Vid: Is the brain the boss of the mind?

_{Denyse O'Leary

July 6, 2014

Mind, Neuroscience, News}

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Here’s a vid from Scientific American, “Free Will: Is Your Brain the Boss of You?”:

Michael Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is at the forefront of the research into free will, and its implications in courtroom trials and in the expectations of different societies. His thoughts and proclamations are captured in an engaging video called Free Will, created by Joseph LeDoux, a well-known expert on the emotional brain at New York University. The video is the second in a series he is putting together with director Alexis Gambis called My Mind’s Eye. (The first episode featured Ned Block on the mind-body problem.) They have given Scientific American the chance to post these videos first, on our site.

Vid:

How Free Is Your Will? An interview with Michael Gazzaniga from Imaginal Disc on Vimeo.

Let us know what you think.

PS: The “mind-body problem” is a lot like the “hard problem of consciousness.” Reality isn’t what accepted theories need, and it’s a problem.

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Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Comments

Your concluding paragraph is particularly beautifully expressed, awstar.Axel_{July 7, 2014
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'Reality isn’t what accepted theories need, and it’s a problem.' At first I thought that was a hilariously wry understatement. But it is anything but funny, when the putative brains of the world, certainly those with the formal authority, doggedly insist on making 2 + 2 anything but 4, because it doesn't figure on their personal wish-list.Axel_{July 7, 2014
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Let us know what you think. PS: The “mind-body problem” is a lot like the “hard problem of consciousness.” Reality isn’t what accepted theories need, and it’s a problem.
I didn't watch the video -- I guess my brain overrode my free will and chose not to watch. RB said:
The bible always presents our minds as a minor point in our thinking.’ its soul , heart, mind.
I suspect that the mind serves as a differentiator (judge) between what the brain is signaling as to what is happening real time (sensation); what we remember of the consequences of that happening before (memory); and what our "hearts" (biblically speaking, the seat of our desires) would like our bodies to do about the sensations we are sensing. If I see a bowl of ice cream but have never eaten ice cream I have no memory of what it tastes like. If someone persuades me to taste it by saying it tastes good, I remember what tasting good is like (brain function) and that my "heart" likes the sensation of eating stuff that tastes good (soul function), and if I trust the one who is telling me that it tastes good (brain function) my mind decides (soul function) to go ahead and taste it because it wants to satisfy the desires of the heart (soul function) and there doesn't appear to be unwanted consequences that would trump the desires of my heart (brain function). So it is the desires of my heart (soul function) that rule my mind, but my mind can decide that avoiding the consequences (as memories stored in the brain) is better for me than giving into the desires of my heart. If God should harden my heart, then He would force my mind to decide to do what my heart wants even though my brain tells me I will regret it. If I have the Spirit of God dwelling in me, I am free to actually choose either what my heart desires, what the world says I ought to do, or what God desires. Without the Spirit of God dwelling in me, I am a slave to both the desires of my heart and the traditions of the world; And both are often contrary to the desires of God. But if God's Spirit dwells within me to give me the knowledge of God, then I am free to choose His desires for me; which are always in my best interest because He loves me and gave Himself for me.awstar_{July 7, 2014
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Split-brain studies don't offer the foundation for inferring that the brain is deterministic that the Dr. in the video thinks it does: Here is a first person account of the split-brain experiment in which the person in the experiment testifies to knowing that his free will was not being followed:
Quote: "BTW, with regards to your citation of the split-brain experiments (and people who suffer from that due to injury, etc). I was involved in one of those split-brain experiments myself. (Which is possible by temporarily numbing the corpus callosum.) And believe me, it was the damnedest thing. The thing is, even though different parts of my brain were acting as if they had no knowledge of “each other”, behind it all was still “me”, consciously experiencing the strange disconnection. https://uncommondescent.com/philosophy/holy-rollers-pascals-wager-if-id-is-wrong-it-was-an-honest-mistake/#comment-460565
Needless to say, it is a non sequitur to infer that since you can produce a situation in which your free will is not being followed, and you know it is not being followed, then you have no free will to be followed. On the contrary, it merely proves you have a free will that is not being followed since your subjective self is aware of the disconnect between its will and the bodies actions. Along this line, In the following videos, although the girl in the videos was written off as hopelessly retarded by everyone who saw her, reveal that there was/is indeed a gentle intelligence, a “me”, a “soul’, within the girl that was/is trapped within her body. And that that “me” was/is unable to express herself properly to others because of her neurological disorder.
Severely Handicapped Girl Suddenly Expresses Intelligence At Age 11 – very moving video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg Carly’s Café – Experience Autism Through Carly’s Eyes – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmDGvquzn2k
Hemispherectomies go even further in clarifying the issue. If the mind of a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed a 'person' should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a 'person', as they were before, but that is not the case. The ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
Miracle Of Mind-Brain Recovery Following Hemispherectomies - Dr. Ben Carson - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zBrY77mBNg Dr. Gary Mathern - What Can You Do With Half A Brain? - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrKijBx_hAw Removing Half of Brain Improves Young Epileptics' Lives: Excerpt: "We are awed by the apparent retention of memory and by the retention of the child's personality and sense of humor,'' Dr. Eileen P. G. Vining; In further comment from the neuro-surgeons in the John Hopkins study: "Despite removal of one hemisphere, the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved. Intellect was only affected in the one child who had remained in a coma, vigil-like state, attributable to peri-operative complications." http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/19/science/removing-half-of-brain-improves-young-epileptics-lives.html Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One - May 2007 Excerpt: Most Hopkins hemispherectomy patients are five to 10 years old. Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly, memory and personality develop normally. ,,, Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically once their seizures stopped. "One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his state, and others are in college doing very nicely," Freeman says. Of course, the operation has its downside: "You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision on that side is lost," Freeman says. Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. ,,, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-when-half-brain-better-than-whole
Quantum Mechanics goes even further in clarifying the free will issue. In the following experiment, the claim that past material states determine future conscious choices (determinism) is directly falsified by the fact that present conscious choices are, in fact, effecting past material states:
Quantum physics mimics spooky action into the past – April 23, 2012 http://phys.org/news/2012-04-quantum-physics-mimics-spooky-action.html
In other words, if my conscious choices really are just merely the result of whatever state the material particles in my brain happen to be in in the past (deterministic) how in blue blazes are my present choices instantaneously effecting the state of material particles into the past? This experiment is simply impossible for any coherent materialistic explanation! Of note: since our free will choices figure so prominently in how reality is actually found to be constructed in our understanding of quantum mechanics, I think a Christian perspective on just how important our choices are in this temporal life, in regards to our eternal destiny, is very fitting:
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell." - C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Verse and Music:
Deuteronomy 30:19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live Kutless- Never Too Late https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIKQbqawdF8
bornagain77_{July 7, 2014
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Whats with the music stuff? Anyways its all missing the big point as I see it. We don't have minds. We only are souls and the great thinking goes on there. Immaterial operations. the mind , I think, is just a priority memories organized thing. The bible always presents our minds as a minor point in our thinking.' its soul , heart, mind. YES our memory machine runs all our material being. moving our arms and vision is all about a memory operation. Its been the error of not seeing the memory as the great mecahanical operation between our soul/memories/and body. healing could come better by accepting gods word on human thinking boundaries.Robert Byers_{July 7, 2014
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