It’s a question that has plagued philosophers and scientists for thousands of years: Is free will an illusion?

Now, a new study suggests that free will may arise from a hidden signal buried in the “background noise” of chaotic electrical activity in the brain, and that this activity occurs almost a second before people consciously decide to do something. […]

Experiments performed in the 1970s also raised doubts about human volition. Those studies, conducted by the late neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, revealed that the region of the brain that plans and executes movement, called the motor cortex, fired prior to people’s decision to press a button, suggesting this part of the brain “makes up its mind” before peoples’ conscious decision making kicks in.

To understand more about conscious decision making, Bengson’s team used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain waves of 19 undergraduates as they looked at a screen and were cued to make a random decision about whether to look right or left.

When people made their decision, a characteristic signal registered that choice as a wave of electrical activity that spread across specific brain regions.

But in a fascinating twist, other electrical activity emanating from the back of the head predicted people’s decisions up to 800 milliseconds before the signature of conscious decision making emerged.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

related { Searching for the “Free Will” Neuron }

The fact that someone is generous is a reason to admire them. The fact that someone will pay you to admire them is also a reason to admire them. But there is a difference in kind between these two reasons: the former seems to be the `right’ kind of reason to admire, whereas the latter seems to be the `wrong’ kind of reason to admire. The Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem is the problem of explaining the difference between the `right’ and the `wrong’ kind of reasons wherever it appears. In this paper I argue that two recent proposals for solving the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem do not work.

{ Nathaniel Sharadin/Pacific Philosophical Quarterly | Continue reading }

Just as we can design and install digital apps in our electronic devices, we can design and install mindapps in our minds. For philosophy the big-problem is the hegemonic assumption that all good thinking takes place in our ordinary, default mindbody state—wakefulness. Because of this error, the vast extensions of our minds beyond our default state are neglected, and directions for future mind development are stunted, if not outright denied. Multistate theory releases that constriction. By reformulating our minds as variables for experimental philosophy, multistate theory re-asks philosophical questions, extends current issues, and engenders fun speculations. Because psychedelics are the most dramatic example of widely known mindbody psychotechnologies, we will illustrate multistate theory with psychedelics’ contributions

{ Thomas B. Roberts | Continue reading }

For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. […] But in the late 19th century all that changed […] the whole focus of physics—then still emerging as a distinct scientific discipline—shifted from the visible to the invisible. […] Today its theories and concepts are concerned largely with invisible entities: not only unseen force fields and insensible rays but particles too small to see even with the most advanced microscopes. […] Theories at the speculative forefront of physics flesh out this unseen universe with parallel worlds and with mysterious entities named for their very invisibility: dark matter and dark energy. […]

…the concept of “brane” (short for membrane) worlds. This arises from the most state-of-the-art variants of string theory, which attempt to explain all the known particles and forces in terms of ultra-tiny entities called strings, which can be envisioned as particles extended into little strands that vibrate. Most versions of the theory call for variables in the equations that seem to have the role of extra dimensions in space, so that string theory posits not four dimensions (of time and space) but 11. As physicist and writer Jim Baggott points out, “there is no experimental or observational basis for these assumptions”—the “extra dimensions” are just formal aspects of the equations. However, the latest versions of the theory suggest that these extra dimensions can be extremely large, constituting extra-dimensional branes that are potential repositories for alternative universes separated from our own like the stacked leaves of a book. Inevitably, there is an urge to imagine that these places too might be populated with sentient beings, although that’s optional. The point is that these brane worlds are nothing more than mathematical entities in speculative equations, incarnated, as it were, as invisible parallel universes. […]

Scientists, of course, are not just making things up, while leaning on the convenience of supposed invisibility. They are using dark matter and dark energy, and (if one is charitable) quantum many-worlds and branes, and other imperceptible and hypothetical realms, to perform an essential task: to plug gaps in their knowledge with notions they can grasp.

