Eric Holloway: Scanning my brain, playing Tetris, shows true AI is impossible

@BA77, Bob O'H and Aaron1978, I appreciate the research. I've heard about this "free-won't". The "free won't" result doesn't necessarily entail we have free will. If we do truly have free will, we can never detect a signal that precedes every choice, but a neuroscientist can always claim we just haven't found the signal yet, i.e. signal of the gaps. However, "free won't" does undermine the determinist argument based on the original Libet experiment. EricMH

Yeah I mentioned it above, John Dylan Haynes did it, it’s called “the point of no return” It was actually quite a brilliant experiment, and by the way John Dillon Haynes is a willusionist That’s kind of important by the way Anyways he hooked the participants brains to a computer which the computer was reading the brain activity specifically for RP So the participants had to ride an exercise bike with the brain scan gear on. They would observe a stoplight and wait for it to turn red at which they would have to stop Now the computer was also tied into that light and what the computer would do is the moment RP started to build in each of the participants head it would turn the red light on for stop What John Dillon Haynes found was that you could stop after RP appeared as long as it was before the 150 milliseconds Mark (point of will) So during the 500 ms you could veto the action after the onset of RP, but not after the 150 ms Mark at the very end, so the first 350 ms you were capable of stopping the action He concluded that you could consciously Vito the action And that we have more free will then we originally thought He was one of the original experimenters for the 2008 experiment in the 2011 experiment of trying to predict what action you were going to take with an fmri machine, Their success with this was 60 to 70 % prediction of what the participants where going to pick 7 to 10 secs ahead of time These experiments brought much criticism especially since it was ported that they had 100% prediction rate and one point which they did not There were a lot of other criticisms for it, one which I found was kind of funny, because I thought of it immediately, But magicians have been doing this for thousands of years with a $50,000 machine was able to do, Which is predict someone’s choice a little bit more than 50% of the time AaronS1978

Eric - someone did this (I went down a neuroscience rabbit hole yesterday). There was an experiment where the researchers were able to predict when someone was about to press the button, and would then flash up a signal to get them to stop. They were able to show that people could stop if it wasn't to soon. Bob O'H

Thank you good sir, I would only add that each brain state might match the action that you’re taking, however to still try to hold onto the brain state is what causes the action you would have to also believe that every action that you take his pre-programmed into your brain which is not possible A cognitive decision of awareness has to be made to assess what you were actually dealing with before decision and action can be taken. It kind of starts smacking of ideas like genetic determinism which your genes manage to predict everything which is absolutely absurd Thank you AaronS1978

@AaronS1978, good question, I've received the same feedback elsewhere. So, as an addendum to the article, now posted on the original, I created a spectrogram of tensing my brow where the EEG electrode was placed. The image looked the same as the 'tapping' spectrogram, and not at all the same as the Tetris spectrograms. So, I take that as evidence the spectrogram is showing my brain activity in response to the cognitive task of playing Tetris. Also, the dataset and source code I used to create the spectrograms is now in a Github repo also linked in the article, and here for convenience: https://github.com/yters/eeg_tetris @Bob O'H, also a good point. At some level the debate becomes metaphysical, everything could be determined to be exactly as it is. But, at least at a high order of events, my decisions during playing Tetris appear to generate the heavily magenta Tetris EEG. I didn't first have a brainstate of high activity which compelled me to play Tetris. Regarding the Libet experiment, what happens if someone is shown what their decision will be before they make it? The 500ms pause is enough time to change course. EricMH

