A Sense of Free Will: requires a properly functioning brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 18:45 (3174 days ago) @ David Turell

An excellent review of the book whose review started this thread. The book is The Main Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy. -http://www.wsj.com/articles/our-bodies-our-selves-1439581982-A sense of self:-"Having painted this portrait of the self through its pathologies, Mr. Ananthaswamy dances across the line between neuroscience and philosophy by asking the reader to consider two selves, the self-as-subject and the self-as-object, or the “I” and the “me,” as one might say. The various kinds of sensory information about the body's status and position are the “me” part of the self. If you say, “I feel furious today,” the fury is part of body-status data reported as the “me.” The question then arises: Who is the “I” who is experiencing the fury, and where does it come from?-"One answer, Mr. Ananthaswamy suggests, is that there are specific anatomical sites in the brain where the components of the self are generated, and one site takes the lead in integrating their output. A deep brain structure called the insula seems to be a high-level part of this system. The anterior insula generates a “global emotional moment” once every 125 milliseconds. Like the invisible frames in a movie, these moments are strung together to give us a continuous sense of self, according to the researcher A.D. Craig."-A view of consciousness:-His comment on consciousness which explains why I don't think Jerry Coyne's use of neuroscience is appropriate. We are on the outside looking in. We realy don't know what is going on:-"The simplest animal studied in laboratories, the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm, has 302 neurons in its brain, with 8,000 interconnections. If, when told the input into this little brain, we could predict the output, we could claim a deep understanding of the worm's mind. But though the circuit diagram of the worm's brain has been available since 1986, no one has come anywhere near a full comprehension of the worm's intellect.-"The human brain contains 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion interconnections. Presently there is no known reason why we should not one day understand this stupendous electrical machine. But as long as we understand so little of the worm's brain, we are unlikely to grasp the higher-level functions of the human brain, such as the self and consciousness.-"The author, to his credit, admits as much. What philosophers describe as the hard problem of consciousness is to explain how the physical processes of the brain give rise to the apparently immaterial property of consciousness, in which the self is embedded. “This book does not offer neuroscientific solutions to the hard problem of consciousness—there are none, yet,” Mr. Ananthaswamy writes."