{ Nautilus | Continue reading }

related { How it works: An ultra-precise thermometer made from light }

I understand by ‘God’ the perfect being, where a being is perfect just in case it has all perfections essentially and lacks all imperfections essentially. […]

Given that there are good reasons for thinking that the premises of the Compossibility Argument (CA) are true, it seems to me we have a good reason to think that God’s existence is possible. Of course, this does not, by itself, allow us to conclude to the much more important thesis that God exists, and so the atheist can consistently admit God’s possibility and maintain her atheism.

{ C’Zar Bernstein/Academia | Continue reading }

The omnipotence paradox states that: If a being can perform any action, then it should be able to create a task which this being is unable to perform; hence, this being cannot perform all actions. Yet, on the other hand, if this being cannot create a task that it is unable to perform, then there exists something it cannot do.

One version of the omnipotence paradox is the so-called paradox of the stone: “Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?” If he could lift the rock, then it seems that the being would not have been omnipotent to begin with in that he would have been incapable of creating a heavy enough stone; if he could not lift the stone, then it seems that the being either would never have been omnipotent to begin with or would have ceased to be omnipotent upon his creation of the stone.

The argument is medieval, dating at least to the 12th century, addressed by Averroës (1126–1198) and later by Thomas Aquinas. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (before 532) has a predecessor version of the paradox, asking whether it is possible for God to “deny himself”.

[…]

A common response from Christian philosophers, such as Norman Geisler or Richard Swinburne is that the paradox assumes a wrong definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence, they say, does not mean that God can do anything at all but, rather, that he can do anything that’s possible according to his nature.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Jesus and Virgin Mary spotted on Google Earth pic }

It is just possible to discern some points beneath the heated rhetoric in which Patricia Churchland indulges. But none of these points is right. If you hold that “mental processes are actually processes in the brain,” to quote Churchland, then you are committed to the thesis that it is sufficient to understand the mind that one understands the brain, and not merely necessary. This is just the well-known “identity theory” of mind and brain: mental processes are identical to brain processes; and the identity of a with b entails the sufficiency of a for b. To hold the weaker thesis that knowledge of the brain is merely necessary for knowledge of the mind is consistent even with being a heavy-duty Cartesian dualist, since even such a dualist accepts that mind depends causally on brain.

{ Patricia Churchland vs. Colin McGinn/NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

While both tourism research and photography research have grown into substantial academic disciplines, little has been written about their point of intersection: tourist photography. In this paper, I argue that a number of philosophically oriented theories of photography may offer useful perspectives on tourist photography. […]

When I was observing photographing tourists on the Pont Neuf and in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, one of the things that struck me was the fact that some tourists, when they came across a sculpture, first took a picture of it, and only started looking after the picture had been taken. Perhaps Sontag is right to argue that the production of pictures serves to appease the tourist’s anxiety about not working; in any case, this type of predatory photographic behavior promotes the accumulation of images to a goal in itself rather than a means to produce meaning or memories.

{ Dennis Schep/Depth of Field | Continue reading }

The atomists held that there are two fundamentally different kinds of realities composing the natural world, atoms and void. Atoms, from the Greek adjective atomos or atomon, ‘indivisible,’ are infinite in number and various in size and shape, and perfectly solid, with no internal gaps. They move about in an infinite void, repelling one another when they collide or combining into clusters by means of tiny hooks and barbs on their surfaces, which become entangled. Other than changing place, they are unchangeable, ungenerated and indestructible. All changes in the visible objects of the world of appearance are brought about by relocations of these atoms: in Aristotelian terms, the atomists reduce all change to change of place. Macroscopic objects in the world that we experience are really clusters of these atoms; changes in the objects we see—qualitative changes or growth, say—are caused by rearrangements or additions to the atoms composing them. While the atoms are eternal, the objects compounded out of them are not.

In supposing that void exists, the atomists deliberately embraced an apparent contradiction, claiming that ‘what is not’ exists.

{ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }

Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest.

{ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }

We investigate the possibility that a decision-maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. In a series of experiments the participants often choose lotteries between allocations, which contradicts most theories of choice such as expected utility but is consistent with a theory of responsibility aversion that implies a preference for randomness. A large data set on university applications in Germany shows a choice pattern that is also consistent with this theory and entails substantial allocative consequences.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Sandler }

The term ‘perspective’ comes from the language of vision. We literally see things from and with a particular perspective. Our eyes are located at a particular point in space, from which some things are visible and others are not, e.g. the top of the table, but not its underneath. A scene looks different from different perspectives. […]

Nietzsche is saying that philosophical beliefs about truth and goodness are part of a particular perspective on the world, a short-sighted, distorting perspective. One of its most important distortions is that it denies that it is a perspective, that its truths are unconditional, that it represents the world as it truly is. But philosophers are wrong to think that it is possible to represent or hold beliefs about the world that are value-free, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’. […]

We can support Nietzsche’s argument by an evolutionary account of human cognition. We can’t possibly take in everything around us. We must be selective in order to survive at all. So from the very beginning, our intellects are responsive to our interests, our biological instincts and all that develops from them – our emotions, desires and values. So we do not and cannot experience the world ‘as it is’, but always selectively, in a way that reflects our values. […]

If Nietzsche claims that all our knowledge is from a particular perspective, then his claims about perspectives and his theory of perspectivism must itself be from a particular perspective. So is what he says about perspectives objectively true or not?

{ Michael Lacewing | PDF }

image { Camille Henrot, still from The Strife of Love in a Dream, 2011 }

What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?

According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.

The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. […]

And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

As many theorists have noted, consciousness, while both familiar and intimate, remains deeply mysterious. The problem of explaining consciousness persists despite all attempts from the pre-Socratic Greeks to modern day philosophers at illuminating this perplexing subject. Throughout history many great thinkers supported the notion that consciousness or some sort of spiritual reality is distinct from matter, and indeed might be the fundamental source of all reality. However, the dominant view in the twentieth century settled on a more materialistic argument: consciousness most likely emerges from complex biological processes, which in turn are based ultimately on complex interactions between subatomic particles.

This view remains unsatisfactory for some philosophers of mind. While advances in neuroscience have led to improvements in our understanding of how processes within the brain work, we still are no closer to understanding experience at the most basic level. This is what Chalmers (1995) has termed the “hard problem” of consciousness. According to Chalmers, materialistic explanations of consciousness would be consistent with a world populated by zombies acting like people in the world, yet devoid of interior experience. Tackling the hard problem of conscious- ness, Chalmers argues, likely requires abandoning a purely materialistic view of consciousness.

The various theories of consciousness can arguably be grouped into five categories: materialism, dualism, panpsychism, neutral monism, and idealism. As noted above, the current mainstream view looks for materialistic explanations. This typically takes the form of arguing that consciousness must be a higher level activity that has emerged from lower level processes, such as complex biological processes. […]

Material dualism holds that matter and consciousness are two substances that differ fundamentally in a number of ways.1 This and other differences lead to the perhaps unsolvable problem of how such fundamentally different substances can interact. Historically, support for dualism fits well with such religious notions as the soul or supernatural agency. Dualism has attracted fewer adherents, however, as philosophy gravitated toward more naturalistic explanations. […]

Two closely related alternatives are panpsychism and neutral monism. Panpsychism holds that matter and mind are joined as one. The usual view of panpsychism holds that all matter, even electrons, has some aspect of mind, albeit at a rudi- mentary level. While panpsychism has relatively few adherents today, this class of explanations has had a long history in philosophy, being a close relative to animism that was common in early cultures (Skrbina, 2007). Neutral monism holds that matter and consciousness are aspects of some more neutral and fundamental reality. […]

One last alternative is idealism, which holds that the physical universe is composed of mind. […]

After a brief survey of the evidence, I conclude that the best explanation would probably be neutral monism. I then explore a framework for neutral monism, using well-known features of quantum mechanics, to develop a ground or bridge between consciousness and matter.

