable in terms of neuronal activity.
(I too will continue)
Stuart continues
----------------
Big quote from Brenda now:
Of course they do. So... you are claiming that you do not intend or mean to do anything, ever!? Really? You are in a class, the teacher asks those who do not wish to take the test to raise their arms.
Case 1. You are not paying attention and you have a twitch and coincidentally raise your arm when everyone else does.
Case 2. You understand the teacher and don't intend to take the test. You raise your arm to signal your intentional condition.
Case 1 does not have semantic content because there was no intention on your part that raising your arm should signal your desire to take the test. Case 2 does have semantic meaning. Raising my arm is not enough to constitute signaling my intent. I have to actually mean it.
You have to mean to do it, I concur. But that intention is a brain state, and can therefore be defined in terms of some configuration of neurons firing. And this is where you and Searle jsut leave me totally lost. Intentionality is simply higher-order language. Just as a biologist could speak of "digestion" prior to a detailed understanding of the specific chemical reactions that were involved, but be confident that the phenomena was entirely chemical, so 'intentionality' as far as I am concerned is a higher-order term for a certain, as yet unmapped, set of neuronal processes.
This is where Searle and you end up being dualists. EITHER intentionality is as I have described it, or it is not, in which case it is magic ghost. Saying you are not counting, or denying dualism in other ways does not stop it being so.
I am aware that Searle uses the concept of intentionality as 'representing' or somehow connecting with the material world to try and ground it, but again this jsut leaves me lost. I intend to go to Brasilia tomorrow. Many people intend to go to heaven, but such a place does not exist. Now, either these intentions are basically one and the same type of thing, in which case they cannot actually have any kind of real relationship with the material world as heaven is not a part of it (@veri's opinions notwithstanding), or they are qualitatively different, the latter being merely a product of brain states, but the former the product of this magic mind-world interaction that is Searlian intentionality. In this latter case, you end up implying the extraordinary position that we all have a full and complete knowledge of what does and does not, can and cannot exist. Roll on Leibniz's monads!
As another Anonymous and I have said, Searle is just a dualist dressed up in material clothes, no matter how much he protests otherwise. Whether or not that is taught in Berkele's neurocog dept.
I BELIEVE we pull our own strings and the free rational choice can operate in that situation.
There fixed it for you.
I would also remind you that information flows bidirectionally in the brain. Deeper parts can influence the cerebral cortex and it can influence the limbic system in return.
You forgot: In my opinion.
Please expand on the direct mechanism involved. Which connections transmit these bidirectional interactions exactly?
Granted it's been awhile i studied the stuff, but afiak the vertical connections between the two layers are sparse and insignificant.
Compared to the Corpus Callosum they are so minimal as to not matter at all.
If such direct influence would exist it would need an important means of direct connection.
The only way to my mind how this supposed interaction could work is via indirect routes.
Which is exactly what i proposed.
Saying that the self is puppet to a reward system
If you'd bothered to actually read what i wrote i pointed out that very issue to one of the authors of the paper. To which he responded postively.
Dismissing metaphysics is itself a metaphysical position. It seems common among atheists and unemployed engineers to make logical positivist claims to truth. I think it's a bad idea
You'll do great in a student debating team i'm sure. In a discussion that leads anywhere i'm not so sure. Your statement contained no information.
Well that is a claim that a software engineer would make. So far you've not presented a valid argument as to why it must be true.
Broad sweeping statement not based on facts in evidence. I've offered plenty of valid arguments. At least i have yet to a proper rebuttal that doesn't involve ad homini and/or appeal to authority.
Denial isn't a rebuttal.
@ petrossa:
I just did experiments with split-brain patients who had a full callosotomy. So no taking a nick away, they had their full corpus callosum removed. And yes, these operations are still being carried out (although they are more cautious to do this, then back in the days).
Petrossa, I appreciate your comments, but it's a little bit annoying if you lecture someone on his own expertise. I like your reasoning and the way you build your arguments, but sometimes you assert things as facts ('they don't do full callosotomies anymore'), that are blatantly untrue. Please stay modest, and do not assert things with certainty that you don't know for sure.
Then @brenda: I sympathize with your (and Searle's) position. Of course, I also have the intuitive hunch that I'm really choosing my own actions, and of course, I'd like to cling to materialism too. However, you can't have it both ways. Putting quantum mechanics aside for the moment, every piece of matter is completely deterministic. So you could say every piece of matter is a small robot. No matter how robots interact, or how many robots you put together, the end result is inevitably another (bigger, more complex) robot. Or to rephrase, if all your building blocks are deterministic, then the end-result inevitably is deterministic as well.
