Information and free will: brain scan value? (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 03:47 (4736 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW,

What stood out to me most in the article was not the excerpt you posted, but rather how silly old science still can't learn from its mistakes.

The problems begin, however, when researchers attempt to take complex psychological phenomena, such as the experience of love, and reduce them to particular blobs of cortex. They do this by leaning heavily on complex statistical algorithms that allow them to sort the "noise" from the "signal."

The noise is all those changes in blood flow deemed irrelevant; it's also the vast majority of what's taking place. The end result is that, in many instances, the statistical filter misrepresents our neural reality, focusing on peaks of activity instead of on all the interactions that make those peaks possible. The brain isn't simple; our pictures of the brain shouldn't be, either.

Didn't they do the same thing with DNA by labeling all the 'noise' junk, only to discover that it was not junk at all, and then they followed that up by noticing that the actual structure of the molecule mattered as much, if not more, than the encoding itself? When is science going to learn that you can not simply ignore the things that you don't want to deal with? The human body is a 'system', you can not understand it by only looking at the bits and bobs that you want to. We are more than the sum of our parts... much much much more.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.