Information and free will (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, October 09, 2011, 20:09 (4772 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: To continue this discussion further, please read the following book review of, "The Folly of Fools'. To my mind the reviewer is the biggest fool. The brain does have special compartments,i.e., the motor strips, the sensory strips, the former which controls movement and the latter sensations. Have damage from a stroke and there are areas that will not move and others that will not feel. But there are many areas that do not have exact controls. There are all sorts of personalities that pop out of the frontal lobes as one example. We can tap our personalities, the moral judgments, the intuitive and counterintuative thoughts at will. Wwe are not required to have different thought modules fight each other.-This is the problem when lay people try to understand the neurology of brain scans. And why I've been harping on the idiocy of overinterpretation.
Read with jaundiced eye:-http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204612504576608801724343980.html?KEYWORDS...-I have read it twice with both jaundiced eyes, but still can't follow the argument. This is the field of evolutionary psychology, so when the author talks of "specialized mental circuits" is he referring to "the neurology of brain scans" or to mental processes? Are the "modules" physical or psychological? He says: "...there's no such thing as a unified self, just a collection of modules", so does he mean different facets of the personality are in conflict or different sections of the physical brain? If it's the latter, I can't believe neurologists have pin-pointed these "modules" with such precision, and if it's the former, what's new? Either way, I don't think it gets us much further!