Researchers have used the usually avoided term “directed evolution” — which may suggest design — to account for the worm’s tiny, complex brain.
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The worm C. elegans can learn, using both associative and non-associative learning, despite having a brain of less than 400 neurons.
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If examples of terminal and paradoxical lucidity in old age are any guide, we should not conclude that children must lack consciousness before a given stage.
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Is science about following the evidence or about confirming a materialist ideology about science? This is the big neuroscience question of our century.
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The higher human ability to think abstractly — to reason and will freely — are not physical abilities and do not come from the brain.
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Understanding the mind in terms of information processing, rather than as a byproduct of brain activity, could reshape the debate.
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Readers have brought to my attention a review article on the effect of split-brain surgery on consciousness. “Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for Understanding Consciousness” (2020) by Yair Pinto and his colleagues is an interesting open-access article, well worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. From the abstract: [Split-brain surgery] leads to a broad breakdown of functional integration ranging from perception to attention. However, the breakdown is not absolute as several processes, such as action control, seem to remain unified. Disagreement exists about the responsible mechanisms for this remaining unity. The main issue concerns the first-person perspective of a split-brain patient. Does a split-brain harbor a split consciousness or is consciousness unified? The current Read More ›
I offer four reasons that we can know that free will is real, drawn from human behavior, law, ethics, and physics.
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Unity of self after brain splitting is not surprising. Each of us is a physical creature with a single spiritual soul. It is immaterial and can’t be severed.
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Minding the Brain, to which the panelists contributed, challenges skeptical readers to move beyond physicalism, which is not producing useful results.
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Eric Cassell: Engineering greatly reduced electronic circuits. It is hard to see how that could occur in insect brains via a merely random evolutionary process.
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Brain stimulation could cause movement or memories but no part of the brain, when stimulated, caused patients to think abstractly or exercise free will.
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Question: If thoughts can only be copied — and copied badly — by AI, which is quite unlike the brain. then how can they be generated by the brain?
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It’s not that the textbooks are wrong; they are just not telling the whole story.
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A sense is growing that no matter what stunning neuroscience discoveries we make, we cannot in principle explain E = MC^2 by what Einstein had for breakfast.
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In the most recent episode of the Mind Matters News podcast, hosts Brian Krouse and Robert J. Marks chatted with philosopher Dr. Mihretu Guta about the role of mirror neurons in understanding consciousness. Dr. Guta’s chapter in the book Minding the Brain critiques the popular interpretation of these specialized brain cells, which activate both when performing an action and observing others perform it. Mirror neurons, discovered in macaque monkeys, have been linked to empathy, learning, and imitation. However, Dr. Guta emphasized the distinction between correlation and causation. While these neurons activate during certain behaviors, this does not prove they cause those behaviors. He also noted the limits of extending findings from monkey studies to human cognition. Dr. Guta introduced three Read More ›
While the article is most interesting, somehow, it doesn’t seem like we have learned more about human nature. Human nature isn’t entirely in our brains.
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Techno-futurists love to dream up visions of the future. Invariably, these are worlds where everything is under control—where every problem has a solution, and the future unfolds exactly as planned. We do seem to be moving toward some sort of centralized loss of agency. But what’s distinctive about the techno-futurist vision is the belief that this is not only inevitable but wonderful. Self-driving cars eliminate wasted time in traffic; smart cities like Songdo or Masdar City adjust every streetlight and service in real-time to optimize efficiency. AI-driven healthcare, like the tools developed by Google’s DeepMind, promises to pinpoint diagnoses. Automated finance uses algorithms to manage our money and secure our futures. Everything works, all the time. But doomsday visions flip Read More ›
Although the optimism is contagious, it is early days yet and many obstacles lie between proof of concept and practical usefulness.
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Split minds doesn’t make sense as a concept. To simultaneously pursue two abstract thought processes or moral choices is not a meaningful idea.
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