Free will again; scanning brain over-hyped (Humans)

by dhw, Thursday, May 10, 2012, 14:15 (4579 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Raymond Tallis and I approve of this:-http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/05/09/3499101.htm
 
A philosopher reminds. Brain scans are a bit of the real human brain being scanned, a tiny bit.-Interesting article, much of it in line with our own arguments about areas of human experience that science is not equipped to handle. But why does Scruton attack the "homunculus fallacy", or "the soul, the mind, the self, the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and is the real me inside"? Apparently it's profoundly misleading to say consciousness "is a feature of the brain, and not of the person", so if he thinks consciousness is not the product of the brain, what's the difference between the "person" as opposed to the "real me inside"? 
 
If one day, as Matt has indicated so often, humans succeed in building an artificial brain with our capacity for sentience, empathy, reason, creativity etc., there will be a strong case for the brain being the source and not the receiver of consciousness. Until then, scientists and philosophers can only cling to their particular faith, or go on speculating.-On this subject, there was an article in the Guardian the other day on the connectome search, which either David or Matt drew our attention to a while back. Jeff Lichtman and his Harvard team have set out to map the wiring of the 85 billion neurons, each of which "forms 10,000 connections, through synapses with other nerve cells. Altogether Lichtman estimates that there are between 100 tn and 1000 tn connections between neurons." The brain is made of "thousands of specific types of brain cell that look and behave differently." The ultimate object is to "lay bare the biological side of our personalities, memories, skills and susceptibilities. Somewhere in our brains is who we are."-We've seen these staggering figures before, but they're worth repeating if only to emphasize the "intelligence" ... I'm gaining confidence in this concept! ... of the cells that have put themselves together, and the difficulty of accepting that even the most rudimentary (cellular) intelligence could have arisen spontaneously in the first place from non-living material. (As difficult to accept as the idea that an infinitely greater intelligence is simply there without ever having arisen from anywhere.)-I find this ongoing connectome project immensely exciting, and a credit to humankind in its quest to find out about itself and, by extension, about the rest of life. Eventually I'm sure there will be a map. Whether it will reveal the source of consciousness and identity, and whether it will lead to a fully functional artificial brain, is of course another matter, and at this stage I don't see how anyone can claim that the biological side of our personalities actually is or is not "what we are". I would hope that Scruton, Tallis and Turell are equally excited and open-minded, even if all of us and Lichtman himself are unlikely to see the outcome!