Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students.
Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin Libet on the fact that conscious choices occur after the brain has already begun a task.
More like this
Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aw
Psychologist Robert Kurzban's new book promises to explain Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.
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This (Libet) seems to be another nail in the coffin of mind/body dualism. If the brain is busy doing the requisite work for a decision long before we're aware of our decision, then it can't been a separate mind doing the decision making. Brain functioning seems to be the mind. This is what my psych unit teaches anyway. Add to that the fact that a immaterial brain has to violate the law of conservation of energy to affect a material brain/body and dualism seems in trouble.
Or have I misunderstood everything?
Shades of Ted Chiang's "What's Expected of Us" -- though (@Brian) he uses it to make a point about determinism, not dualism.
What a piece of bunk.
You can see a more concise description under
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2112.html
and the supplementary figures under
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/suppinfo/nn.2112_S1.h…
The prediction accuracy before the conscious decision is 60% and jumps to 75% when SMA is activated (which is *after*
the conscious decision). That is lousy and doesn't legitimate the wording "Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand". Dear friends, 60% isn't a "consistent prediction" and telling that "not completely accurate" is a severe understatement.