There’s always proceeding brain activity prior to action, if not you would be dead. What Aaron Schurger had discovered was that RP was not the cause of the action, This is actually supported by a lot of recent discoveries one being done by John Dillon Haynes who discovered you can veto the action in a book of his called “point of no return” And once again showing that the preceding brain activity did not constitute the action, And again I would like to emphasize that the action being chosen in these experiments is flicking your wrist and also predicting when you will flick your wrist. So it’s a very rudimentary action that they’re doing that doesn’t require any thought, Choosing between a button choosing between adding in subtracting and choosing between particular books or images have also been shown to be predictable with some success using neural imaging But all of these present a binary decision that really doesn’t require any thinking and can be chosen ahead of time before you do it which is actually one of the critiques about these experiments Again their success rate is only about 60% on average and they are finding that previous decision making actually explains this a little bit better than just reading the neural activity This was pointed out in an experiment done in Australia replicating the neural prediction results and found that previously view images Greatly influenced the future decision meaning that you had to be consciously aware and that had influence on what you would do next Now these recent discoveries have been discussed by the scientists in question and they stated that it actually fits quite well in nicely with the common sense notion of free will So of course brain activity can be measured as anything else can be no differently than a storm can be measured But the measured brain activity is just that activity we have yet to discover 100% neural prediction and so far success rate is about 60% he can go up to 80% but that’s because of the fact that it gets closer to point of will so much closer that it’s hard to tween the two apart We know when it happens and it turns out that it happens when you feel that you’ve made a decision not before That’s my two cents on that I actually study this all the time and feverishly wait for new papers to show up on this Literally I have a problem But I still would really like Eric Holloways input on Epiphenomenalism and his experiment I hope I don’t sound sarcastic I really don’t want to sound that way I actually really appreciate Eric’s input AaronS1978

"They still agree that the measured brain activity precedes the action." Seriously, are you taking hallucinogenic drugs? "An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment." i.e. the 'activity' they measured was the activity of the people themselves, via their immaterial mind, deciding to move their body, not the activity of the brain 'preparing' to move the body. bornagain77

ba77 - thanks for that link. Yes, I wasn't aware of it (even if it doesn't mention the experiment I was pointing too, it's just as relevant). But I'm not sure it helps you either - what they are suggesting is that the 'decision' to make a movement isn't the result of thinking it through, rather it's the result of the stochastic nature of brain activity. They still agree that the measured brain activity precedes the action. Bob O'H

As Anton Zeiliger explains in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in a certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

Thus regardless of how atheists may prefer the universe to behave, (i.e. deterministically), with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Steven Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally. First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:

November 2019 - despite the fact that virtually everyone, including the vast majority of Christians, hold that the Copernican Principle is unquestionably true, the fact of the matter is that the Copernican Principle is now empirically shown, (via quantum mechanics and general relativity, etc..), to be a false assumption. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/so-then-maybe-we-are-privileged-observers/#comment-688855 (February 19, 2019) To support Isabel Piczek’s claim that the Shroud of Turin does indeed reveal a true ‘event horizon’, the following study states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’,,, Moreover, besides gravity being dealt with, the shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/experiment-quantum-particles-can-violate-the-mathematical-pigeonhole-principle/#comment-673178

To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ's resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”

Astonishing discovery at Christ’s tomb supports Turin Shroud – NOV 26TH 2016 Excerpt: The first attempts made to reproduce the face on the Shroud by radiation, used a CO2 laser which produced an image on a linen fabric that is similar at a macroscopic level. However, microscopic analysis showed a coloring that is too deep and many charred linen threads, features that are incompatible with the Shroud image. Instead, the results of ENEA “show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence”. ‘However, Enea scientists warn, “it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”. Comment The ENEA study of the Holy Shroud of Turin concluded that it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology. http://westvirginianews.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-study-claims-shroud-of-turin-is.html

Verse:

Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

bornagain77

Bob O'Hara claims that "there is evidence that a brain state can precede a conscious decision." Bob's referenced article from 2008 states this,,,

"The results build on some well-known work on free will done in the 1980s by the late neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, then at the University of California, San Francisco. Libet used a similar experimental set-up to Haynes, but with just one button and measuring electrical activity in his subjects' brains. He found that the regions responsible for movement reacted a few hundred milliseconds before a conscious decision was made. But Libet's study has been criticized in the intervening decades for its method of measuring time, and because the brain response might merely have been a general preparation for movement, rather than activity relating to a specific decision."

