7 ms·

First of all, our own explanations about ourselves and our behaviour are mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning:

First of all, our own explanations about ourselves and our behaviour are mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning: "In one well-known experiment, a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere was shown a picture of a chicken claw and his right hemisphere was shown a picture of a snow scene. The patient was asked to point to a card that was associated with the picture he just saw. With his left hand (controlled by his right hemisphere) he selected a shovel, which matched the snow scene. With his right hand (controlled by his left hemisphere) he selected a chicken, which matched the chicken claw. Next, the experimenter asked the patient why he selected each item. One would expect the speaking left hemisphere to explain why it chose the chicken but not why it chose the shovel, since the left hemisphere did not have access to information about the snow scene. Instead, the patient’s speaking left hemisphere replied, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed”" [1]. Also [2] has an interesting hypothesis on split-brains: not two agents, but two streams of perception. [1] 2014, "Divergent hemispheric reasoning strategies: reducing uncertainty versus resolving inconsistency", https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204522 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204522 [2] 2017, "The Split-Brain phenomenon revisited: A single conscious agent with split perception", https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/25987577/Split_Brain.pdf https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/25987577/Split_Brain.pdf

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
that is absolutely fascinating and also makes me extremely uncomfortable
- incangold 3y ago
  Same. We are so, so profoundly not what it feels like we are, to most of us anyway. I am morbidly curious how people are going to creatively explain away the more challenging insights AI gives us in to what consciousness is.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  It's probably way worse than we can imagine. Reading/listening to someone like Robert Sapolsky [1] makes me laugh I could have ever hallucinated about such a muddy, not even wrong concept as "free will". Furthermore, between the brain and, say, the liver there is only a difference of speed/data integrity inasmuch as one cares to look for information processing as basal cognition: neurons firing in the brain, voltage-gated ion channels and gap junctions controlling bioelectrical gradients in the liver, and almost everywhere in the body. Why does only the brain has a "feels like" sensation? The liver may have one as well, but the brain being an autarchic dictator perhaps suppresses the feeling of the liver, it certainly abstracts away the thousands of highly specialized decisions the liver takes each second solving adequately the complex problem space of blood processing. Perhaps Thomas Nagel shouldn't have asked "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" [2] but what is it like to be a liver. [1] "Robert Sapolsky: Justice and morality in the absence of free will", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvAAvwS-UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvAAvwS-UA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
  - sclarisse 3y ago
    The biggest problem with the current popular idea of “free will” is that people think it means they’re ineffably unpredictable. They’re uncomfortable with the notion that if you were to simulate their brain in sufficient detail, you could predict thoughts and reaction. They take refuge in pseudoscientific mumbling about the links to the Quantum, for they have heard it is special and unpredictable. And that’s just the polar opposite of having a meaningful will at all. It is good that you are pretty much deterministic. You shouldn’t be deciding meaningful things randomly. If you made 20 copies of yourself and asked them to support or oppose some essential and important political question (about human rights, or war, or what-have-you) they should all come down on the same side. What kind of a Will would that be that chose randomly?
    - MarcoZavala 3y ago
      [dead]
  - MarcoZavala 3y ago
- nomel 3y ago
  This is why I suggest that curious individuals try a hallucinogen at least once*. It really makes the fragility of our perception, and how it’s held up mostly by itself, very apparent. * in a safe setting with support, of course.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    I can confirm lucid dreaming does the same.
- causi 3y ago
  Neurology is full of very uncomfortable facts. Here's one for you: there are patients who believe their arm is gone even though it's still there. When the doctor asks whose arm that is, they reply it must be someone else's. The brain can simply refuse to know something, and will adopt whatever delusions and contortions are necessary. Which of course leads to the realization that there could be things we're all incapable of knowing. There could be things right in front of our faces we simply refuse to perceive and we'd never know it.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    Oliver Sacks' A Leg To Stand On is a lengthy discussion of that, including his own experiences after breaking a leg---IIRC, at one point after surgery but before he starts physical therapy, he wakes up convinced that a medical student has played a prank by removing his leg and attaching one from a cadaver, or at least sticking a cadaver's leg under his blanket. (ISTR he tries to throw it out of bed and ends up on the floor.)
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    Famously, our nose is literally right in front of our faces and the brain simply "post-processes" it out of the view. After breaking my arm, split in two, pinching the nerve and making me unable to move it for about a year, I still feel as if the arm is "someone else's", as if I am moving an object in VR, not something which is "me" or "mine".
- tokamak-teapot 3y ago
  Just wait until you notice how much humans do this day to day
- Joeri 3y ago
  If that makes you uncomfortable you definitely should not go reading the evidence supporting the notion that conscious free will is an illusion. https://www.mpg.de/research/unconscious-decisions-in-the-brain https://www.mpg.de/research/unconscious-decisions-in-the-bra...
  - mcguire 3y ago
