3 ms·

> A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together'. That

by retrac 4y ago

> A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together'. That also means there is no one instant in time where we become 'conscious' of things. People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before they consciously become aware of the action. This delay can be quite a few seconds. Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press one of two buttons). I've had hints of this experience subjectively, from time to time. Action, then thought, in that order. I'd like a sip of water; with particularly careful awareness of relative sequencing, I'm fairly sure that, sometimes, when this thought percolates to the surface of my mind, my hand is already moving towards the glass. Sometimes I wonder if the conscious self is mostly just a passive observer, constantly coming up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain why the body just acted the way it did. Decidedly unnerving, but that seems to be the nature of our being. Multiple loci of consciousness is, IMO, fairly strongly supported by what happens with brain damage. Very rarely, people with damage to the corpus callosum linking the hemispheres of the brain, develop something like alien hand syndrome, where half of their body adopts complex and seemingly-intentional behaviour, that the person is quite unaware of consciously. This manifestation is sometimes described as having a personality and desires, which are often similar, but not identical, to the conscious part of that person.

cecilpl2 4y ago
There is an excellent (very) short story by Ted Chiang called "What's expected of us" that I think you'll like. https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
- qbit 4y ago
  Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this part: “Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions.” Of course sending the warning will have an effect because it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read it! They don’t get to choose how they will be affected by it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a person has no free will is not to say that they are not affected by their environment.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    > Of course sending the warning will have an effect Compared to not sending it? Of course – but that's a counterfactual. The present leads to the future, where this message is sent; the act of sending the message did not alter the past.
- Filligree 4y ago
  It's something, alright. I just find it a little... strange. Compatibilism isn't a new invention, and Chiang ought to have heard of it, but it isn't mentioned at all in the story.
tudorw 4y ago
https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consciousness_as_a_memory_system.19.aspx https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consci...
pessimizer 4y ago
People can act with "seemingly-conscious" intent without ever becoming "consciously" aware of the action. Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a lot about this; one of my favorites of his is How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation. https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
tsimionescu 4y ago
> Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press one of two buttons). I think I read somewhere that this result couldn't be reproduced with a more rational task. The original experiment asked the participants to press one of two buttons when some signal was triggered, and asked them to remember what time they saw when they chose which button to press, all while hooked up to some EEG machine. The spike corresponding to their choice was consistently happening before the self-reported time. However, if I'm remembering correctly, when further experiments were carried out with a more rational choice, they were unable to find a similar gap that would precede the reported time of choice. A possible conclusion is that in fact the original experiment had found nothing interesting about conscious choice, but something interesting about how we make random choices - when the normal variance in brain activity happens to spike in some way, the timing/place/some other characteristic of the spike is used later by our consciousness to determine the result of the choice. Unfortunately, I don't know how to find the paper I remember, so I don't know if I'm remembering it right and/or if it is regarded as a good paper or not - so don't put too much stock in what I've said above.
- codeulike 4y ago
  You're talking about Libets famous emperiment in 1984 and the more recent articles (it was widely reported in 2019) that because of the aritificiality of the setup (as you say, participants were asked to just act randomly) Libet had essentially made a sortof statistical error and was not measuring 'decisions' at all. e.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
codeulike 4y ago
People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before they consciously become aware of the action This idea is largely based on Libet's experiments in the 80s, and recent studies have concluded that what he was measuring was not the brain 'making a decision' but more or less just random noise which seemed to become significant due to the way the data was processed. It was widely reported in 2019, e.g. see here https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

by retrac 4y ago

cecilpl2 4y ago

There is an excellent (very) short story by Ted Chiang called "What's expected of us" that I think you'll like. https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

qbit 4y ago
Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this part: “Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions.” Of course sending the warning will have an effect because it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read it! They don’t get to choose how they will be affected by it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a person has no free will is not to say that they are not affected by their environment.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > Of course sending the warning will have an effect Compared to not sending it? Of course – but that's a counterfactual. The present leads to the future, where this message is sent; the act of sending the message did not alter the past.
Filligree 4y ago
It's something, alright. I just find it a little... strange. Compatibilism isn't a new invention, and Chiang ought to have heard of it, but it isn't mentioned at all in the story.

tudorw 4y ago

https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consciousness_as_a_memory_system.19.aspx https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consci...

pessimizer 4y ago

People can act with "seemingly-conscious" intent without ever becoming "consciously" aware of the action. Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a lot about this; one of my favorites of his is How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation. https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

tsimionescu 4y ago

> Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press one of two buttons). I think I read somewhere that this result couldn't be reproduced with a more rational task. The original experiment asked the participants to press one of two buttons when some signal was triggered, and asked them to remember what time they saw when they chose which button to press, all while hooked up to some EEG machine. The spike corresponding to their choice was consistently happening before the self-reported time. However, if I'm remembering correctly, when further experiments were carried out with a more rational choice, they were unable to find a similar gap that would precede the reported time of choice. A possible conclusion is that in fact the original experiment had found nothing interesting about conscious choice, but something interesting about how we make random choices - when the normal variance in brain activity happens to spike in some way, the timing/place/some other characteristic of the spike is used later by our consciousness to determine the result of the choice. Unfortunately, I don't know how to find the paper I remember, so I don't know if I'm remembering it right and/or if it is regarded as a good paper or not - so don't put too much stock in what I've said above.

codeulike 4y ago
You're talking about Libets famous emperiment in 1984 and the more recent articles (it was widely reported in 2019) that because of the aritificiality of the setup (as you say, participants were asked to just act randomly) Libet had essentially made a sortof statistical error and was not measuring 'decisions' at all. e.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

codeulike 4y ago

People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before they consciously become aware of the action This idea is largely based on Libet's experiments in the 80s, and recent studies have concluded that what he was measuring was not the brain 'making a decision' but more or less just random noise which seemed to become significant due to the way the data was processed. It was widely reported in 2019, e.g. see here https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...