Vale Wheeler, and Libet updated 14 Apr 2008 Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students. Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin Libet on the fact that conscious choices occur after the brain has already begun a task. General Science History
Creationism and Intelligent Design Does science lead to atheism? Not really 2 Jul 2009 Occasionally one’s sole impact on things is the ability to get other people to do good work by threatening to do it badly. I was set to do a review of survey’s on scientists and religious belief, but the literature got out of hand rather quickly, so I emailed Matt… Read More
History It’s a mystery 28 May 2010 Since the earliest times in recorded Graecoroman history, there have been mystery cults. Every cultic practice for a god had secret rituals and spaces, and there were a number of mystery religions, known as the Eleusinian mysteries, that developed that we know little about. In an excellent review of a… Read More
Evolution Notre Dame conference – the washup 3 Nov 2009 It’s been a great conference. Simon Conway Morris was fun (but wrong! It’s OK, he says I am too). Peter Bowler’s talk on “what-if history” – what if Darwin had drowned on the Beagle? was actually interesting and raised some nice points about both the nature of the theory of… Read More
This (Libet) seems to be another nail in the coffin of mind/body dualism. If the brain is busy doing the requisite work for a decision long before we’re aware of our decision, then it can’t been a separate mind doing the decision making. Brain functioning seems to be the mind. This is what my psych unit teaches anyway. Add to that the fact that a immaterial brain has to violate the law of conservation of energy to affect a material brain/body and dualism seems in trouble. Or have I misunderstood everything?
This (Libet) seems to be another nail in the coffin of mind/body dualism. If the brain is busy doing the requisite work for a decision long before we’re aware of our decision, then it can’t been a separate mind doing the decision making. Brain functioning seems to be the mind. This is what my psych unit teaches anyway. Add to that the fact that a immaterial brain has to violate the law of conservation of energy to affect a material brain/body and dualism seems in trouble. Or have I misunderstood everything?
Shades of Ted Chiang’s “What’s Expected of Us” — though (@Brian) he uses it to make a point about determinism, not dualism.
What a piece of bunk. You can see a more concise description under http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2112.html and the supplementary figures under http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/suppinfo/nn.2112_S1.html The prediction accuracy before the conscious decision is 60% and jumps to 75% when SMA is activated (which is *after* the conscious decision). That is lousy and doesn’t legitimate the wording “Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand”. Dear friends, 60% isn’t a “consistent prediction” and telling that “not completely accurate” is a severe understatement.