Apparently Bob did not get this 2019 memo that shows that Libet’s experiment has now been debunked,

A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. BAHAR GHOLIPOUR - SEP 10, 2019 Excerpt: In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment. In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision. When Schurger first proposed the neural-noise explanation, in 2012, the paper didn’t get much outside attention, but it did create a buzz in neuroscience. Schurger received awards for overturning a long-standing idea. “It showed the Bereitschaftspotential may not be what we thought it was. That maybe it’s in some sense artifactual, related to how we analyze our data,” says Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University. For a paradigm shift, the work met minimal resistance. Schurger appeared to have unearthed a classic scientific mistake, so subtle that no one had noticed it and no amount of replication studies could have solved it, unless they started testing for causality. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

Moreover, there is entire issue of 'free won't' that directly undermines Bob's, and other atheists', claim that we don't have free will:

Do we have free will? Researchers test mechanisms involved in decision-making - January 4, 2016 Excerpt: Back (in the 1980s), the American researcher Benjamin Libet studied the nature of cerebral processes of study participants during conscious decision-making. He demonstrated that conscious decisions were initiated by unconscious brain processes, and that a wave of brain activity referred to as a 'readiness potential' could be recorded even before the subject had made a conscious decision. ,,, Until now, the existence of such preparatory brain processes has been regarded as evidence of 'determinism', according to which free will is nothing but an illusion, meaning our decisions are initiated by unconscious brain processes, and not by our 'conscious self'. ,,, Using state-of-the-art measurement techniques, the researchers tested whether people are able to stop planned movements once the readiness potential for a movement has been triggered. "The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that further decision-making is automatic and not under conscious control, or whether the person can still cancel the decision, i.e. use a 'veto'," explains Prof. Haynes. ,,, "A person's decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement," says Prof. Haynes. "Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought. http://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-free-mechanisms-involved-decision-making.html

Libet himself held that his experimental confirmation of 'free won't', "accorded with the traditional religious understanding of free will".

Do Benjamin Libet's Experiments Show that Free Will Is an Illusion? - Michael Egnor - January 15, 2014 Excerpt: Materialists often invoke the experiments of Benjamin Libet when they deny free will.,,, (Yet) Libet himself was a strong defender of free will, and he interpreted his own experiments as validating free will. He noted that his subjects often vetoed the unconscious "decision" after the readiness potential appeared. ,,,"The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as 'bubbling up' in the brain. The conscious-will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing." - Libet Libet even observed that his experimental confirmation of free will accorded with the traditional religious understanding of free will:,,, Libet proposes (based on his work) a common-sense model of free will: our unconscious is a bubbling sea of velleities. We freely choose the impulses we wish to enact by prescinding from a veto, and we freely choose the impulses we wish to suppress by vetoing the act. Libet found experimental traces of the unconscious impulses (the readiness potential) and experimental confirmation of the freely chosen veto (the conscious choice unaccompanied by corresponding electrophysiological activity). He even noted that his experimental results validated a particular traditional religious understanding of moral choice — that sin is in the act, which is freely chosen, not in the temptation, which can arise without our choice. He even proposed a neurophysiological model of original sin! http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/01/do_benjamin_lib081171.html

On top of all that, Jeffrey Schwartz has now shown that people can, merely by their thoughts, "change the structure of the brain itself."

How Research on OCD Challenges Materialism - David Klinghoffer - June 18, 2019 Excerpt: Patients with OCD are under the command of the brain — to wash their hands obsessively, for instance, fearing they never quite get them clean. But using techniques that Jeffrey Schwartz pioneered, they can choose to train themselves to reinterpret their compulsive impulses, and, remarkably, change the structure of the brain itself. How is this possible? As Schwartz describes, a “wise advocate” or (quoting Adam Smith) “impartial spectator” stands outside and above the brain (not spatially but conceptually). This personality is the true self, and can objectively evaluate messages from the brain, because it is not the brain! https://evolutionnews.org/2019/06/how-research-on-ocd-challenges-materialism/

"Brain Plasticity" as it is termed,, i.e. thoughts changing the physical structure of the brain itself, is simply completely devastating to the 'bottom up' materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists.

