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Scientists Find Brain Cells Linked to Choice
An anonymous reader writes "Scotsman.com is reporting that Harvard Medical researchers may have found the neurons, or brain cells, that play a role in a persons ability to choose between different items. From the article: 'Scientists have known that cells in different parts of the brain react to attributes such as color, taste or quantity. Dr Camillo Padaoa-Schioppa and John Assad, an associate professor of neurobiology, found neurons involved in assigning values that help people to make choices.'"
I personally feel that there are so many "disorders" these days, that people often find a crutch for every vice and desire. Instead of working tochange for the better, people say "That's the way I am... I can't change."
Some of these people may think this article proves that thought. I for one, feel it supports the opposite.
From the article:
"The monkey's choice may be based on the activity of these neurons," said Padoa-Schioppa. Earlier research involving the OFC showed that lesions in the area seem to have an association with eating disorders, compulsive gambling and unusual social behaviour. The new findings show an association between the activity of the OFC and the mental valuation process underlying choice behaviour, according to the scientists."
I think people still have choices regardless of the addiction they suffer from (OCD disorders, Serial Killer, Gambling, etc.) A person doesn't HAVE TO Gamble, but it feels that way. He doesn't HAVE TO wash his hands 5 times, but he thinks he does.
These abnormalities or "lesions" in our brains may make us feel we do not have a choice. In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
Funnypics
In other news, the sun is hot, space is cold, and Tiger Wood is black. News at eleven.
How about putting electrodes in these areas and forcing these macaque monkeys to choose grape over apple juice? That would really prove it.
Duh!
First thing we do, we find out which cell is responsible for making guys choose to wear pink shirts.
Every guy who has an active pink-shirt cell then gets neutered (or would they technically requiring spaying?).
brain cells linked to choice Wow and I always thought it was the lung cells that determine choice.
The word you're looking for is "Predisposition".
Are these the same guys that linked a study of sounds to your ears? Simply Amazing.
Let me know when they find the part that makes stupid choices for me so I can have it removed
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It's time for the age-old debate about man's free will. Does it exist, or are we just kidding ourselves? Is the consciousness an intact "entity" within the brain, or is it simply the end result of external stimuli influencing choices? One thing is for sure: neuroscience is making it more difficult for a spirit to hide in our mushy insides. Eventually, we'll know for sure how the brain works. For now, we are stuck with debating the definitions of words like soul, freedom, consciousness, etc...
We can give a genetic explanation for why people bought SCO stock.
I'm sure there are many other instances where "Broken Choice Genes" have
altered expected outcomes. Right?
/* * pope1 */
For neurobiologist the debate is long over. IF they are scientific worth their salt they won't presuppose the existence of a "supplemental entity" like soul to explain our "selves", that is unless somebody bring the data which can't be explained without this so called "soul". hasn't happenned so far. Neurobiologist leave "soul" and other of those to religion and philosophy. As for free will, Since "we" are the sum of all our chemical reaction in the brain (again if you want to bring a 3rd identity in play like soul or conscience bring the data to prove it with), there is no such things as free will, only the illusion that those reaction give to the mass of neuron constituing that "we".
Bottom line is the debate is over, unless you bring data and evidence to the contrary, not explainable within current frame. Good luck on that...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I feel compelled to post this:
Would that make you an Al-Gayda?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I'm choosing not to mod you down.
Scientists find Lack of Mod Points Linked to Choice
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Perhaps this "brain" of ours should be investigated for ties to other things involving thought.
Shouldnt memory play a role in this?
.. I thought that also could be expressed in the earlier way mentioned.
I was under the impression that memory (basically hippocampus and amygdala) was the reason we chose items.
For example -
Grape - Appropriate synapses of the looks of the grape colour,look etc all get burned up in hippocampus
Also, when we eat it - the synapses for amygdala set for pleasure also gets set up.
Also a combination path way neuron for both also gets hardened due to electrons going there - (in hippocampus).
Now next time I see a grape, this compination path gets a signal when we see a grape - so a signal goes to the other one (for pleasure also), thus the memory of pleasurable experience when a grape is eaten comes to me.
