Neural correlates of free will

*nismaratwork*

Quote by apeiron

She said she had a blood clot pressing on the language areas. And had that removed. So she may not have lost a lot of gray matter. On the other hand, her style is a bit wild....

I have to say I did very like her account of the stroke itself. That did seem accurately observed. It is the cartoon version of neuroscience - the right brain in tune with the cosmos, the left brain standing for the selfish self - which makes it invalid as a PF citation here.

Agreed.

Pythagorean

Quote by apeiron

So what is the point you are attempting to make here?

Do you expect this to be taken seriously as evidence for something? What exactly?

This:

If you want a neuroscientific explanation of her symptoms, that isn't hard to supply. A general state of disinhibition has this everything happening/nothing happening quality of raw potential experience. Attentional states are needed to suppress activity, creating a state of meaningful activity. The left brain is the lead player in creating focal attentional states.

Yes, there is a strong dichotomy expressed in the left~right brain. It is focus and fringe, event and context. A processing dichotomy. Left zooms in, the right pans out. But this woman soars way off into la-la land when it comes to a scientific view of what is going on.

It's not a scientific view... how can you think that? It's a phenomenological view. The assumption was that we already knew the neuroscience. Nismar was commenting on what people felt and experienced. We were talking about subjective experience.

I was demonstrating how the subjective experience of self that binds you to one location in your head requires functioning neural circuitry.

apeiron

Quote by Pythagorean

I was demonstrating how the subjective experience of self that binds you to one location in your head requires functioning neural circuitry.

So please when you post links, make it clear what it is we are supposed to notice.

And you still don't make sense as she was talking about her emboddied experience. Subjectively she never felt located in a side of her head. But she did find her own hands and body start to feel alien. And then her own presence swell and break the physical bounds of her body.

If you wanted to talk about the psychophysics of body image, there is a ton of peer-review papers you know.

A recent one...
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/4082/full

Pythagorean

Quote by apeiron

So please when you post links, make it clear what it is we are supposed to notice.

A fair request.

It was in the heat of a discussion between nismar and I (the collective conscious vs. self discussion) that transcended a couple threads, so I had already habituated to the context and failed to continue to declare it.

Darken-Sol

Quote by JoeDawg

No. All it really tells us, is that the decision making process is distinct from the self-reflective process. It actually makes sense that the latter would require more processing. Compare how much more difficult it is to learn to drive a car... than it is to drive one after you have learned. In the former case, you have to 'be aware' of everything you are doing. In the latter, your decisions seem 'more unconscious', even though a truly unconscious driver would be in a lot of trouble. The real problem is that the conscious/unconscious dichotomy is overly simplistic. We're only scratching the surface of what consciousness actually is, so this is not surprising.

my sensei says we train so we do not have to think. when we fight from "no-mind" we will always be faster than some one who has to process information and decide. when i learn and train a new technique i am making the decision then and there to use it if the situation ever arises.

Ken G

Yes, I think there are (at least) two kinds of being conscious-- one which is very self-reflective, possibly even internally verbal (like analysis of one's situation), and the other that is less verbal and more animalistic-- "in the zone", if you will. We might err to jump to the conclusion that the higher form of consciousness is the former because it is the more separate from animals-- the "in the zone" form actually feels like a higher consciousness, we feel more in tune with our surroundings and more able to act (and act faster, as we heard just above). I don't say that animals are "in the zone" the way people are-- it seems more like a person coming full circle to a kind of animalistic state of mind is still a higher or more complete self-awareness than what animals might experience. Perhaps the goal should not be to take our greater intelligence and achieve a state of mind as different from animals as possible, but rather, to take our greater intelligence that separates us from animals and find the road back that allows us access to both worlds.

In relation to the thread, if this is true, it means that what we mean by "free will" could be more than just one thing, so we should not study it as though we were studying just one thing.

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