    My impression is that the understanding of that research that comes up with statements like "But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings" is based on dualistic reasoning. The idea that there should not be any neural activity before a conscious decision is straight-up dualism---the intangible soul makes a decision and neural activity follows it to carry out the decision. An alternative way of understanding that result is that the neural activity that precedes the "conscious decision" is the brain's mechanism of coming up with that decision. The "conscious mind" is the result of neural activity, right?
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    i always thought that the concept of free will didnt bother me. but it turns out i just didn’t understand what it implied. oh dear. if it turns out that true, it’s truly amazing how well we convince ourselves that we’re in control. but if our brain controls our actions and not our consciousness, then what is the purpose of consciousness?
    - stevenhuang 3y ago
      Perhaps there is no purpose to consciousness. Perhaps it's a phenomenon that somehow arises independently ex nihilo from sufficiently complex systems, only ever able to observe, unable to act. Weird to think about.
      - Aerbil313 3y ago
        Can conscious experience ever arise from matter? Even if the said matter is neural networks? This seems utterly nonsensical to me.
rounakdatta 3y ago
Phantoms in the Brain is a fascinating book that deals with exactly this topic.
haldujai 3y ago
I'm not understanding the connection between your paragraphs here even after reading the first article. Even if you accept classic theory (e.g. hemispheric localization and the homunculus) which most experts don't all this suggests is that the brain tries to make sense of the information it has and in sparse environments it fills in. How does this make our behavior "mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning" as most humans don't have a severed corpus callosum. The discussion starts with: "In a healthy human brain, these divergent hemispheric tendencies complement each other and create a balanced and flexible reasoning system. Working in unison, the left and right hemispheres can create inferences that have explanatory power and both internal and external consistency."
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  He didn't say behavior. He said explanations of behaviour. Split brain experiments aside, this is pretty evident from other research. We can't recreate previous mental states, we just do a pretty good job (usually) of rationalizing decisions after the fact. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/
  - haldujai 3y ago
    I'm reading this as our explanations for our own behavior as in why am I typing on this keyboard right now, in which case it's not evident at all. The existence of cognitive dissonance suggested in your citation is in no way analogous to "our own explanations about ourselves and our behaviour are mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning" and in fact supports the opposite.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      One primary explanation of ourselves is that there is in fact a "self" there, we feel this "self" as being permanent, continuous through time, yet we are absolutely sure that is a lie: there are no continuous processes in the entire universe, energy itself is quantized. In the morning when we wake up, we are "booting" up the memories the brain finds and we believe that we have persisted through time, from yesterday to today, yet we are absolutely sure that is a lie: just look at an Alzheimer patient. We are feeling this self as if it's somewhere above the neck and we feel like this self is looking at the world and sees "out there", yet we are absolutely sure that is a lie: our senses are being overflown by inputs and the brain filters them, shapes a model of the world, and presents that model to the internal model of itself, which gets so immersed into model of the world that starts to believe the model is indeed the world, until the first bistable image [1] breaks the model down. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amanda-Parker-14/publication/282917004/figure/fig2/AS:671528807051270@1537116352444/Examples-of-perceptual-bistability-involving-object-interpretations.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amanda-Parker-14/public...
westurner 3y ago
Not supported by neuroimaging. Promoted without evidence or sufficient causal inference. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-right-2017082512222 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-ri... : > But, the evidence discounting the left/right brain concept is accumulating. According to a 2013 study from the University of Utah, brain scans demonstrate that activity is similar on both sides of the brain regardless of one's personality. > They looked at the brain scans of more than 1,000 young people between the ages of 7 and 29 and divided different areas of the brain into 7,000 regions to determine whether one side of the brain was more active or connected than the other side. No evidence of "sidedness" was found. The authors concluded that the notion of some people being more left-brained or right-brained is more a figure of speech than an anatomically accurate description. Here's wikipedia on the topic: "Lateralization of brain function" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi... Furthermore, "Neuropsychoanalysis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychoanalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychoanalysis Neuropsychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology Personality psychology > ~Biophysiological: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology MBTI > Criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... Connectome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome
- haldujai 3y ago
  Agree I'm not a neuro subspecialist but I've listened to some talks at conferences out of interest and I don't think anyone still believes in this anymore. Anecdotally the few fMRI's I reported as a trainee didn't support this either.
- jorgeortiz85 3y ago
  You are talking about the popular narrative of “left brain” thinking being more logical and “right brain” thinking being more creative. You are correct this is unsupported. The post you are replying to is talking about the small subset of individuals who have had their corpus callosum surgically severed, which makes it much more difficult for the brain to send messages between hemispheres. These patients exhibit “split brain” behavior that is well studied by experiments and can shed light into human consciousness and rationality.