The Case for the Soul - InspiringPhilosophy - (4:03 minute mark, Brain Plasticity including Schwartz's work) - Oct. 2014 - video The Mind is able to modify the brain (brain plasticity). Moreover, Idealism explains all anomalous evidence of personality changes due to brain injury, whereas physicalism cannot explain mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBsI_ay8K70

Moreover, the denial of free will by atheists is simply insane. What atheists are actually doing in their denial of free will is denying the reality of their own agent causality altogether. Yet, since we are in fact causal agents ourselves, and indeed since we experience our own agent causality every waking moment of our lives, then this claim is completely insane in that it denies the validity of the one thing we each have direct first hand knowledge of. Moreover, this insane denial of free will, via 'methodological naturalism', is 'baked into' the way atheists practice science itself. As Paul Nelson explains, the denial of free will "entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed you of that event after the fact. “That’s crazy,” you reply, “I certainly did write my email.”

Do You Like SETI? Fine, Then Let’s Dump Methodological Naturalism - Paul Nelson - September 24, 2014 Excerpt: Assessing the Damage MN Does to Freedom of Inquiry Epistemology — how we know — and ontology — what exists — are both affected by methodological naturalism. If we say, "We cannot know that a mind caused x," laying down an epistemological boundary defined by MN, then our ontology comprising real causes for x won’t include minds. MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed you of that event after the fact. "That’s crazy," you reply, "I certainly did write my email." Okay, then — to what does the pronoun "I" in that sentence refer? Your personal agency; your mind. Are you supernatural? https://evolutionnews.org/2014/09/do_you_like_set/

Besides atheists insanely being forced, (because of their a-priori philosophical commitment to methodological naturalism), to deny the reality of their very own agent causality which, again, they experience first hand, atheists, in their denial of the reality of their own free will, also directly undermine any claim that they may make that they are making a rationally coherent argument in the first place.

Sam Harris’s Free Will: The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It – Martin Cothran – November 9, 2012 Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state — including their position on this issue — is the effect of a physical, not logical cause. By their own logic, it isn’t logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/11/sam_harriss_fre066221.html (1) rationality implies a thinker in control of thoughts. (2) under materialism a thinker is an effect caused by processes in the brain. (3) in order for materialism to ground rationality a thinker (an effect) must control processes in the brain (a cause). (1)&(2) (4) no effect can control its cause. Therefore materialism cannot ground rationality. per Box UD

Simply put, the denial of free will is, as Dr. Egnor once put it, "self-refuting logical nonsense." Moreover, aside from the fact that evidence from neuroscience, (despite repeated false claims from atheists to the contrary), unequivocally demonstrates the reality of free will, and aside from the fact that atheists, in their denial of free will, undermine any claim that they are making a rationally coherent argument in the first place, aside from all that, recent advances in quantum mechanics itself now also validate the reality of free will. Although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:

Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm

And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.

Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell’s inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of ? 7.4 × 10^21. This experiment pushes back to at least ? 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

bornagain77

Another interesting thing is the direction of causality. The intensity of my mental processing brought about an observable brain state. The causality did not go in the other direction; the magenta brain state did not increase my conscious process.

Eric doesn't present any evidence for this - he doesn't show that his conscious thought preceded the observed brain state. And there is evidence that a brain state can precede a conscious decision. Bob O'H

Thank you for this Eric. But can I ask this? What about those who see this as an Epiphenomenal reaction of brain activity due to an environmental stress response. I’m sure this will be levied as an explanation for this. What would be a good refutation of that? Or does that not apply in this experiment? AaronS1978

Eric (I bought a brain wave scanning kit) Holloway, The Sheldon Coopers of the world salute you Sir! :) http://sites.psu.edu/psych256sp15/wp-content/uploads/sites/20663/2015/02/Sheldon-and-Amy.jpg bornagain77