Kevin's Watch

The American brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga writes, "The strong subjective sense we all possess of ourselves is that we are a signle, unified, conscious agent controlling life's events with a singular, integrated purpose."
And yet, as Gazzaniga adds, "It is not true." His research and that of many colleagues reveals that the brain is by no means monolithic, but consists of many different modules modules- Gazzaniga calls them "programs"- that function more or less independently.

...Consciousness forms a much smaller part of the operations of the brain than was once supposed. Mind is not the all-knowing monarch of the brain, but a little circle of firelight in a dark, Australia-sized continent where the unconscious brain proceses carry on.

This strange circumstance- that one's mind neither controls nor comprehends most of what goes in in one';s brain- is emphasized in the results of two recent experiments. One was conducted by Benjamin Libet, a neurophysiologist at the School of Medicine of the University of California at San Francisco. The other was pioneered by Roger Sperry and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology...
Libet asked the subjects of his experiments simply to flex one finger. To do so would seem to be a purely volitional act, one that the conscious mind orders and the rest of the nervous system carries out. But Libet's results proved otherwise.
Libet wired up his subjects with electrodes that measure brain activity, and seated them in full view of a rapidly rotating clock hand that enabled them to note exactly when they "ordered" their finger to flex. Libet could then mark three events in time: The onset of increased brain activity recorded by the electrodes, the flexing of the finger, and the point at which each subject had consciously willed his finger to flex.
What Libet found was that in each instance, a flurry of brain activity took place a fraction of a second before the "order" to flex the ginger was dispatched by the conscious mind. "In other words," says Libet, "their neurons were firing a third of a second before they were even conscious of the desire to act. Hence it appeared the brain had begun preparing for movement long before the mind had 'decided' to do anything."
The illusion of conscious control is maintanined, Libet notes, because another mechanism in the brain delays the sensation of the finger moving, so that the concious mind continues to think that it has first decreed the action, then felt the muscles act.

... in experiments conducted by Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others on what are called "split brain" patients. The cerebrum- the seat of thought and voluntary action- is divided into two lobes or hemispheres. In most individuals, the left cerebral hemisphere processes visual information from the right side of each eye's field of view, and controls the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere performs the same functions for the left side. Communication between the two hemispheres is handled by the corpus callosum, a bundle of over two hundred million nerve fibers. Sufferers from grand mal epiepsy may find relief through a surgical procedure in which the corpus callosum is cut, terminating communication between the right and left sides of the higher brain. Typically these individuals go on to lead normal lives, with few obvious side effects. But careful studies of their perceptions and actions has taught scientists a great deal about how the brain works.
...Sperry and his colleagues flashed pictures on a screen in such a way that their subjects could see them on only one side of their field of view. This apparatus could, for example, show a picture to the right brain while keeping the left brain in the dark. In a normal individual this would make little difference; the corpus callosum, a high-bandwidth transmission channel that shuttles information back and forth between lobes, would inform the left brain of what the right brain had seen. But a split-brain patient has lost the use of the corpus callosum; consequently his left brain has little or no way of knowing what the right brain has seen.
...When a word is flashed to the right hemisphere of a split-brain patient, she cannot tell the researcher what the word was. The left brain, which handles speech, does not know what to say, because it has not seen the word. The right brain knows, but cannot speak. It can, howeer, answer questions in other ways.

But the implications of localized brain functions can also help us understand the unity of mind. The split-brain modules that operate more or less independently, and that the function of the mind is not so much to tell the other units what to do as to try to make some coherent sense out of what they already have chosen to do.
This is where Gazzaniga came in. he worked with split-brain patients whose right hemispheres had sufficient linguistic facility to understand simple commands... When a command- "Walk!"- was flashed to such a patient's right brain, he got up and began to walk out of the room. The remarkable thing is that when asked, the patient invariably came up with a rational though bogus explanation of his actions. Asked, "Where are you going?" a typical response was something like, "Uh, I'm going to get a Coke."
This behavior calls to mind a similar phenomenon often observed in connection with hypnosis. "Under hypnosis the patient is given a post-hypnotic suggestion," writes the philosopher John Searle, of the University of California, Berkeley. "You can tell him, for example, to some fairly trivial, harmless thing, such as, let's say, crawl around on the floor. After the patient comes out of hypnosis, he might be engaging in conversation, sitting, drinking coffee, when suddenly he says something like, 'What a fascinating floorin this room!'... He then proceeds to crawl around on the floor.

