Information and free will; deterministic universe! (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 14:33 (4734 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Another nutty book review. The nuttiness is this thought: this is a deterministic universe from the Big Bang on and therefore there is no free will!

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/11/the-riddle-of-free-will-goes-unsol...

Thank you for a variety of posts on how the brain works. You’re right about the nuttiness! Quote:

“So what of free will? The problem is a familiar one. We live in a deterministic universe. Given enough information about its present state, we could extrapolate to any past or future state with 100 per cent accuracy. Everything that has or will happen was determined at the big bang - and given that our brains are part of the physical universe, free will does not exist. Depressingly, neuroscience itself offers little comfort that this isn't the case.”

They might just as well say we live in a world governed by chance, by God’s will, by the stars, or by a computer hidden in the deepest depths of the darkest dark matter. “Given enough information about its present state”, I could prove any one of these claims as well as telling you everything that has happened and will happen. If I knew everything, folks, I would know everything.

An article in today’s Guardian has the headline “Scans reveal how the brain’s GPS helps humans navigate”. Researchers at University College London have revealed how two areas of the brain (front and rear of the hippocampus) take turns, “with one keeping track of the distance to our destination as the crow flies, and the other chipping in to calculate the actual distance of the route ahead when we reach a junction.” As someone with no sense of direction, who gets lost even driving to local destinations, and who relies on his wife to do all the navigating, I suspect that my hippo has long since abandoned the campus. However, what caught my eye was the following paragraph:

“We didn’t know if the brain tried to keep track of the straight line distance to the goal and we got there by minimizing the distance, or whether the brain used the actual path we planned to take.”

In the clause “we planned to take”, what part of us does the planning?