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How Your Brain Decides Without You (2014)
- guard-of-terra 11y ago"People who have discovered they have a brain and were frightened by it" If you are not your brain, who are you?
- noja 11y agoPart of my brain.
- johnchristopher 11y agoThe rest of the body of course. And if you are into it: The sum of all your connections to others and the traces you leave in their minds.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoProbably more the traces they leave in your mind. We have a slightly bizarre illusion of separate consciousness, but it's impossible to grow into a full adult human without being connected - in many different ways - to the wider human network.
- hellbanner 11y agoGreat point. Humans growing up without others we call "feral" Have you read Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind? A psychologist analyzes historical signs of "consciousness", like the transition in the Ilyad of men's motivations shifting from parts of their bodies & god puppeters to their "will". One of his interesting conclusions is that schizophrenic voices were these connections, or in hackerspeak, daemons or programs running. With so many programs competing for attention at once, the "consciousness" program was formed to "decide" how to spend its newly alloted attention. Peter Watts, marine biologist, explores this in his Firefall series (fiction) - the idea of consciousness arising out of conflict. It fits nicely with the folk wisdom that in "Flow", there is no sense of self. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618057072 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618057072? : Origins of Consciousness http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765328038 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765328038 : Sci-fi featuring Consciousness as conflict as a central theme .. why do I feel like this exact discussion has been repeated on HN before? Like different neurons of the HN-brain are running across this idea of "automatic decision making" and sending it up to the neo-cortex (front page), again, and again..
- nhaehnle 11y agoMy line of thinking when I saw the headline was very similar. If you believe that your brain decides something without you, that just means you don't have a good understanding of who/what you are.
- Zigurd 11y agoOr it could mean that what you think of as "you" can't access the parts of your brain that makes decisions. Just like it can't access how you digest food.
- laotzu 11y agoThe universe
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dualogy 11y ago~37.2 trillion cells and ~372 trillion microbes first and foremost
- criddell 11y agoMathematics maybe.
- ZeroFries 11y agoPresumably an emergent entity formed in part by the activities of the brain.
- codeulike 11y agoClicked on article expecting it to not be very good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
- lemevi 11y agoI didn't really like the article. It was too conversational with unnecessary anecdotes. While reading it I was pretty much annoyed by how the writer didn't respect my time and couldn't just spit out what their main idea was. Like I shouldn't need to read three or four paragraphs to find out if the topic is something I already know about or interesting to me. This article is basically a fluff entertainment piece for people who just enjoy reading for the sake of it and want to feel smart for it when they're done.
- degenerate 11y agoI did like the opening picture though. There's something creepy about it!
- ksk 11y ago>While reading it I was pretty much annoyed by how the writer didn't respect my time and couldn't just spit out what their main idea was. Like I shouldn't need to read three or four paragraphs to find out if the topic is something I already know about or interesting to me. And yet, you did the same thing for your comment. Anyway, your preferred style of writing does exist and its called a research paper. Thankfully, the world is big enough to accmodate other styles of writing.
- fmstephe 11y agoWhen reading any articles about psychology now I always have in the back of my head the question "How many of these studies have been reporoduced?" There are a lot of valuable insights from this kind of research but right now it's hard to know which are the valuable ones and which ones are just air.
- hashkb 11y agoIt really is too bad that we are hardwired to suck at being corrected. It is the source of so much social and organizational inefficiency.
- danharaj 11y ago> It really is too bad that we are hardwired to suck at being corrected. Why do you think that? Speak for yourself. The foundation of human society is transmission of knowledge and skills. We spend a great deal of our time learning from others, which involves correction based on observation of others as well as instruction from others. When people are receptive to being corrected, they are very good at being corrected. When they resist being corrected, they are very bad at it. Why do they resist? Probably because we often find ourselves in social situations where accepting criticism from others is considered submissive and a penalty to social standing. People who consider each other equals tend to be very receptive to mutual correction. People who are vying to be the dominant one in a relationship are very hostile towards being corrected.
- jschwartzi 11y agoThere's another reason to resist being corrected: your colleagues are in the middle of having a knee-jerk reaction to something you did for good reason, and they can't explain why they don't like it in this instance, only in general.
- danharaj 11y agoAh yes, when the person being corrected corrects the person correcting them :)
- hashkb 11y agoIf you disagree with my statement, aren't you also saying you don't believe in confirmation bias? It's more or less proven that we behave this way (seek out information that supports our beliefs, discard/adjust information that doesn't.) Why do you think that? I don't, actually; I think I'm awesome at being corrected and just happen to be right most of the time. Fortunately I'm often able to catch my biased, subconscious reactions before I say anything.
- laotzu 11y ago>We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. -Alan Watts, Way of Zen
- humanrebar 11y agoIn the same vein, here's an alternate title for this post: "How Our Brains Think Your Brain Decides Without You"
- robinhoode 11y ago> An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Even when this regression is finite, it has a name: anxiety.
- cryoshon 11y agoIn other words, your idea is that anxiety is the repetitive regression of meta-thought?
- criddell 11y agoHow is that different than Zeno's Paradox?
- marklgr 11y agoZeno's paradoxes are about convergence of infinite series, something quite puzzling back then. But the infinite regress problem here (or in related free will questions) is not about convergence.
