Parasites Use Sophisticated Biochemistry to Take Over Their Hosts - NYTimes.com: The current issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Biology is entirely dedicated to such examples of zombies in nature. They are far from rare. Viruses, fungi, protozoans, wasps, tapeworms and a vast number of other parasites can control the brains of their hosts and get them to do their bidding. But only recently have scientists started to work out the sophisticated biochemistry that the parasites use.
Showing posts with label Free will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free will. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Parasites Use Sophisticated Biochemistry to Take Over Their Hosts - NYTimes.com
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Waking Life - Free will
A monologue from the movie Waking Life (2001) with philosopher David Sosa (UT Austin) speaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sosa
ht: Thanks, Tad Zawidzki, for reminding me of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sosa
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Responsibility and Brains: Your Brain and You
Responsibility and Brains: Your Brain and You
I’ll add here a speculation on a mechanism by which citing brain facts may lead us to assign people less responsibility than we should. Many reports of brain facts emphasize the role of some part of the brain. But we do not think of people as their parts: Jones is not his insula or his amygdala, Smith is not her frontal lobes or her neurotransmitters. So, some reports of background conditions in terms of brain facts may lead us to think of actions as the result of people’s parts, and thus not as the actions of the whole person. A corrective to this kind of mistake is to bear in mind that our encouragements of good behavior and our threats of punishment are addressed to whole persons. Whole persons generally do know what is expected of them, and in most cases knowledge of these expectations offsets deficiencies that may occur in some of our parts. Our brains are organized systems, and the effects of their parts can become visible only when the whole system is mobilized toward carrying out an action.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Monday, November 14, 2011
Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? - NYTimes.com
Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? - NYTimes.com:
Philosopher Eddy Nahmias in the New York Times:
Philosopher Eddy Nahmias in the New York Times:
Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will. Not in the sense we think.” And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.”
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Andrew Cullison Video on Writing a Short Philosophy Paper
Andrew Cullison Video on Writing a Short Philosophy Paper: Cullison's short video presents guidance for students on writing philosophy. (The sample in the video is on free-will.) Follow the link above for some handouts.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will : Nature News
Excerpt:
The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.
"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."
The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.
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