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The act of telling a secret can itself be the solution.
If we hope to invent robots that think, our challenge is not simply to devise a subagent to cleverly solve each problem but instead to ceaselessly reinvent subagents, each with overlapping solutions, and then to pit them against one another. Overlapping factions offer protection against degradation (think of cognitive reserve) as well as clever problem solving by unexpected approaches.
Alcohol is not a truth serum. Instead, it tends to tip the battle toward the short-term, unreflective faction—which has no more or less claim than any other faction to be the “true” one.
The drives you take for granted (“I’m a hetero/homosexual,” “I’m attracted to children/adults,” “I’m aggressive/not aggressive,” and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.
Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time before our birth,
When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that you choose neither one.
in the legal system, a prosecutor must not merely show a guilty act, but a guilty mind as well.11 And as long as there is nothing hindering the mind in its control of the body, it is assumed that the actor is fully responsible for his actions.
Mens rea htgawm
the brain does in fact operate in a different state during sleep, and sleepwalking is a verifiable phenomenon.
if free will is to have any effect on the actions of the body, it needs to influence the ongoing brain activity. And to do that, it needs to be physically connected to at least some of the neurons. But we don’t find any spot in the brain that is not itself driven by other parts of the network.
Libet himself fretted over this possibility raised by his own experiments, and finally suggested that we might retain freedom in the form of veto power.
So despite all our hopes and intuitions about free will, there is currently no argument that convincingly nails down its existence.
The materialist viewpoint states that we are, fundamentally, made only of physical materials.
What makes cocaine cocaine is the fact that its accidental shape happens to fit lock-and-key into the microscopic machinery of the reward circuits. The same goes for all four major classes of drugs of abuse: alcohol, nicotine, psychostimulants (such as amphetamines), and opiates (such as morphine):
Who you turn out to be depends on such a vast network of factors that it will presumably remain impossible to make a one-to-one mapping between molecules and behavior (more on that in the moment).
Relates closely to Levitt's thoughts in Freakonomics
It turns out that the social stress of being an immigrant to a new country is one of the critical factors in developing schizophrenia.
boil down to the same important lesson: a combination of genetics and environment matters for the final outcome.
In other words, if you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you’re tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy.
Just because a system is made of pieces and parts, and just because those pieces and parts are critical to the working of the system, that does not mean that the pieces and parts are the correct level of description.
Reductionism has been the engine of science since before the Renaissance. But reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won’t explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence.27
The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts.
Funny that I'm reading Prey concurrently, and I could swear Jack said the exact same thing!
while minds depend on the integrity of neurons, neurons are not themselves thinking.
The brain is not so much the seat of the mind as the hub of the mind.
When people assert that brain function can be completely explained by classical physics, it is important to recognize that this is simply an assertion—it’s difficult to know in any age of science what pieces of the puzzle we’re missing.
Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in “the simplest explanation is probably correct,” also known as Occam’s razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony; this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.
In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all—it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion. If history is any guide, it’s never a good idea to assume that a scientific problem is cornered.
Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.
assumption of a comprehensive science is finally true? Or does it seem more likely that in one hundred years people will look back on us and wonder what it was like to be ignorant of what they know?
Arthur C. Clarke was fond of pointing out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don’t view the dethronement from the center of ourselves as depressing; I view it as magic. We’ve seen in this book that everything contained in the biological bags of fluid we call us is already so far beyond our intuition, beyond our capacity to think about such vast scales of interaction, beyond our introspection that this fairly qualifies as “something beyond us.” The complexity of the system we are is so vast as to be indistinguishable from Clarke’s magical technology. As
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Cliche Or Brilliant?
What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