- drostie 11y agoWhen Lewis Carroll discusses a similar logical problem in "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" it comes from the perspective of a Zeno paradox which cannot be resolved in the same way. Essentially, Achilles says "A, therefore Z." Tortoise says, "Well, suppose I don't see the connection here, you have some symbols on this side and some symbols on that side, could you help me?" So Achilles modifies this to, "A, and A implies Z, therefore Z." And the Tortoise says, "well, that sounds very good and I trust your proof that A implies Z but I'm still not seeing the connection here. Could you help me connect those left hand things to the right hand thing?" So Achilles modifies this to "A, and A implies Z, and (A and A implies Z) implies Z, therefore Z." And the Tortoise says, "aha, of course '(A and A implies Z) implies Z' ... but wait, now that I've written that down, I again don't see the connection here...". Essentially the point is that our generic rule that replaces "x and x implies y" with "x and y" is a process which lives outside the declarative scope of formal logic. (In the Curry-Howard isomorphism: you can have a value of type `x` and a function which turns values of type `x` into values of type `y`, but these are definitions, and there is no way to capture the true process of applying the function to the value -- just another declaration of another function which has type `x → (x → y) → y` which is by itself never involved in a process.) (As an amateur physicist, I hasten to remind everyone that Zeno won in the end; there is a context which Zeno could have never foreseen where a Zeno paradox makes a certain kind of motion impossible. The reason nobody can travel faster than light is that if you take your spaceship and try to race a light beam, first you throw down a beacon, and then you accelerate to speed c/2 relative to that beacon -- in your shiny new reference frame, due to the constancy of the speed of light in inertial reference frames, the light beam is still moving at speed c away from you.)
- dschiptsov 11y agoThere is no You in the brain. That You is an illusion produced by the conditioned mind. Animals doesn't have any You. 99.9% of activities which brain controls are "non-verbal", which means have nothing to do with the prefrontal cortex, Wernicke's areas, etc. To put it simply, almost everything is non-verbal (doesn't require your self). We grossly overemphasize importance of that You we are obsessed with.
- marklgr 11y agoIt depends on how you define "you". If it's the conscious self, then it does exist, even though it's anywhere near in control of as much as it believes. It's more like it's sometimes notified of what happens in the hood, and it got some veto on that.
- esMazer 11y agothere's no separation, you and your brain are not 2 different things. The interface (what most people call "you") is that, just the interface. The real "you" is everything..
- cmcnally 11y agoThere has to be some degree of separation at some point though. For all I know, there could be more than one "me" experiencing life as processed by my brain at any given time, but the self cannot possible be the complete interface as a whole. If it were so, then the self could not continue to exist if a portion of the interface were removed, but it can, regardless of it being a less than optimal condition.
- monort 11y agoThere is seems to be indeed two of you as evidenced by split brain patients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
- wnmurphy 11y ago
- charlysisto 11y agoAnother case for duck typing... (a shameless rubyist)
- charlysisto 11y agoI guess appreciating humour has something to do with one's brain perception - or the lack of thereof.
- joosters 11y agoMy brain is part of me (who else could it be?) So how can it possibly be said to make decisions without me?
- ASalazarMX 11y agoYou're throwing a baseball, but at the last moment you spot a kid running into its path. You tried to stop your arm but it was already in motion. You decided half a second too late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Over...
- richardboegli 11y agoFor those who haven't read up about emotional intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Intelligence
- richardboegli 11y agoNot sure why I was voted down, it relates to the same things talked about in the parent post...
- glxc 11y agoi wish this article appeared on their facebook page so i could like it to share it with my network this article is a month old, so maybe it went away?
- knughit 11y agoIf you play one of those modern games with he AI assist, like Final Fantasy Sims or StarCraft , are you really playing the game?
- Splines 11y ago(I don't know what this has to do with the article, but it's an interesting question) Sure, why not? Games are just a simulation of something, and an AI assist removes some of the user-interacting parts of that simulation. You don't need to manually reload your weapon in Counterstrike, nor do you need to worry about where to place your feet. Similarly, you don't need to pathfind for your units in Starcraft, nor do you need to manually fetch every single resource.
- oldmanjay 11y agoI can see the duck and the rabbit at once. I don't have much of an opinion on the rest of the article.
- ryanmaynard 11y agoI did as well. However, I imagine that articles that aren't a touch hyperbolic seldom make it to the top of the news aggregators.
- decisiveness 11y agoThey can't possibly share the same set of eyes, so you must be slightly ignoring the backs of both of their heads.
- ckaygusu 11y agoI had a bit spooky experience more or less 1 year ago. It was an emotionally intensive period, at certain moments my body was giving off reactions that I wasn't in control of. My mind wasn't completely detached from the situation I was in, but enough so I was just watching myself... doing things. This experience made me think in what state my mind will be at later ages. I'm quite young now, and I've heard from so many people that at later ages one's thought process is not as fluid or creative as it is in youth. It made me think of all these moments of brillance I've had the pleasure of experiencing will vanish as I age. I'm speaking of arriving at solutions to problems without consciously thinking about them, like all of the sudden the solution just pops in your head and, comparing to the state that you are in, moments ago, having no clue what to do with the problem at hand, suddenly you precisely know what to do. I have done nothing to achieve or deserve this trait, but still, knowing that it will be taken away some time later and having no control over the process, is depressing.