This is memory.
Now, for a choice, depending on the amount of pleasure, my synapses fire more and I go for that.
For example - if there is bittergourd and grape, I will go for grape only.
I thought the monkeys choice depended on these neurons rather than the one they speak about.
Or is this the intelligent choice they are talking about - where in I go for bittergourd instead due to the higeher nutrition content ???
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I don't know much about Free Will, but I do believe in Free Willy.
The Y chromosome must have the directions for that portion of the brain. My wife can't decide on anything.
They seem to buy or like whatever is shoved in their face by public advertising.
Maybe these people are brain-damaged, after all...
South Dakota legislators have no brains.
It seems to me that, for the average person, this would play a small part in actually making choices...most incorrect choices tend to be made due to incomplete information, selfishness (including refusing to hear others opinions or accept advice), or denial of what is known or true.
Sure, these neurons may be involved in the process of making judgements, but if the person does not understand or refuses to accept the choice, he is setting himself up for failure before the brain even gets to this step.
I agree with some of the other posters that this discovery may be misused as an excuse for poor choices and behaviors that the individual has an inkling may be incorrect. But, I hope we come to our senses and start taking personal responsibility for our lives, instead of making biological and societal excuses for everything that "goes wrong".
>"The neurons we have identified encode the value individuals assign to the available items when they make choices based on subjective preferences"
The article does not deny the subjective nature of many of our preferences, but provides evidence as to the objective mechanism by which these subjective preferences are translated into action.
It sorta requires a re-thinking of the distinction between 'objective' and 'subjective'.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
"I don't like what you're saying, so, Shut-Up!"
You see, the parent probably has one of those "disabilities" that allows him to walk around with an entitlement chip on his shoulder, letting everyone know that they need to treat him special and that they owe him (whatever) because he has a "disability" and if they don't then they're just "prejudiced against people with disabilities."
When you realize that you don't owe anyone anything and they don't owe you anything, a lot of "prejudice" in this world suddenly evaporates. It funny how it works! It took me 40 years to figure it out and I would have been a lot happier if I figured it out earlier.
Oh, I'm assuming the worst here that you're in a chair, blind, deaf, or have some other real disability.
Go ahead, call me an insenitive asshole! And I'll thank-you!
There have been many fascinating finds in this field over just the last couple of years, from the discovery that you can externally trigger feelings of volition to be associated with artificially stimulated actions (i.e. make you feel like you CHOSE to move your arm, when in fact it was the scientists stimulating your nerves), to the discovery that religious ecstasy can be likewise triggered.
In all of this, I've always been confused by those that suggest that human consciousness is better explained by a soul or free will. As far as I can tell, neither "Free Will" nor "soul" actually explain ANYTHING about conscious volition. Certainly, conscious experience is a philosophical mystery: what is it, and why is it? Nobody knows. But simply referencing some random word like "soul" and noting that it is supernatural doesn't explain anything. It's not that the rules of the natural world are too restrictive to allow "free will" or "conscious experience" to work. It's that we have no idea what they are or how they work at all. So positing some supernatural realm where anything is possible doesn't help, or advance our knowledge even a bit.
Free will is actually even more bizarre, because although many people claim we have it, no one seems able to actually define what it is or what difference having free will vs. not having it would make. In short, it appears that the concept is completely incoherent and self-contradictory. It's one thing to be free to make choices for yourself, according to your own volition. But that's not what the strong "Free Will" concept is: even computers can make choices for themselves. Strong Free Will posits that people somehow make choices independently of.... well what? Independently of their own natures? That makes no sense! If there isn't some underlying deterministic substrate to my choices, how can they be mine at all? How can I be responsible if you can't causally track my choices back to some "me."
In short, "Free Will" makes no sense as a concept, and offers no explanatory value for anything. It's SOLE purpose seems to be in theological arguments, a bit of handwaving to avoid having a designer be responsible for the nature of his own designs.
If this is valid, then the animals with the same neurological structure would make the same choices, right?
So far, all that's been shown is that damaging an area of the brain results in failures to react to certain distinguishing features.
