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June 13 - July 18, 2017
I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.
Without much fanfare, discoveries in these fields have solved a key aspect of the free will problem.
the emergence of nervous systems and the first inkling of sentience. The continuing complexification of brains, to use Teilhard de Chardin’s term, enhanced consciousness until self-consciousness emerged: awareness reflecting upon itself. This recursive process started millions of years ago in some of the more highly developed mammals. In Homo sapiens, it has achieved its temporary pinnacle.
Like all organs, the nervous system is made out of billions of networked cells, the most important of which are neurons. Just like there are kidney cells that are quite distinct from blood or heart cells, so there are different types of neurons, maybe as many as a thousand.
If tens of thousands of neurons and their millions of synapses are active, their contributions add up to something called the local field potential. The distant echo of this electrical activity is visible in the never-ceasing peaks and troughs recorded outside the skull by an electroencephalograph (EEG). The local field potential, in turn, feeds back onto individual neurons. We are now learning that this feedback forces neurons to synchronize their activity.
blind men, each describing different aspects of the same elephant, each captures an important facet of consciousness, with none of them painting
Ecclesiastes had it right: “For the living know that they shall die but the dead know not anything.”
one reason we like to watch movies—they distract us from our overly active self-consciousness,
from our daily barrage of worries, anxieties, fears, and doubts.
let me briefly explain the principle underlying nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (the word “nuclear” has been dropped because of its negative connotation). The MRI scanner generates a powerful magnetic field, about 100,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. The nuclei of certain elements, including hydrogen, behave like miniature bar magnets.
functional MRI (fMRI) relies on a fortuitous property of the blood supply to reveal regional brain activity.
Face-blindness
Capgras delusion. The patient with this condition persistently claims that his wife has been replaced by an alien,
Akinetopsia is a rare and devastating motion blindness.
the medial temporal lobe. This region, which includes the hippocampus, turns percepts into memories,
concept neurons.
Paradoxically, once learning has occurred, paying attention to details can disrupt skilled performance.
To combat such choking under pressure, coaches and training manuals recommend emptying your mind of everything. This frees up your inner zombie, to considerable benefit.
Choice blindness
confabulating without realizing it.
Don’t sweat the problem. Think of something else, and your invisible brain
Chapter 7: In which I throw caution to the wind, bring up free will, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and what physics says about determinism, explain the impoverished ability of your mind to choose, show that your will lags behind your brain’s decision, and that freedom is just another word for feeling
FREE WILL
Contrast the strong notion of freedom with a more pragmatic conception called compatibilism,
deterministic chaos.
What breaks down in chaos is not the chain of action and reaction, but predictability.
decoherence.
Will as an Afterthought to Action
Philosophy is written in this grand book—the universe I say—that is wide open in front of our eyes. But the book cannot be understood unless we first learn to understand the language, and know the characters, in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics. —Galileo Galilei, The Assayer
The endpoint of my quest must be a theory that explains how and why the physical world is capable of generating phenomenal experience. Such a theory can’t just be vague, airy-fairy, but must be concrete,
quantifiable, and testable. I believe that information theory, properly formulated and refined, is capable of such an enormous feat, analyzing the neuronal wiring diagram of any living creature and predicting the form of consciousness that that organism will experience. It can draw up blueprints for the design of conscious artifacts. And, surprisingly, it provides a grandiose view of the evolution of consciousness in the universe.
And what is true for dogs is also true for monkeys, mice, dolphins, squids, and, probably, bees. We are all nature’s children; all of us experience life.
An emergent property is something expressed by the whole but not necessarily by its individual parts. The system possesses properties that are not manifest in its parts.
We now know that life is an emergent phenomenon and can, ultimately, be reduced to chemistry and physics. No vitalistic force or energy separates the inorganic, dead world from the organic world of the living.
This lack of a clear dividing line is typical for emergence.
Panpsychism
Integrated information theory
When you look into the eyes of a dog, a fellow traveler on a voyage book-ended by eternities on both sides looks back. Its mind is not the same as yours, but it is related to your mind. Both dogs and people experience life. The idea that humans are special, that they are singled out by the gift of consciousness above all other creatures, stems from the deeply held Judeo-Christian belief that we occupy a privileged place in the order of things, a belief with a biblical but no empirical basis.
“Project Mindscope.”
Science has brought us to the end of our childhood. Growing up is unsettling to many people, and unbearable to a few, but we must learn to see the world as it is and not as we want it to be. Once we free ourselves of magical thinking we have a chance of comprehending how we fit into this unfolding universe.
The books of the Bible were written before the true age and extent of the cosmos were even remotely imagined, before the evolutionary bonds between humans and animals were understood, before
the brain was identified as the seat of the mind (neither the Old nor the New Testament mentions the brain a single time).