And then about 'consciousness can be irreducible, yet just another piece of matter'. That is the core of dualism versus materialism discussion. Consciousness is irreducible means that you cannot say: consciousness is material interaction X (or material piece X). Which basically means: consciousness is not material interaction X (otherwise you could say it, obviously). So, simply put: saying consciousness is irreducible is saying: consciousness is not a material entity. And clearly, either consciousness is a material entity or it is not. It really is a contradiction to say 'consciousness is not a material object, yet it is a material object', that's not just old-fashioned cartesian thinking, that's old-fashioned logical thinking.
Finally: @Stuart: I also think the Chinese Room argument fails (although I still think it's a great idea), I'm just curious to know why you think it fails?
@ano
Appeal to authority. Doesn't work. Never worked. Strangely enough i have more confidence in someone who co-pioneered the operation and has 45 years under his belt then the statements of Anonymous.
Furthermore i've started reading up on this in the 70's and going by the nature of your responses you were playing in the kindergarten.
All this show to me is that if you failed to get the same results it's more your due to your lack of experience/competence.
Nothing is more absurd then the equivalent of : "Don't you who i am" as an argument.
I'll lecture anyone i please when i see they are making bland sweeping statements which fly in the face of decades of studies showing otherwise.
There's no reason why a hemisphere shouldn't have a characteristic behavior. Actually it's way more logical then not.
All one can do is go into semantics and start to squabble about what exactly constitutes personality.
Which is fun for some, not for me.
All experiments i've read sofar show definitively the vast differenc ebetween the hemispheres. And the most impressive ones are those were the language center is situated in the right hemisphere.
The responses from those persons (as in more then one case) are so completely distinctively different from those were it is in the left hemisphere there is no question the two hemispheres have their own characteristics which one could call personality.
wow, being rude again petrossa?
What is it with you?
Well I'm actually done discussing with you. You just spread obvious lies. You clearly stated that no more full callosotomies are being performed. A clear lie. But more than that, you're just being plain rude. I never claimed authority, I just tell you about experiments I just did with split-brain patients with a full callosotomy. And then you just wipe this off as being a figment of my imagination. Then, sir, there is no base for a civil discourse anymore. Btw, "The social brain" by Gazza is coming in very soon, probably I'll be able to expose another of your lies then.
At any rate, too bad that Petrossa sees it fit to rant and be rude in another wise very civil discussion going on here. For my part, I'll continue to engage the discussion with all the other members here, since I very much enjoy the discussion.
Suit yourself. Any 'discussion' was hard anyway. Shouting down from on high isn't discussing.
At least you've got a real book to read. Will make a change from reading abstracts.
petrossa said:
"Which connections transmit these bidirectional interactions exactly?"
Memory and emotion PPT Slide 30:
"Medial Forebrain Bundle [the area we are talking about]
Multisynaptic pathway from the septal region and amygdala through
the lateral HT and down to the brainstem.
Bidirectional pathway connecting limbic structures to the HT and
to autonomic control centers in the brainstem."
"i pointed out that very issue to one of the authors of the paper. To which he responded postively."
Appeal to authority fallacy.
---
Anonymous said:
"This is where Searle and you end up being dualists. EITHER intentionality is as I have described it, or it is not, in which case it is magic ghost."
Notice that you are simply repeating the assumptions that underly dualism that if something can be desribed in physical terms then it just _can't_ be mental. I completely accept that the mind is the result of the activity of the brain. I reject tha idea that therefoer mental events do not exist nor can influence the world. Minds are just one of the features of the universe.
"Now, either these intentions are basically one and the same type of thing, in which case they cannot actually have any kind of real relationship with the material world as heaven is not a part of it "
Intentionality is not the same as intent. In German the distinction is much more clear, it English it is more confusing. Intentionality is the condition of directedness or about-ness that we can have. So it is true that you intend to fly to Brazil even when you are asleep or even if the object of your intention does not exist.
Another anonymous said:
I'd like to cling to materialism too.
I'm not a materialist. Materialism is the metaphysical position that the world consists of one substance. I think that is ultimately incoherent. This does not make me an Idealist.