Do monkeys with brain pattern X always choose apple juice? But monkeys with brain pattern Y always choose grape juice? And monkeys with brain pattern Z always choose orange juice?
The same with choosing to gamble. Why does someone choose ponies over blackjack?
It's fairly obvious that god put those cells there and gave us all freedom of choice.
Reading some of the /. comments on this story, I have to say that it's always interesting to see religious men trying too hard to associate Man with the divine as though we stand above and seperate from the natural world, but equally it's interesting to watch atheists try to find mankind wholly within nature as well. For as much as we want to call Man an animal (subject to an animal's exigencies and vicissitudes) we must admit that he is a curious sort of animal able to escape those forms of nature and create new configurations of need and choice.
I don't really have a point. I just find the whole matter of human will and spirit interesting.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Are these the same monkeys that like Fritos?
Every neuron "helps you make choices" from your photoreceptors up to your prefrontal cortex.
And to imply that this is the first time we've found the brain doing more than "responding to stimuli" is grossly naive. Neuroscience could tell you what decision you were going to make before you knew what decision you were going to make for probably a decade or two now.
I know I should expect it by now, but it still goes straight up my arse to read it.
That's just devolution. Since The Fall, human have devolved, not evolved, and this is a new type of cell that is "cursed" because of man's fall from grace.
Or it's evolution alright. But only bad mutations got passed on after the fall -- due to God's curse.
Take your pick.
Scientists have known that cells in different parts of the brain react to attributes such as color, taste, quantity", or sexual orientation!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think I finally understand what's so great about free, repercussion-free speech!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's Salmon! ;)
Your ego is refusing that you become a senseless tool, thus you refuse to mod him down.
That and the mod points.
If you honestly believe you're not free, there are a number of things you might as well stop doing:
... why should the mere presense of any of these representations in physical instantiation imply any diminishment of your capacity to will? I'd rather say the more representations on the dashboard, the more the driver is freely in control.
1. Why do you consciously try to deliberate over any choices? If you are not free, that effort you're putting forth - to the extent, you know, that you have decided to try to deliberate, is at best an epiphenomenal waste. So why not save the effort? On the one hand, that epiphenomenal sense of your own agency can't really do anything in the physical world, right? On the other, for the epiphenomenal to exist it must be draining energy from the actually useful parts of the brain, which might be able to run their deterministic algorithm better if you weren't shunting that energy into the appearance of phenomenal consciousness, with its illusion of free agency and all that. So why not just give it up?
2. The next time you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or boss for anything, why bother? After all, they have no freedom in what they do. It was all determined from the beginning of time (if not before). So why not just give it up?
3. When others of us say that we believe - no, we know that we are free agents, in ways that are beyond Newtonian causal physics (although not beyond some interpretations of quantum theory, e.g. Henry Stapp's or Roger Penrose's), it is absolutely determined that we will be saying these things. You could not possibly persuade us to freely change our minds through conscious deliberation on these questions. So why not just give it up?
What these experiments may show is that the weights of particular desires are represented in particular cells in particular regions. Did you think, for instance, that thirst wouldn't be represented somewhere in the brain? What they don't (and probably can't) show is that it is merely a certain "weight" of thirst, balanced against certain "weights" of other desires, that results in action in some deterministic way. Think of it like a dashboard. There's a certain "weight" of the gas running low, a certain "weight" of the speed you're going, a certain "weight" of the oil light coming on, and even the "weight" of how many miles are on the vehicle. None of these prevent your free operation of the wheel and pedals (until the gas runs out, or a cop stops you, or the engine blows a rod, or the transmission falls on the road). Why should a dashboard in the mind representing how thirsty you are, how horny you are, how clever you think you are with your doubting of the common sense about our freedom
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
We've known all along that there are brain cells linked to Choice. The question is whether there are any Pro-Life brain cells.
First I have to plug the Hofstadter books Godel, Escher, Bach, and to a lesser extent, Metamagical Themas. These books are as close to hard science as you're going to get talking about conciousness. Anyone with any interest in these topics really owes it to themselves to read these (sometimes challenging) books.
Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly. And as a creative emotional person I didn't want that to be true. But after digging as far as I could, in I've come to peace with the idea that reductionism will not reveal the man behind the curtain, so to speak. Maybe I'll be proved wrong someday, but to me, loosely speaking, the combinations of uncertainty, incompleteness, chaos, and feedback effects result in the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm not saying that there's some magical soul that exists outside our physical selfs, but rather that there is some higher level network effect in complex systems such as our brain where something exists on top of the physical parts, is wholly made from them, but is only loosely determined by them. That is the "I" to me.
Cheers.
I often wonder what compulsive pople would be doing if their vices had not ever been invented?
For example, the poor fool who claims to have the 'disease' of alocolholism: would the person have the disease if alcohol had never been created?
The same for the gambler..what if we never got the concept of making a game of of random occurances...what would 'compulsive gamblers' be doing with their lives?
I suppose that on the other side of this, if we had discovered that you can get high by |insert unknown undiscovered science here| would we suddenly have a 'disease' for that?
Huh?
Well, that's easier than having to supply a brain to Democrats...
"A concrete possibility is that various choice deficits may result from an impaired or dysfunctional activity of this population (of neurons), though this hypothesis remains to be tested," Padoa-Schioppa.
Mindware isn't soul IMHO.Soul is probably a bootloader for Mindware OS: skills are applications,data is knowledge,memory is storage,reflexes are drivers,etc.Soul could be in some EM field form attached to one of organs and/or bootup routine replicated in DNA.
"...But we already know what you are going to do, don't we? Already I can see the chain reaction: the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you to the simple and obvious truth: she is going to die and there is nothing you can do to stop it."
I'll bite: suppose neural pathways determine 99% of behaviour, since it is reflexive, instant, and unconscious (that is, without conscious thought; like particular movement algorithms are coded in the cerebullum, this sort of behaviour is also automatic: see an apple -> want to take a bite out it).
The other 1% might be conscious reflection on actions previously taken, or imagined to be taken in the future, and be able to redefine those neural pathways. Given this theory (put forward by Daniel M. Wegner in his book "the illusion of conscious will", which the grandparent did not reference but made an allusion to), the direct answers to your rheterical questions are:
1: That effort is valuable redirection of the mind in the environment it is put in. In the future, the mind will make better choices.
2. The 1% of behaviour is enough to not be a mindless drone of determinism at the level of sociological behaviour (not at the level of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system). You do have a choice to change yourself at the level that is important. Leave the changes at the physiological level to the chemists and biologists/engineers, through medicine and nanobots.
3. Like in the previous answer, at the level of social communication, you have a choice to gain other insights. You wouldn't suggest your never changed your mind about something, ever, do you?
I chose not to RTFA.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
The headline makes this sound like a retarded article. Although the article is light on details, this isn't the "no shit?!" article some slashdotters are painting it as based on the headline. The neuroscience discovered here could have a huge impact on the entire field of social studies, and particularly economics.
/. headline to something like "Scientists Find The Brain Cells That Are Linked to Choice"...
Rename the
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I wonder if research will disclose that all Calvinists have more of these brain cells and all Arminians have fewer. Or vice versa.
Sorry.
And that's still easier than having to supply a heart, soul, functioning mind, logic, compassion, class, skill, wisdom, decency, restraint, truthfulness, trustworthiness, balls, courage, humanity, etc., to repugnicans...
The Kirchberg "motorway" is straight again...
What kind of news will Martin bring back from Florida?
With pop[ular] music in its current state, do I have more choice neurons, or less?
According to some research consciousness is something that comes *after* the rest of your brain already made the choice. So you can't do anything consciously to begin with.
