Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Thursday, November 17. 2011

Is there an "I" in a person, or are people just a jumble of gooey tissues with neurons firing all around?

We have all been posting about Gazzaniga's new book Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain?, for a couple of weeks.


As an old-fashioned person, I always claim, whenever I do something wrong (and I do), "The Devil made me do it."


At the same time that I mean that, I also accept the notion of human agency. Every waking second of life offers choices, and I think a college bs post about Free Will would be sophomoric. All I will say is that what we feel, and how we chose to behave (absent severe mental illness) are entirely different things. Human dignity and civilization itself requires a distance and a delay between the two. Even animals exercise that delay.


A human without a reliably moral, executive "I" is a dangerous entity, an entity to be avoided if not locked away.


In the WSJ, a review of the book: Rethinking Thinking - How a lumpy bunch of tissue lets us plan, perceive, calculate, reflect, imagine—and exercise free will. From the review:



... as Mr. Gazzaniga says, "we are people, not brains," and brain scans tell us little about our personhood.



Indeed, when I am gone they can study my brain all they want in the lab but they will never find The Barrister in there.

Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, Psychology, and Dr. Bliss, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 13:33 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

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Behaviorists assert that humans make decisions subconsciously before they are aware of having made a decision.
That explains much.
#1 PacRim Jim (Link) on 2011-11-17 13:45 (Reply)
Some physicists assert that all of space-time exists concurrently, and some that all possible space-times exist concurrently.

Head hurt yet?
#2 PacRim Jim (Link) on 2011-11-17 15:38 (Reply)
Sometimes you have to wonder if physicists just throw stuff against the wall to see if it sticks.
#2.1 Tom Francis on 2011-11-17 15:55 (Reply)
...study my brain all they want in the lab but they will never find The Barrister in there.

Er......

...what we feel, and how we chose to behave...are entirely different things.

I ain't no big time philosopher - I'm just a humble human gazing at my navel. But it seems to me that feelings and behavior are reciprocal in nature - polar opposites that need to be kept in balance so that one doesn't overly influence the other.

At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
#3 Tom Francis on 2011-11-17 15:48 (Reply)
Coleridge, after Schelling: matter has no inwards.

Chapters 4-9 of Biographia Literaria are a thorough debunking of mechanism.

However, Cavell in a way puts it back in play, saying that we lack the language to characterize the situation. We're stuck with unhelpful cliches and prepositions.

``It may be that the sense of falsification comes from the way I understand the phrase ``have a body.'' It is really a mythological way of saying that I am flesh. But I am not satisfied with this myth, for it implies that I also have something other than a body, call it a soul. Now I have three things to put together: a body, a soul, and me. (So there are four things to be placed: I plus those three.) But I no more have a soul than I have a body. That is what I say here and now. People who say they have a soul sometimes militantly take its possession as a point of pride, for instance William Ernest Henley and G.B.Shaw. Take the phrase ``have a soul'' as a mythological way of saying that I am spirit. If the body individuates flesh and spirit, singles me out, what does the soul do? It binds me to others.''

which is a point of grammar.
#4 rhhardin (Link) on 2011-11-17 16:49 (Reply)
I know I'm in here, but nobody else will ever be able to prove to me that he's not just a robot.

The self is the one real place that no scientist can observe.
#5 John David Galt on 2011-11-18 00:54 (Reply)
We all know that we will find The Barrister right here on the farm. Sometimes.
#6 Sam L. on 2011-11-18 01:01 (Reply)

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