"saying consciousness is irreducible is saying: consciousness is not a material entity. And clearly, either consciousness is a material entity or it is not."
There are no material entities because there is no substance called "matter" or "mass" of which they are composed. There are only particles moving in lines of force. Matter is an unscientific concept. Mass is a relationship, a transaction mediated by the Higgs boson. There is no such "thing" as mass.
Relationships are real and have ontological existence. Harvard University exists even though it cannot be reduced to buildings nor can it be located in them. It is just as wrong to say that it's buildings are the substance of Harvard University as it would be to say that Harvard University is a Platonic form. It is neither. It is simply a feature of the world we live in created by the collective intentionaliy of it's members.
There are types of reductionism. One is how a rainbow can be reduced to "nothing but" light refraction and so is illusory and can be eliminated. Minds are not like rainbows. Another is how a table can be reduced to atoms in lattice structures while the tabel qua table cannot be and can be.
Minds then reduce to brains but cannot on that account be eliminated.
@brenda
Reading class 101:
"Granted it's been awhile i studied the stuff, but afiak the vertical connections between the two layers are sparse and insignificant.
Compared to the Corpus Callosum they are so minimal as to not matter at all."
See. Helps if you read.
"Appeal to authority fallacy."
Appeal to someone elses authority.
Not mine. I never said I AM A SPECIALIST HOW DARE YOU LECTURE ME
Big difference.
So all you came up with is a bit nitpicking due to bad reading/comprehension skills. Nothing actually rebutting my arguments on the issue at hand.
No serious discussion. Just again jumping right in with metaphsysical newspeak containing no information but appearing to be very intelligent.
Stuart again
------------
OK, @Anonymous-who-asked-about-my-rejection-of-the-Chinese-Room, also @Brenda, you may take this as my response to your position here; your other comments I will respond to separately:
The first thing with the Chinese Room is that it is a thought experiment and therefore, to me, something about which to be highly suspicious. Thought experiments are fine for morality/ethics, where you can use them to probe your own assumptions about your own and others' behaviour (the 'trolley' problems are a fine example of this). Some other thought experiments work, but in general those that involve the generalized description of a counterfactual scenario, frequently extremely improbable and in some instance probably impossible, and the presuming that we are capable of extrapolating correctly the detail or consequences of that scenario. They are also tricksy buggers, as we shall see below, allowing the person who draws up the experiment to stack the deck in his own favour.
So the first question about the CR is: is actually a viable scenario? In other words, could a robot programmed with purely syntactic rules pass the Turing test? If we accept it is, we are already being coerced into acceptance of part of Searle's position, which is the problem with thought experiments. They are sneaky things. In the case of the CR, Searle requires us to accept that it is possible to perfectly replicate natural language through a syntactic algorithm, but then rules out by fiat that there is something that it is like to be the Chinese Room, or that the Chinese Room may have semantic content. As @brenda put it: "There is something that it is like to be me or you. There is nothing that it is like to be a database of bits on a hard drive."
Now, here's what Searle has done: he has asked us to imagine a potentially successful strong AI scenario, but then arbitrarily ruled out the consequences of that scenario were strong AI to be true. That is, taking his scenario, my response would be, this is not a disproof of strong AI: if (and I am happy at present to leave this as an if) strong AI were true, then there would be semantic content in the CR, there would be something that it is like to be the CR, to be the database. These might seem strange and difficult statements, but we are in the world of the thought experiment! We are expected to accept Searle's strange and difficult scenario, but are not permitted to draw our own conclusions therefrom: he rules them out.
So, in short, the CR fails because as with so many other thought experiments, Searle builds his position into the experiment.
A more detailed critique can be offered later (or offline) with the idea of strong AI anyway, but there you have the structural failure of the argument, which is sufficient to rule it out.
I quite agree with Stuart re: the Chinese room argument.
And indeed any argument which relies on, essentially, saying: "Imagine a situation where Theory X predicts something about conciousness that just seems wrong."
I see no reason to trust our intuitions about conciousness. Actually I suspect that the answer to the Hard Problem, if there is one, will strike everyone as incredibly weird, or be so complex as to be incomprehensible. Because if there were a nice, acceptable, easy answer, we'd have it by now.
They don't call it the Hard Problem for nothing.
Branda said: QM is neither deterministic nor stochastic, therefore QM is not science. QED.
I R smrt, I R rly rly smrt.