You're talking about Libet's well-known research, and mischaracterizing it. In his experiment people have already decided to move their arm, in cooperation with the researcher's request, at a "random" time. They're also watching a clock on a computer screen, and are to push a button at the time that they are aware of making the choice to move their arm. Meanwhile Libet is monitoring what he interprets as a "readiness potential" at a certain location in the brain, which is a good predictor of moving your arm. The finding is that the potential is there before the subject reports awareness of the volition relative to the clock. However, Libet also found that people can successfully decide not to move their arms even after the readiness potential was in evidence. These findings are still much debated. But what they do not show is anything about the efficacy of complex, conscious deliberations.
without defining "free" there is no way to talk about it in a meaningfull way
You're working from an old, bogus notion in philosophy that we must "define our terms" before we can talk about anything. It's a failed program. Terms don't get meaning that way. Rather, terms get meaning from context, and from overlay ("blending" is the technical term in modern cognitive linguistics) with other contexts. There are few if any things that we can define (1) without context, and (2) without being in some sense circular. Yet there are a great many things we can talk about in a meaningful way - although it depends who we're talking to. Still, most all of us know, from our contexts in life, what freedom is, and what it is to will something to happen. That you can befuddle yourself about what these words mean is nice; but we can befuddle ourselves about any word if we just repeat it to ourselves a few hundred times. And that's basically the whole trick about demanding a definition before allowing a discussion to proceed - with every repeated demand you're moving the word closer to that temporarily alienated state. But, since that can be done with any word, what you've done is just on the level of a psychological illusion, not a revelation of the ill-defined meaninglessness of whatever word you've targeted.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
> The same with choosing to gamble. Why does someone choose ponies over blackjack?
I don't know about you, but I always pick ponies because they're so darn cuuuuuute!! ^_^ <3 <3 <3
Lets say the genes predetermine all the choices we are going to make throughout our lives.
Then the genes chose to have us learn about them, and manipulate them.
Then what causes the genes to manipulate the genes? Hello cache 22!
Believing, at any time, you are not in control of your actions leads to one enivitable thing; control. If you have no plan for yourself, you become a part of someone elses plan. If you think the chains you are in are unbreakable, then they will be unbreakable, even if they don't exist.
Should pro-choice advocates start to worry? The anti-choice lobbyists might be soon actually be able to remove a women's right to choose. They will then become automatons!
Well considering that you have to add a brain to Republicans and THEN try to turn them from being soulless abominations, I'd say that Democrats come out ahead.
I read the headline as: "Scientists Find Brain Cells Linked to Cheese"
When mad at one, try running a mile in their shoes. That way, not only do you have their shoes, but you are a mile away.
All that tells me is that that atom has as much or more influence in the choices made as the portion of the brain that they are studying.Again, that tells me that a 2 degree difference in the room tempurature has as much or more of an effect than the portion of the brain they are studying.
That's why my initial post was titled "Continuum".
If you don't include the extremes (hot, cold, starving, psychotic, etc), then their findings should (if valid) be able to predict what one monkey will choose because it has a similar brain pattern to a known monkey.
Otherwise, they're only identifying the portions of the brain used to make general choices. Not specific choices. And because it is not about specific choices, then the other discussions of freewill and such don't matter in this instance.
The compulsory urge to make inane self-informative posts on slashdot.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I think I heard that brain cells doesn't die from alcohol they just "slumber." Laying off the bottle for a few years and you're up to speed again. I searched and found this:
...
3 162109.html
Moderate drinking doesnt kill brain cells but helps the brain function better into old age. Studies around the world involving many thousands of people report this finding.
However, abstinence after chronic alcohol abuse enables brains to repair themselves, according to new research involving rats.
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/HealthIssues/110
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
...you chose the wrong wife.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
I think people still have choices regardless of the addiction they suffer from (OCD disorders, Serial Killer, Gambling, etc.) A person doesn't HAVE TO Gamble, but it feels that way. He doesn't HAVE TO wash his hands 5 times, but he thinks he does.
These abnormalities or "lesions" in our brains may make us feel we do not have a choice. In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
You are wrong, at least when it comes to actual neurological damage.
An excellent demonstration for damage in this area (the orbitofrontal cortex) is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). Simply described, a subject tries to sort cards according to one of three criteria (color, shape or number). They don't know which criteria is correct, but get a yes/no feedback with every try. And of course, fairly quickly people catch on and follow the rule.
