Are Your Life Story, Your Free Will, and Your Self Convenient Fabrications?

Suppose that because of epilepsy you have had the connection severed between your two brain hemispheres so that one side does not communicate with the other. In an experiment, somebody shows you a card that says "Walk." So you walk. When asked why you did it, you say, "To get a drink of water." In fact you only did it because you saw the card. You made up the explanation after the fact. This couldn't happen to you, right? Wrong.

Michael Gazzaniga: The Mind's Past

In The Mind's Past, Gazzaniga reminds me of age-old teachings in Buddhism and Advaita. Of course in this he is not out of tune with other neuroscientists.   I am reminded of Benjamin Libet,  I am also reminded of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger, who publishes opinions reminiscent of ancient Eastern views of self and mind. (Not that neurophilosphers intend it, although some borrow from the teachings without acknowledging their sources.) Neuroscience also provides evidence that corroborates some of the teachings.

Is Your Brain a Meat Computer Without Free Will?

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.(Robert Frost)

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! (Yogi Berra)

Both quotations have to do with forks in the road. Frost implies he exercised free will and Berra makes nonsense out of the very idea of free choice. The Yankees catcher was good at silly quotes that the press liked to scoop up like fly balls but this one resonates into philosophy and brain science.

We can't start over to discover if we could have done differently because we are creatures of time and perhaps it is merely a construction of our consciousness. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once, as John Wheeler put it, which is another way of saying we are dimensionally constituted to handle one thing at a time.

A Review of Michael Gazzaniga's The Mind's Past

In The Mind's Past, Gazzaniga reminds me of age-old teachings in Buddhism and Advaita. Of course in this he is not out of tune with other neuroscientists (e.g, Benjamin Libet) and neurophilosophers (Thomas Metzinger, for one) who increasingly publish findings and opinions that are reminiscent of ancient Eastern views of self and mind. (Not that they intend it, although some borrow from the teachings without acknowledging their sources.) Neuroscience also provides evidence that corroborates some of the teachings.

Michael Gazzaniga--Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

I recall when I was in college and read various descriptions of human beings: Man is the only animal that thinks, or the only one that is moral. The one I like best is Mark Twain's, "Man is the only animal that blushes--or needs to." (Those were times when Man was used as a term to encompass humanity, although today we encounter sentences such as "When we think about God we realize that she is, if anything, abundant.") Of course, each of the "only's" became scratched off the list as more knowledge was gained of our fellow creatures.

Michael Gazzaniga also compares us to other creatures. In the comparison, he finds that though most of our activity can be found as antecedents in other animals, something in our species has made us unique. This uniqueness can be found by tracing the evolution of the human brain. In easy to understand language, Dr. Gazzaniga explains findings in fields in neuroscience (his own discipline), molecular biology, genetics, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

What follows is an excerpt from a review of his recent book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

" If there is one question that has puzzled humans longer than anything else, it must surely be: who am I? And just what makes me human? In short: why are humans seemingly so different from all other species of animals? Michael Gazzaniga’s new book takes us through a virtuoso cavalcade of research over the last decade in search of the answer. It is a tour de force, because it covers such a wide range of disciplines from ethology and animal behavior to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, at each stage patiently steering the reader through layers of technical complexity to the core gems that lie within.

Mind, if you just want the answer, you could save yourself a long read—Gazzaniga gives it to us in the book’s opening sentences (as it happened, I naturally read it last because it came in a short chapter entitled “Prologue” …):

I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor say, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” It is such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity. Other apes don’t have that sentiment. More in PDF.