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

that is absolutely fascinating and also makes me extremely uncomfortable

incangold 3y ago
Same. We are so, so profoundly not what it feels like we are, to most of us anyway. I am morbidly curious how people are going to creatively explain away the more challenging insights AI gives us in to what consciousness is.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
It's probably way worse than we can imagine. Reading/listening to someone like Robert Sapolsky [1] makes me laugh I could have ever hallucinated about such a muddy, not even wrong concept as "free will". Furthermore, between the brain and, say, the liver there is only a difference of speed/data integrity inasmuch as one cares to look for information processing as basal cognition: neurons firing in the brain, voltage-gated ion channels and gap junctions controlling bioelectrical gradients in the liver, and almost everywhere in the body. Why does only the brain has a "feels like" sensation? The liver may have one as well, but the brain being an autarchic dictator perhaps suppresses the feeling of the liver, it certainly abstracts away the thousands of highly specialized decisions the liver takes each second solving adequately the complex problem space of blood processing. Perhaps Thomas Nagel shouldn't have asked "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" [2] but what is it like to be a liver. [1] "Robert Sapolsky: Justice and morality in the absence of free will", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvAAvwS-UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvAAvwS-UA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
- sclarisse 3y ago
  The biggest problem with the current popular idea of “free will” is that people think it means they’re ineffably unpredictable. They’re uncomfortable with the notion that if you were to simulate their brain in sufficient detail, you could predict thoughts and reaction. They take refuge in pseudoscientific mumbling about the links to the Quantum, for they have heard it is special and unpredictable. And that’s just the polar opposite of having a meaningful will at all. It is good that you are pretty much deterministic. You shouldn’t be deciding meaningful things randomly. If you made 20 copies of yourself and asked them to support or oppose some essential and important political question (about human rights, or war, or what-have-you) they should all come down on the same side. What kind of a Will would that be that chose randomly?
  - MarcoZavala 3y ago
    [dead]
- MarcoZavala 3y ago
nomel 3y ago
This is why I suggest that curious individuals try a hallucinogen at least once*. It really makes the fragility of our perception, and how it’s held up mostly by itself, very apparent. * in a safe setting with support, of course.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  I can confirm lucid dreaming does the same.
causi 3y ago
Neurology is full of very uncomfortable facts. Here's one for you: there are patients who believe their arm is gone even though it's still there. When the doctor asks whose arm that is, they reply it must be someone else's. The brain can simply refuse to know something, and will adopt whatever delusions and contortions are necessary. Which of course leads to the realization that there could be things we're all incapable of knowing. There could be things right in front of our faces we simply refuse to perceive and we'd never know it.
- mcguire 3y ago
  Oliver Sacks' A Leg To Stand On is a lengthy discussion of that, including his own experiences after breaking a leg---IIRC, at one point after surgery but before he starts physical therapy, he wakes up convinced that a medical student has played a prank by removing his leg and attaching one from a cadaver, or at least sticking a cadaver's leg under his blanket. (ISTR he tries to throw it out of bed and ends up on the floor.)
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Famously, our nose is literally right in front of our faces and the brain simply "post-processes" it out of the view. After breaking my arm, split in two, pinching the nerve and making me unable to move it for about a year, I still feel as if the arm is "someone else's", as if I am moving an object in VR, not something which is "me" or "mine".
tokamak-teapot 3y ago
Just wait until you notice how much humans do this day to day
Joeri 3y ago
If that makes you uncomfortable you definitely should not go reading the evidence supporting the notion that conscious free will is an illusion. https://www.mpg.de/research/unconscious-decisions-in-the-brain https://www.mpg.de/research/unconscious-decisions-in-the-bra...
- mcguire 3y ago
  My impression is that the understanding of that research that comes up with statements like "But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings" is based on dualistic reasoning. The idea that there should not be any neural activity before a conscious decision is straight-up dualism---the intangible soul makes a decision and neural activity follows it to carry out the decision. An alternative way of understanding that result is that the neural activity that precedes the "conscious decision" is the brain's mechanism of coming up with that decision. The "conscious mind" is the result of neural activity, right?
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  i always thought that the concept of free will didnt bother me. but it turns out i just didn’t understand what it implied. oh dear. if it turns out that true, it’s truly amazing how well we convince ourselves that we’re in control. but if our brain controls our actions and not our consciousness, then what is the purpose of consciousness?
  - stevenhuang 3y ago
    Perhaps there is no purpose to consciousness. Perhaps it's a phenomenon that somehow arises independently ex nihilo from sufficiently complex systems, only ever able to observe, unable to act. Weird to think about.
    - Aerbil313 3y ago
      Can conscious experience ever arise from matter? Even if the said matter is neural networks? This seems utterly nonsensical to me.