The implication seems clear that there is a program in the brain responsible for presenting the mind with plausible explanations for actions, and that it acts, so to speak, unscrupulously, blithely explaining matters about which it is uninformed.

JemCheeta wrote:While it may have been possible to make decisions other than the ones we've made, keep in mind that we didn't, and don't, and never do Hehehe...sorry for that semantic rubbish there....

JemCheeta wrote:Anyway, ahem, Fist... as far as the shrew goes, you said that he doesn't have much room for free will, he MUST eat and MUST flee from predators... does that mean that a starving human loses his free will?

JemCheeta wrote:Also, as far as the 'useless' 'illusion' of free will, I don't think it's free will you're talking about, I think you're talking about the process of making decisions. That process is neither illusory nor useless, it's the foundation of human behavior, the act of making choices based on what you have to go on.

This strange circumstance- that one's mind neither controls nor comprehends most of what goes in in one';s brain- is emphasized in the results of two recent experiments. One was conducted by Benjamin Libet, a neurophysiologist at the School of Medicine of the University of California at San Francisco. The other was pioneered by Roger Sperry and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology...
Libet asked the subjects of his experiments simply to flex one finger. To do so would seem to be a purely volitional act, one that the conscious mind orders and the rest of the nervous system carries out. But Libet's results proved otherwise.
Libet wired up his subjects with electrodes that measure brain activity, and seated them in full view of a rapidly rotating clock hand that enabled them to note exactly when they "ordered" their finger to flex. Libet could then mark three events in time: The onset of increased brain activity recorded by the electrodes, the flexing of the finger, and the point at which each subject had consciously willed his finger to flex.
What Libet found was that in each instance, a flurry of brain activity took place a fraction of a second before the "order" to flex the ginger was dispatched by the conscious mind. "In other words," says Libet, "their neurons were firing a third of a second before they were even conscious of the desire to act. Hence it appeared the brain had begun preparing for movement long before the mind had 'decided' to do anything."
The illusion of conscious control is maintanined, Libet notes, because another mechanism in the brain delays the sensation of the finger moving, so that the concious mind continues to think that it has first decreed the action, then felt the muscles act.

Nathan wrote:Free will and determinism may not be mutually exclusive. Just because you make the choice you had to make, doesn't mean you didn't make the choice yourself. If it wasn't you then who was it? Don't your experiences belong to you?

Nathan wrote:You went round collecting them up, so you must have some kind of responsibility for what they do.

Caer Sylvanus wrote:I think you mostly have it, Fist. As I understand it, there are are three measurements taken. The first is by the subject when he records what time he willed his finger to move. The second is taken by the electrodes that record what time the brain activity occurred. The last is recorded by an observer (or mechanism) that notes the exact time the finger moved.

How do you define responsible? If, as Jem suggests, and seems likely to me, our first experiences are basically living out pain/pleasure responses, and we must make the later "choices" that we make, I don't see how we could hold anyone accountable for theirs.

Nathan wrote:I suppose when I say responsible I mean that you have an obligation or duty to accept that the effect your decisions have on other people is your own doing. You may not have total control over your choices (because your experiences do) but when it comes down to it you are you, and it's not anybody else making the decisions for you so it's only you who can be responsible for them.

JemCheeta wrote:Fist, I'd like to focus on this responsibility idea, but not because I have an answer, because I want an answer

Can we have an obligation or duty to accept this? Certainly, I'm still not sure of exactly what you think, but I would have thought that you thought our experiences, physical makeup, and other factors determined whether or not we accepted it.

Nathan wrote:What I meant when I said that was that we are who we are. Our fault or not, we have done the things we've done, therefore we're responsible for them. Yes, people will often not accept responsibility for their actions, they'll blame someone else or attribute it to violent computer games. These things will have an effect of course, but I've played violent games and not murdered anyone. The people who are influenced by things like this are already in a position where they are easily convinced that bad things are a good idea. Their life experience and physical makeup to that point has made them so.

My point is, everybody is in the same situation. Our experiences make us. We make the decisions.

JemCheeta wrote:For me, the only way I could accept the potential of free will is as an acting agent that is not coerced, and uncoercable. It would be unbribable, and I don't think the human will is at all that. To me, that would be a totally free will....
Do you believe that you could have a 'free will' that is limited?

the power of making free choices unconstrained by external agencies

But to your way of thinking, would it be more accurate to say that a murderer is the cause of the murder? If you think that his act was determined by past experiences and physical makeup, then he couldn't have chosen otherwise.