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Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will (extremetech.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we've cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision -- how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act. The team devised a novel way to track a participant's focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger's-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times. In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. Participants' frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
Awesome... now we know the exact areas of the brain to manipulate so that our corporate overlords can control us better.
I'm betting the next gen VR headsets will have electrodes to stimulate those areas properly for future mind control -- especially during election seasons. lol.
I'm kidding.... at least... I think I'm kidding. Oh, dear god, they might actually go there with this tech.
Indeed. I don't know where I was reading it this week (it may have been here on /.) there was an interesting article about how science is basically "broken". The gist is that there is a lot of BS floating around as science that is really nothing of the sort. Just as truth has devolved into "truthiness", science has devolved into "scienciness". That is not to say that there are not good scientists out there doing good work, but a lot of them have to come up with plausible, "sciencey" bullshit in order to justify their existence and get funding.
No, I don't know how to fix it.
Proverbs 21:19
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Agreed. I'm convinced that many people who discuss "free will" -- and particularly those who strongly object to the idea of determinism on the microscopic level (ignoring random quantum mechanical fluctuations) as destroying "free will" -- haven't always thought about what they really mean by terms.
From my perspective (and some philosophers would agree with this, particularly so-called "compatibilists"), trying to apply a concept like "free will" to microscopic behavior is an exercise in futility. It's like trying to define macroscopic "beauty" or a concept like "truth" or even a concept like a "chair" only in terms of atoms. You couldn't do it. Our human macroscopic concepts simply don't exist with that sort of granularity -- even if you tried to define what constitutes a "chair" compared with "not a chair" on the level of arrangements of individual molecules, you'd never get two humans to agree to that sort of level of precision.
It's a similar problem when we come to an idea of a "free choice." What do we really mean when we say, "I freely chose X instead of Y"? Usually in discussions of free will, we're talking about deliberate choices, not just random choices made with no reason. And that means we have reasons for choosing X over Y. We might enumerate them -- I had 5 reasons in favor of X but 3 in favor of Y, so I chose X. When we say, "But I could have freely chosen Y instead," we generally mean something about our reasoning would change -- maybe some of those reasons in favor of X would be undermined by something we read recently or something a friend said discounting those reasons. Or it could be something more subtle, like changes in our body chemistry -- maybe we had an extra cup of coffee which changed the mood and made Y seem more desirable, or maybe we had a headache and that shifted our priorities... or whatever.
But when we say "I could have freely chosen Y over X" in the context of a discussion about "free will," we generally do NOT mean, "If EVERYTHING in the universe had been exactly the same, including all of my subjective ratings and beliefs of the reasons for and against X and Y, along with all of my body chemistry and feelings... and every single atom EXACTLY in the same position, I COULD HAVE made a different choice."
We don't generally mean that, because that would be making a different choice for no reason, and "free will" is not about random choices, it's about having an ability to make a deliberate choice based on reasons. If all the reasons are the exact same (and every atom in the same place), why would it support "free will" to believe that a different choice would make sense? That's not conscious "free will" -- that's randomness or anarchy.
"Free will" is a macroscopic human concept -- an emergent phenomenon -- which has little to do with how deterministic (or not) the microscopic universe is. And whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot, there are always these fervent believers that "free will" has to exist in some way that the universe is not deterministic -- but where exactly does that "free will" happen? Quantum mechanics effects "bubbling up" to microscopic consequences can't be a reason, because that's based on randomness -- and proponents of "free will" usually insist that the alterations in decisions must be deliberative not based on random chance.
So, if everything in the universe down to the atom is precisely the same, and you still want to be able to make a "free choice" that's different, how precisely is that supposed to happen? Does some atom suddenly take a different turn for no apparent reason? It makes little sense in a scientific context, unless you're willing to postulate the existence of a separate "soul" or "consciousness" or whatever that doesn't obey the laws of science as we currently understand th
However, a first step would be to mandate that all published whitepapers must provide:
(we just call them papers)
Your aims and ideas are worthy, but they won't be as much use or as practical as you think.
* ALL the data
Provide to whom? In an extreme case like CERN, all the data simply isn't available as it's stripped out in hardware. The resulting data is still vast, roughly 30 petabytes per year. There's no practical way to deliver it to anyone.
Even in less extreme cases, the archiving costs will be large, and in many cases few people are interested. Sifting through other people's data is hard work. Almost all scientists would rather sift through their own. You have to deal with storage, transmission, badly organised data taken haphazardly by a first year PhD student, file formats, documentation etc etc.
There's also a tradeoff: data for the original experiemnts for widely established facts (e.g. magnesium diboride superconductivity) is perhaps of historical interest, but not much beyond that. For boring, uncited papers (most of them), no one will ever care.
Now, it will be useful in some cases, but those are less common than people expect. About the only time is during an active period (actually this is an argument in favour since long term archiving has less point) when something is contentious. But even so, many times people would prefer to take their own data since then you can trust the whole chain of acquisition.
* ALL the Software
As someone who's tried to use published-with-paper software... nope. I mean ostensibly yes, and the goal is laudable, but unless people are dedicated to it (like I am), merely publishing the software won't work. Most people in research have no idea about making solid, portable, engineered software. And by "portable" I mean "ports to someone else's computer with the same OS installed".
This is not a criticism: a researcher's job is to do research. The software has to do what it's supposed to, be usable enough that the author can do the processing needed for the paper, and the software can keel over and die once the results are published. These people aren't software engineers. A lot of the software is written by inexperienced PhD students on a ferociously tight time budget.
Yes there are tools that can help like docker or VM images, but that's stuff to make life easier for software engineers, and the problem is these people aren't software engineers.
I've actually released some software and the reception has been mixed. One was a pretty simple algorithm which got wide uptake, because it was widely applicable and it was portable C. Another was a complicated algorithm integrated into a system to make it usable, which got moderate uptake. Another was an equally complex system and despite a lot of effort got as far as I can tell zero uptake, making my software release a complete waste of time. Not to say it hasn't been cited, and people haven't used some of the ideas, but no one seems to have used the software. At least I've had no support questions and IME you always get support questions.
So even ignoring the problem that most researchers can't produce release-quality software, much of it isn't useful. Algorithms that can be used as plug-in replacements for others benefit from releases. Systems which can be widely used as a tool, likewise. Everything else won't be used.
* Schematics for the Hardware, and
That's like software but 10x as bad. Oftentimes the schematics won't even exist.
* non-paywalled Whitepapers (so that money is no longer a barrier for access)
That's fine. Funding agencies are beginning to enforce this and many many researchers are on board with that. All of my papers are (and always have been) freely available online.
So yes, those are nice goals. However, absent an awful lot of money (e.g. employing engineers in addition) it'll be impossible to achieve them in a meaningful manner. If it was done, it would certainly help, but the question is whether or not the improvement would be worth the money.
SJW n. One who posts facts.