Now, once the subject has caught on, the rule changes (again, without the subject being told). It's quickly obvious that the rule is different, so normal subjects will start trying other rules until they find the right one.
People with this area damaged will not. They will continue the old rule even though it keeps failing. They can even te the experimenter that "I know the rule has changed; it's not the old one anymore!", and they _still_ can't change their behavior and switch the rule. But take them out of the room and into another one and continue the test, and they will imediately and easily wsitch to whatever new rule was needed.
Again, these people know the rule has changed. They can say so, and they can become quite distressed over it, but they can not switch their behavior. In a very real sense, the data pathway needed to initiate the switch is no longer functional, and so it doesn't matter how much they want to - nothing will happen.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I mean, it's great and all, learning about what's going on, but if we find out what parts of our brains deal with choice, couldn't someone eventually make a device that can suppress some parts of the choice mechanism, and it might just happen to fall into a corrupt government's hands?
If that happens, it would only be a matter of time before the government would have the devices installed into your brains at birth in order to "prevent new terrorists"...
Could this be the answer the RIAA has been looking for? if they can isolate and modify the part of the brain that decides to pirate or not, they will be set!
I wonder if those cells are going to devolutionize in the starving children or race in the world since they do not have the luxury of choice as we do. Or that the limited number of choices they have greatly limits the growth of those cells. -Mr. Anderson
but I don't have a choice
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Evidence for this (with regards to sexual attraction) is the widely-differing cultural norms for what constitutes an attractive woman throughout the world. I remember hearing that polynesian women are prized for being larger (I don't know how true this is, someone from the Pacific Islands, please correct me). My wife and I watched a show about brothels in the late 1800s, and the experts made it clear that the ideas of what was attractive was VERY DIFFERENT than what we think of it today.
His post may have been flamebait, but I don't think it was entirely unfounded.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I was going to comment, but... awe crap... nevermind.
-=sig=-
They can call me when I can modify these cells. Not my own, but my girlfriend's. For either of these three fine attributes, I can think of some modification for her:
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Is It Free Will, or Just a Reasonable Facsimile? Filed under: Science And Technology -- Cranky @ Edit This When we begin life, we begin with a brain that has been built by DNA. But from the moment the first sensations begin to trickle into that tiny organ, the brain begins to change. At first, the sensations are simple. The beat of the mothers heart, the warmth of the womb, the sense of enclosure coming through touch... these are the first of many things that will mold a child. After birth, the brain is completely saturated with new sensations. For the rest of its life, that brain will take in, categorize, and learn from a continual barrage of input. From early on the lessons being learned are extremely complex. Cause and effect. Rules. Social behaviours. Orders. Persuasion. Manipulation. These are the lessons of early childhood. The incredible range of sensation made available to every brain is so varied that each one develops differently. Even identical twins raised together and treated roughly the same can end up with dramatic differences in their personalities. After all, they start out with the same brain, thanks to common DNA... so even small differences in environment can clearly make huge differences in people. At every stage of growth, a person faces a multitude of choices. Each choice made carries with it the weight of countless past choices, and the knowledge of the results. The brain grows even more intricate... and the person learns. But... I look at my life, and I wonder. Looking back at every decision I have ever made... was it possible for me to have decided any other way than I eventually did? I'm bad with money. When I was 18 and I got my first credit card, I might have made smarter choices with it. But I didn't. Could I have? I just don't know. I inhabit my mind. It feels like I'm making decisions as I go... but am I just carrying out the only possible courses of action, ones dictated by the combination of new input and old patterns? It could be. Perhaps it was utterly impossible to make different decisions in my past. Perhaps my future is not in my hands. This new input, the choice made, and the results will become a part of the old patterns, ready to affect my next choice. In the deterministic universe there is no such thing as chance. If you knew all of the variables you could compute the state of the universe from beginning to end. There is no free will in a universe that winds down like a perfectly ordered clock. But in the quantum universe, the probabilistic one, it isn't possible to predict individual events. You can only treat large numbers of them statistically. If free will is real, then the basis of it must be found within the randomness built into the underlying rules that govern the realm of the very, very, very small. It can't simply reside in the cells, ganglia and structures found in the brain. These are tinkertoys, part of the macroscopic world. And as such, they are predictable like clocks. Free will bucks the universe. It implies that we are capable of guiding our destiny, regardless of what reality dictates. But are we really? Even if I think I do not have free well, I will still act as if I do. I have no choice. If I am running a preordained treadmill of actions, I'll never know it, because part of that chain involves me reacting to the world around me as if I did have a choice. It's complicated. Sometimes it's frustrating. I could just stop thinking about it and do something else... Or could I? (Written September 28, 2005)
When we begin life, we begin with a brain that has been built by DNA. But from the moment the first sensations begin to trickle into that tiny organ, the brain begins to change. At first, the sensations are simple. The beat of the mothers heart, the warmth of the womb, the sense of enclosure coming through touch... these are the first of many things that will mold a child. After birth, the brain is completely saturated with new sensations. For the rest of its life, that brain will take in, categorize, and learn from a continual barrage of input.