What a silly comment in response to antianticamper's statement of picking our mechanistic poison by which to introduce this mythical 'free-will' indeterminacy into the brain.
First of all, QM has different interpretations of which Bohm's non-local hidden variable theory flies in the face of your previous statements.
Furthermore, returning to our field of neuroscience, the idea that QM -- regardless of its actual formulation -- has anything to do with a conscious process is silliness. I often see this from people who read pop-culture books on the topic, but when you actually work with the numbers and churn through the models, you see they don't allow for this proposed ability to inject indeterminacy. Given the physiological range over which kBT acts, decoherence times in a neuron will be on the order of 10^-13 to 10^-20 seconds. Meanwhile the dynamical time of an action potential is approximately 10^-3s. This leaves between 10 and 17 orders of magnitude: Just Not Happening. See Max Tegmark, 2000 for a review.
At the end of the day: free-will, as Libet has started to explore with his clever experiments, is likely a neat little evolutionary trick pulled over on us.
There is no reason to think we are anything but sloppy little wetware classical computers that take a deterministic input and operate on the data with a few token transform operations, albeit handled massively in parallel. The current classical models -- from HH dynamics to IBM-Switzerlands simulation work -- all fit observed data. There is no need to resort to these for fantasic ideas of consciousness... especially over the empiracle evidance just because they feel right.
The big hold-up, IMHO, is people feel or want to feel free; as if their future decisions are unknown and theirs alone to make and know. Understandable, given such traits were likely selected for, but is it really necessary?
No, not within the deterministic macroscopic world we live: even if you want the above to be true. It's not a question of indeterminancy -- who wants that anyways?! Would you really want a truely random number generator pegged into your stream-of-consciosness? We have those types of people: they're called psychotics. What we desire is that we can't prestate or predict the state of the system at a future point, even given the configuration space.
Just as demonstrated via several cellular automaton rule-sets, there are such systems whose state cannot be prestated. And these are fully classical systems and fully deterministic, albeit chaotic. The only way to know is to compute it out -- Well, guess what we're doing...
@Vince
You worded my layman's thoughts in proper 'your disciplines' jargon.
It's exactly what i tried to say. I guess the big problem is that once you've had a formal education in a discipline one absorbs the particular kind of communication conveying idea's in a standardized fashion.
Being an ICT specialist i used my jargon, and conveyed my idea's relative to the jargon of that field.
And then you get a kind of clash of cultures, a tower of Babel.
To my mind this process is not unlike (or actually exactly the same) as ancient shaman's mumbling some mysterious sounding vocalizations to impress the yokels and guarantee that no onlooker could steal his shtick.
In the end, as you said, the brain is just a floppy lump of cholesterol with only one purpose: ensure the survival of the species.
Anything else is just coincidental luggage.
I once wrote a piece on religion, a part of that i feel is appropriate:
"Unfortunately there are lots of people with a less developed notion regarding the origin and nature of conscience whom take themselves very seriously. So immensely serious that it is for them unacceptable that their existence has no meaning. And then they will look for something which will give their existence the grandeur they imagine it to have .
Old books such as the bible, koran, torah come in very handy, because just like the writings of Michel the Nostredame they can be interpreted in any which way to suit whatever you want to believe.
The simple solution that we simply are procreating little primates that exist because we exist is too humiliating to them.
We logically have an anthropocentric world view. We assume ourselves to be superior because we believe we are superior. A type of extreme ‘dubito, ergo cogito ergo sum’. Other animals doubt also, take decisions, deceive, tease, play, have feelings of love, hate, joy etc.
Their philosophy of life we do not understand just as little as they understand ours.
But by their standards they sure can feel superior over humans with good reason."
Hey Stuart,
great reply, thanks. So to just re-word it: you basically say: huge extrapolations, with no checks, are dangerous in general, bc we might miss subtle mistakes. Agreed.
Then you go on to say, the problem with the CR argument is that it assumes that a simple rule-book (or robot) could pass the turing test.
I like that very much. I've seen a lot of answers to the CR argument, mainly along the lines of the systems-argument, but I like yours the best. My thoughts are actually very much along the same line.
A simple robot with a bunch of if-then statements, would never pass the turing test. Only a robot with algorithms that are sufficiently advanced that they will yield actual comprehension will pass the turing test.
