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

by dhw, Monday, November 28, 2011, 17:24 (4744 days ago) @ David Turell

I found Eddy Nahmias's article itself rather woolly, as the author doesn’t believe in mind/body dualism, and doesn’t really offer any explanation for the provenance of free will if the body is all there is. But I remember Tony saying something to the effect that we are more than the sum of our parts, and Matt has frequently updated us on progress in the field of AI. David is very sceptical as to whether humans will ever be able to build a form of AI that matches ours, but putting these various viewpoints together may give us a possible lead. If there really is no mind/body dualism (i.e. no unknown form of energy that is able to control the physical brain), the alternative can only be that within the brain is a physical mechanism that has overall control (will). Maybe in another ten thousand years scientists will have come up with the goods – hold on, David…I haven’t finished yet – a machine that has its own consciousness and will, with ten thousand refinements to the mechanisms already built in our time. This will prove that will, consciousness, emotion etc. do have their source in materials. But it will also prove that conscious minds have experimented over and over again, refining existing machines step by step, discarding those that don’t work, retaining those that do, adapting them, adding new bits….So hey ho, what do we have? Evolution guided by conscious design. Only speculating, folks.