From early on the lessons being learned are extremely complex. Cause and effect. Rules. Social behaviours. Orders. Persuasion. Manipulation. These are the lessons of early childhood. The incredible range of sensation made available to every brain is so varied that each one develops differently. Even identical twins raised together and treated roughly the same can end up with dramatic differences in their personalities. After all, they start out with the same brain, thanks to common DNA... so even small differences in environment can clearly make huge differences in people.
At every stage of growth, a person faces a multitude of choices. Each choice made carries with it the weight of countless past choices, and the knowledge of the results. The brain grows even more intricate... and the person learns. But... I look at my life, and I wonder. Looking back at every decision I have ever made... was it possible for me to have decided any other way than I eventually did? I'm bad with money. When I was 18 and I got my first credit card, I might have made smarter choices with it. But I didn't. Could I have? I just don't know.
I inhabit my mind. It feels like I'm making decisions as I go... but am I just carrying out the only possible courses of action, ones dictated by the combination of new input and old patterns? It could be. Perhaps it was utterly impossible to make different decisions in my past. Perhaps my future is not in my hands. This new input, the choice made, and the results will become a part of the old patterns, ready to affect my next choice.
In the deterministic universe there is no such thing as chance. If you knew all of the variables you could compute the state of the universe from beginning to end. There is no free will in a universe that winds down like a perfectly ordered clock. But in the quantum universe, the probabilistic one, it isn't possible to predict individual events. You can only treat large numbers of them statistically.
If free will is real, then the basis of it must be found within the randomness built into the underlying rules that govern the realm of the very small. It can't simply reside in the cells, ganglia and structures found in the brain. These are tinkertoys, part of the macroscopic world. And as such, they are predictable like clocks.
Free will bucks the universe. It implies that we are capable of guiding our destiny, regardless of what reality dictates. But are we really?
Even if I think I do not have free well, I will still act as if I do. I have no choice. If I am running a preordained treadmill of actions, I'll never know it, because part of that chain involves me reacting to the world around me as if I did have a choice.
It's complicated. Sometimes it's frustrating. I could just stop thinking about it and do something else...
Or could I?
(Written September 28, 2005)
if I select M$,does it mean my brain cells are not functioning properly?
/.'ers don't have to settle for ponies. Virgins can play with unicorns.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
"I think a good movie would be about a guy who's a brain scientist, but he gets hit on the head, and it damages the part of the brain that makes you want to study the brain."
Anyway, if randomness does not exist in the physical world, the exact same monkey presented with the exact same decision will always make the same choice.
Actually, that's kind of up in the air. The most popular quantum mechanics interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, rejects any sort of determinism. All you would have is exactly equal probabilities that they'd make the same decision, not a fixed determinism. Fundamentally, all processes in the universe are random (but weighted) under that interpretation. You can read about more quantum mechanics interpretations on the Wikipedia.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I have believed in determinism ever since i understood the concept. our ability to predict the next state is something else. the news is that the scientists found the controlling neurons that affect the pleasure centers of you brains.
and we will NEVER be able to predict the next state of the universe because to store all the information in a state will require an exact copy of the whole universe at the very least.