{ The Journal of Mind and Behavior | PDF }

art { Ellsworth Kelly, Black Forms, 1955 }

Can you ever be reasonably sure that something is random, in the same sense you can be reasonably sure something is not random (for example, because it consists of endless nines)? Even if a sequence looked random, how could you ever rule out the possibility that it had a hidden deterministic pattern? And what exactly do we mean by “random,” anyway?

These questions might sound metaphysical, but we don’t need to look far to find real-world consequences. In computer security, it’s crucial that the keys used for encryption be generated randomly—or at least, randomly enough that a potential eavesdropper can’t guess them. Day-to-day fluctuations in the stock market might look random—but to whatever extent they can be predicted, the practical implications are obvious. Casinos, lotteries, auditors, and polling firms all get challenged about whether their allegedly random choices are really random, and all might want ways to reassure skeptics that they are.

Then there’s quantum mechanics, which famously has declared for a century that “God plays dice,” that there’s irreducible randomness even in the behavior of subatomic particles.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

image { Matt Waples }

We tend to characterize art as “self-expression,” but that’s really more a description of bad art. The immature artist, as Eliot wrote, is constantly giving in to the urge to vent what’s inside, whereas the good artist seeks to escape that urge. […]

Social media turns us all into bad poets.

{ Rough Type | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }

Spinoza is quoted approvingly […] to the effect that the free man is the one who thinks about, or fears, death the least. Such fear he considers to be a passive emotion, or affection, which is a bondage to pain, symptomatic of our impotence and servitude. Spinoza writes,

Hope is nothing else but an inconstant pleasure, arising from the image of something future or past, whereof we do not yet know the issue. Fear, on the other hand, is an inconstant pain also arising from the image of something concerning which we are in doubt. If the element of doubt be removed from these emotions, hope becomes Confidence and fear become Despair. In other words, Pleasure or Pain arising from the image of something concerning which we have hoped or feared.

The free man, in this light, is one who has not only cultivated the stronger active emotion of acquiescence to the univocal chorus of necessity, but has also learned to disengage external factors which are coincident with such passive emotions.

{ James Luchte | Continue reading }

Giving violators more punishment than they deserve can undermine the benefits of cooperative action. […] At the same time, imposing markedly less punishment than what a violator deserves creates disaffection and acrimony that also can subvert cooperation. In other words, it is not punishment that is needed to maintain social cooperation, but justice. […]

In 1848, the discovery of gold brought 300,000 men to California from all over the world. Yet this sudden mass of humanity lived without a functioning legal system. And if there had been a legal enforcement system, it was unclear what law it would enforce. […] Without a functional government, there were no licensing procedures, fees, or taxes to regulate gold prospecting. No miner worked land that he owned. Any prospector could join any mining camp at any time. Camp populations were heterogeneous: “Puritans and drunkards, clergymen and convict, honest and dishonest, rich and poor.” There was no common language, culture, or legal experience. […] The men shared a common set of needs, however. Each miner needed to be able to leave whatever he owned unguarded each day while he worked his claim. A miner who found gold needed to protect his find until he could convert it into cash or goods.

{ Paul H. Robinson/SSRN | Continue reading }

Horses are the only species other than man transported around the world for competition purposes.

In humans, transport across several time zones can result in adverse symptoms commonly referred to as jetlag.

Can changes in the light/dark cycle, equivalent to those caused by transport across several time zones, affect daily biological rhythms, and performance in equine athletes?

[…]

We found that horses do feel a change in the light/dark cycle very acutely, but they also recover very quickly, and this resulted in an improvement in their performance rather than a decrease in their performance, which was exactly the opposite of what we thought was going to happen.

{ HBLB | PDF }

“Would you please take a selfie of my friend and I in front of this window?”

She was not aware that she had approached a linguist. […]

It would not be like him to snarl that of my friend and I should be of my friend and me (or perhaps better, of me and my friend). Nor did he remonstrate with the woman over her rather extraordinary misuse of the noun selfie.

{ Language Log | Continue reading }

unrelated { Photographer countersues Empire State Building for $5M over topless photos }

More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.

I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair.

{ FiveThirtyEight | Continue reading }