What do these algorithms look like? Do they even exist? No idea. But as Dennett would have it, Searle just uses an intuition pump to suggest a bunch of very simple algorithms that will definitely not yield comprehension, and then makes the jump that since these simple algorithms cannot cause comprehension, no algorithm can. Without any proof to support the point.
Anyway, I guess we're on the same page regarding the CR argument then, so no point to drag out the discussion more than necessary :)
More Stuart here
----------------
OK, further response to @Brenda.
I said: "This is where Searle and you end up being dualists. EITHER intentionality is as I have described it, or it is not, in which case it is magic ghost." Brenda replied: "Notice that you are simply repeating the assumptions that underly dualism that if something can be desribed in physical terms then it just _can't_ be mental. I completely accept that the mind is the result of the activity of the brain. I reject tha idea that therefoer mental events do not exist nor can influence the world. Minds are just one of the features of the universe."
I am not repeating the assumptions that underlie dualism: I am repeating the assumptions that underlie the dualism/monism distinction. And, whilst I am with you in that I am happy to speak of mental events as existing, to me this is simply higher-order language: they ultimately decompose into the brain states. You assert otherwise, and to me this is dualism. Let us ask the following questions: of what are mental events constituted? Are the atomically constructed (in the broad sense of being combinatorially composed of components of a limited range of types)? Or are they each unique? In the latter case, where do they come from, where do they go? In the former, what are these mental-atoms, how do we observe them? Did mental events in general exist before the first mind-producing brain? Was all this mental 'stuff' there from the Big Bang, just inert, waiting for minds to actualize it? There's a sorites problem with at what point in the evolution of brains did they become mental-event-interacting? In other words, what in FSM's name are they? And you say that that these mental events can influence the world (at least that's how I parse the combination of negation and disjunction in the penultimate sentence quoted above; if I have misread then excuse me). For someone who accused me of being ignorant of Descartes, this is pretty extraordinary, because it raises the basic problem: HOW? How, how, how, how, how, given that the world-other-than-mental-events is fully determined by the laws of physics, how do mental events interact with these laws in such a way that state A would lead to state B without the presence of a mental event, but leads to state C in the presence of this mental event? If you cannot answer this question, then you are -- as far as I, and I would suggest the majority of people here, understand the term -- a dualist.
I said: "Now, either these intentions are basically one and the same type of thing, in which case they cannot actually have any kind of real relationship with the material world as heaven is not a part of it." Brenda replied: "Intentionality is not the same as intent. In German the distinction is much more clear, it English it is more confusing. Intentionality is the condition of directedness or about-ness that we can have. So it is true that you intend to fly to Brazil even when you are asleep or even if the object of your intention does not exist."
Firstly, yes, I realize my response was a little confused by using intending-to-do as the exemplar of intention-as-aboutness in my head to maintain a distinction; and apologies for this. However, the point raised was concerning intention-as-aboutness and remains valid. That is, if you are going to reify intention-as-aboutness and claim it is an actual thing, a reified relationship, not simply a brain state fully determined by neuronal activity, you are going to have to explain how one can have apparently identically structured thoughts, where one has a concrete and certain thing as the object of the intention, and the other does not; or has a generalized concept as its object. And that's before we even get into Russellian-type questions like, we are both in an intentional relationship with Samuel Clements, but I know that he is Mark Twain and you do not, what the hell is happening here?
(to be continued)
Yet more Stuart
---------------
Continuation of response to @Brenda
"Relationships are real and have ontological existence."
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, please supply. How do we know what is in relationship with what? Given that gravity has no limit to its range, there is a conceptually available relationship between every particle in the Universe and every other particle in the Universe. Are you claiming all of these have ontological existence? You multiply, I fear, the already mind-boggling number of things that there are exponentially, and all without perceivable effect.
You went on: "Harvard University exists even though it cannot be reduced to buildings nor can it be located in them. It is just as wrong to say that it's buildings are the substance of Harvard University as it would be to say that Harvard University is a Platonic form. It is neither. It is simply a feature of the world we live in created by the collective intentionaliy of its members."
I'm sorry, this is idealism, and just unsupportable in my view. The onus is upon you to prove that there is something that is Harvard University over and above the simple Gricean fact that when I speak of "Harvard University" other people who speak the same language largely understand what I desire them to. Your reification of Harvard as a thing over-and-above a consensual term for a certain bit of the universe, I'm sorry, IS idealist and edges pretty close to Platonism. I just fail to get this reification of words as things, it leaves me totally at a loss. What test could I possibly perform to establish the existence of the state of affairs 'Harvard is a Real thing' that would return a different result to 'Harvard is not a Real thing'?