rounakdatta 3y ago

Phantoms in the Brain is a fascinating book that deals with exactly this topic.

haldujai 3y ago

I'm not understanding the connection between your paragraphs here even after reading the first article. Even if you accept classic theory (e.g. hemispheric localization and the homunculus) which most experts don't all this suggests is that the brain tries to make sense of the information it has and in sparse environments it fills in. How does this make our behavior "mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning" as most humans don't have a severed corpus callosum. The discussion starts with: "In a healthy human brain, these divergent hemispheric tendencies complement each other and create a balanced and flexible reasoning system. Working in unison, the left and right hemispheres can create inferences that have explanatory power and both internal and external consistency."

famouswaffles 3y ago
He didn't say behavior. He said explanations of behaviour. Split brain experiments aside, this is pretty evident from other research. We can't recreate previous mental states, we just do a pretty good job (usually) of rationalizing decisions after the fact. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/
- haldujai 3y ago
  I'm reading this as our explanations for our own behavior as in why am I typing on this keyboard right now, in which case it's not evident at all. The existence of cognitive dissonance suggested in your citation is in no way analogous to "our own explanations about ourselves and our behaviour are mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning" and in fact supports the opposite.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    One primary explanation of ourselves is that there is in fact a "self" there, we feel this "self" as being permanent, continuous through time, yet we are absolutely sure that is a lie: there are no continuous processes in the entire universe, energy itself is quantized. In the morning when we wake up, we are "booting" up the memories the brain finds and we believe that we have persisted through time, from yesterday to today, yet we are absolutely sure that is a lie: just look at an Alzheimer patient. We are feeling this self as if it's somewhere above the neck and we feel like this self is looking at the world and sees "out there", yet we are absolutely sure that is a lie: our senses are being overflown by inputs and the brain filters them, shapes a model of the world, and presents that model to the internal model of itself, which gets so immersed into model of the world that starts to believe the model is indeed the world, until the first bistable image [1] breaks the model down. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amanda-Parker-14/publication/282917004/figure/fig2/AS:671528807051270@1537116352444/Examples-of-perceptual-bistability-involving-object-interpretations.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amanda-Parker-14/public...

westurner 3y ago

Not supported by neuroimaging. Promoted without evidence or sufficient causal inference. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-right-2017082512222 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-ri... : > But, the evidence discounting the left/right brain concept is accumulating. According to a 2013 study from the University of Utah, brain scans demonstrate that activity is similar on both sides of the brain regardless of one's personality. > They looked at the brain scans of more than 1,000 young people between the ages of 7 and 29 and divided different areas of the brain into 7,000 regions to determine whether one side of the brain was more active or connected than the other side. No evidence of "sidedness" was found. The authors concluded that the notion of some people being more left-brained or right-brained is more a figure of speech than an anatomically accurate description. Here's wikipedia on the topic: "Lateralization of brain function" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi... Furthermore, "Neuropsychoanalysis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychoanalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychoanalysis Neuropsychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology Personality psychology > ~Biophysiological: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology MBTI > Criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... Connectome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome

haldujai 3y ago
Agree I'm not a neuro subspecialist but I've listened to some talks at conferences out of interest and I don't think anyone still believes in this anymore. Anecdotally the few fMRI's I reported as a trainee didn't support this either.
jorgeortiz85 3y ago
You are talking about the popular narrative of “left brain” thinking being more logical and “right brain” thinking being more creative. You are correct this is unsupported. The post you are replying to is talking about the small subset of individuals who have had their corpus callosum surgically severed, which makes it much more difficult for the brain to send messages between hemispheres. These patients exhibit “split brain” behavior that is well studied by experiments and can shed light into human consciousness and rationality.