What I've heard about that famous experiment conducted by Benjamin Libet is so far from convincing that I'm stunned people take it seriously. Maybe I haven't read a good account of it? Tried Gazzaniga's The Mind's Past, because Harr said: "Surprisingly, our consciousness also doesn't appear to be involved in much of our own behavior, apart from bearing witneess to it. A number of fascinating experiments have been conducted in thei area, and the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga describes some of them in detail in a wonderful chapter aptly titled 'The Brain Knows Before You Do" in his book The Mind's Past." IMO, he does a horrible job of describing them. I literally don't even know what the experiment is until I google it. People look at a clock, make a decision to move their finger, and make note of when they made the decision. Come to find out their brain started preparing for the finger movement 350 milliseconds before the conscious decision was made. I have some doubts.
This is the clock they were looking at:
www.informationphilosopher.com/solution ... clock.html
Are you kidding?!? I think there are a couple pretty big problems with this.
1) Any chance people can't tell you exactly where that rapidly moving dot was when they made the decision? Any chance they could be off by as much as, oh let's just make up a number, 350 milliseconds?
2) I suspect people in this situation will often think, "When will I move my finger? When will I move my finger? How do I decide? I know! I'll move it when the dot hits the 30." And yes, they actually begin the process of moving it then. Thing is, part of them was watching the dot approach 30 (at that crazy speed), and began preparing for the move ahead of time. We're talking less than a half-second. I'm sure, "Get ready! Get ready! Here it comes!!!" will show up as brain activity before you think "NOW!"
3) It didn't show brain activity prior to an entirely different part of the body moving, followed by the person saying, "WHAT?!? I didn't know I was going to move that!!"
I don't think it says much about free will, either. But I do think it touches on panpsychism. The half that speaks is clearly conscious, though entirely unaware that it was shown a picture of anything. The half that cannot communicate picks out the object shown in the picture from several objects, which were all hidden from sight. There are two consciousnesses. When joined by the corpus callosum, there is one. The two parts have joined together into one. There is no sign that there are two consciousnesses cooperating. When the person with split brain hugs someone with one arm while trying to push the person away with the other arm, a resolution of any sort means the two consciousnesses cooperated in some way. But when joined, they become one.Zarathustra wrote:I don't think you can make sound inferences about whole brains from the behaviors of damaged brains. With that said, I admit that consciousness is a kind of "interpreter," making sense out of inputs, and sometimes it gets this interpretation wrong. But just because the interpretation is wrong (i.e. an illusion) doesn't mean that the underlying phenomenon is nonexistent. Both facts can be true, namely, that a person decided to stand up due to the input of a verbal command, and that they interpret this decision with the wrong words, especially when the two hemispheres aren't communicating. When you split consciousness and its functions this drastically, of course you're going to get wonky results. Why would anyone attribute that to illusory agency, rather than the much more likely and obvious fact that the brain has been split???
Think of the times when you have trouble verbalizing something. A feeling, a gut reaction, an instinct. You can act on this feeling, but still not be able to describe it. Does your lack of an accurate verbal description mean you weren't free to act upon that feeling? I don't see how. No one is claiming here that freewill is dependent upon accurate verbal descriptions of our behavior.
Could be panpsychism could work that way. And it wouldn't have to to nearly that degree, for the most part. It's not like the atoms of the brain have the same type and/or degree of consciousness as the brain, so there aren't trillions of consciousnesses that need to find a way to cooperate.
In what way would that not be the point of evolution?Zarathustra wrote:I think you're getting Nagel wrong. He's not saying that it's the point of evolution. He's saying that it controls evolution. It produces itself.
Zarathustra wrote:If your author here is right, it only highlights the problem of this thread even more: if consciousness doesn't increase the likelihood of survival because it doesn't affect our behavior, then how the hell did evolution produce it??
Agreed.I don't think, and I don't think she thinks, panpsychism has to mean a degree of consciousness that can make decisions all the way down. Like the Skrbina quote says, "Minds of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience." I don't know if that's possible, or just poetic. But we're talking about consciousness - something that is not materially reducible. That's not possible!Zarathustra wrote:This is a basic contradiction in her position. If panpsychism is true, then there is no sense in which any action happens without consciousness. If my finger is moving because my brain tells it to move--rather than my consciousness--but my brain is conscious all the way down to its constituent atoms, then how does she know that it's not the conscious decision of the atoms themselves to make my finger move? Agency would just be moved down a level, not removed completely. Instead of being illusory, it would be ubiquitous!
But it exists, nonetheless. I have a tough time distinguishing the valid theories of how this can be from the hair-brained ones. What criteria do we use to say what's possible and what's not? So I'm willing to entertain the idea of atoms having a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience. "Experience" is Galen Strawson's word for consciousness. (I tried to start reading him, but then learned that Nagel is on audio, so I'll get back to Strawson.) Skrbina's idea is experience of a vastly reduced degree, but it's still panpsychism.