Where others have raised this type of critique you have thrown accusations of logical positivism at them, as if it that were to be feared at all costs. Whilst the 'strong' form of LP as proposed by, say, Ayers, in which untestable statements are actually meaningless is clearly bunkum, a basic verificationist (or, as I am quite Popperian in my inclinations, falsificationist) agenda underlies science and, at the very least, should you wish your truth-claims to be accepted, it is generally a good idea to provide people with a way in which they could at least in principle test them. Otherwise, we are relying upon your unsupported fiats; or else you believe that the human intellect (or, rather, a certain specific human intellect, as others disagree) is capable of rationally deducing the nature of the universe independent of any empirical tests. This IS pure Platonism: the, excuse me, arrogant elitism of 'I have reasoned how existence must be.'
You went on: "There are types of reductionism. One is how a rainbow can be reduced to "nothing but" light refraction and so is illusory and can be eliminated. Minds are not like rainbows. Another is how a table can be reduced to atoms in lattice structures while the tabel qua table cannot be and can be.
These are names, higher-order terms. No-one claims that in reducing a rainbow to "nothing but" light they are showing it to be illusory. Light is real, sometimes it is naturally refracted by moisture in the air, and when that happens, we term it 'rainbow'. There is no such thing as the table qua table. We just find it convenient to talk as though there were.
In general, you have presented a picture of the universe which, I'm sorry, looks to me fundamentally idealist, Platonic (in the sense above, that truth claims can be assessed by pure reason and need no empirical support), and grants ontological existence to a staggering range of things that can be neither tested nor seen, heard or smelt; I'm sorry, but I find this deeply unscientific. There are far, far, far fewer things, Brenda, in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
(an aside in response to "Given that gravity has no limit to its range, there is a conceptually available relationship between every particle in the Universe and every other particle in the Universe. "
You might not want to use for rhetorical purposes since one could say that a mass outside of another mass's light cone (gravity cone?) might not seem to be connected to that mass. (depending on how gravity works))
hi all, I am happy to say that BPS Research Digest blog has also posted on this paper.
And by following a trail of links in that blog post, I saw this other blog post on variations on the Libet task involving different sense modalities as well as a variation where the 'clock' is sped up.
I just wanted to point these out in case anyone else was curious about all the ways in which this RP thing has been studied.
I wish there was an edit feature. This is the blog post.
Hopefully the papers will be open access.
Begin mild rant:
The paper we are currently discussing isn't, in fact, one can buy access to it *for one day* ?! for a ludicrous amount. At least in other journals if you buy an article you have it for more than a day. And even so, someone who doesn't have access to a library with a subscription (like me) has to wonder which paper is worth the $$ to access, given that I might not necessary have enough background to follow it.
I appreciate you cog sci bloggers who post about these things. esp when the papers are closed access.
@skm, yes correction accepted! I was being slightly hyperbolic to make the point, but you're right I should have limited it to the light cone at least.
On another aside, if you drop me a note with your email address, I may have something for you re your rant...
Was wondering if Anonymous has his book already? Hope he remembers to post his findings.
Still waiting for Anonymous to post his findings about
"Gazzaniga showed already in the sixties definitively using open brain experiments that conscious awareness trails 0.5 seconds to 1 seconds after the act."
Probably he found out it's really there.
Thanks for this nice post! Just a few points, though:
* It was a finger tapping, not a button pressing task in Libet's original experiment.
* Libet et al. could also measure the (averaged) readiness potential (RP) in trials when subjects did decide NOT to move, as Libet called it, when they took the veto after the spontaneous urge to move the finger (what is sometimes called the "decision"). So the RP can hardly be taken as the cause of the action and it does not matter whether it occurs before, simultaneously, or after the conscious intention (see, e.g., Libet's 1985 BBS review).
* Trevena & Miller reproduced this finding recently, i.e. that the RP does not predict whether subjects move a finger or not (Consciousness & Cognition, 2010).
So the whole free will debate is mostly rubbish, insofar as it relates to Libet's experiment – and that is the conclusion drawn by Libet himself, by the way. He only concluded that we should not hold people responsible for their INTENTIONS, because they arise spontaneously (whereas some religions already hold you responsible for thoughts/intentions).
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