That is the case, they were able to write two things at once, but that is the least troubling aspect of it. Note that the brain isn’t COMPLETELY split, and the subjects reported that they still felt like one unified person. There are a number of dualists who misunderstood these claims and so point to the subjects’ continuing ability to function as evidence of dualism. This misses the point, however…
There were some troubling implications about perceptions. These studies found that if you display an image - say, a chicken - to the person’s left eye only (and so the right side of their brain), and then ask them to explain what they saw - the left side of their brain, which is responsible for speech, will say that they saw nothing. However, their left hand is able to point to a picture of a key.
This is weird, but it isn’t THAT weird. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about consciousness - it could be an example of Aphasia, where the person knows what they saw but cannot communicate it through speech.
Here is where it gets weird, though. When asked to explain why they were pointing to a chicken, the person wouldn’t show confusion or uncertainty. Instead, they would confidentially explain that they were hungry and thinking about having chicken wings after the study was over.
In other words, we like to think of ourselves as a disembodied soul driving our body and brain alike. But in fact, our brains often make decisions without involving our consciousness, and then our consciousness invents a plausible story to justify these decisions to ourselves.
There are studies that draw similar conclusions in people who did not undergo brain surgery, but the split brain example is the most dramatic and troubling example for the belief in external souls as free agents.
Yeah, I do remember reading that they used images shown to only one eye and the subject would totally botch the explanation. But so long as conscious thought drives future behavior and considered behavior, I’m not particularly troubled by the phenomenon of post-rationalization of subconscious acts and its effects on moral culpability.
And a cite that talks about not just the split brain example but how this “consciousness as interpreter not decisionmaker” theory applies to us all:
The first example it gives shows that we are most likely to pick the rightmost object in a series of objects hanging on a wall as our “favorite” but that we then invent all sorts of seemingly plausible explanations as to why we did so.
Other than our own subjective experience - which these experiments show are not particularly trustworthy - what evidence do we have that this is the case?
We’ve just had 100+ posts where the topic basically boiled down to the argument that Determinism has the same flaw as one argument against Free Will does. I don’t believe that that’s correct, but regardless, it’s a “whatabout” defense of free will at best.
I don’t want to waste more time on whatabout. For the sake of argument let’s just say that “random” just means magic pixie dust and is the dumbest concept ever made up by dum dums and believed by rubes.
So…shall we now focus on what Free Will is supposed to be, why it can’t be deterministic and why we have reason to think it exists?
Also, I’m not sure why a deterministic model has ANY
We make decisions for reasons. Sometimes we make good decisions, sometimes bad ones. Sometimes we do it for good reasons, other times for bad ones. If a serial killer is committing his crimes because he gets off on murder, is he any less morally culpable if the reason for him getting off on murder is due to:
Well, that’s a matter of faith, and lines up with our observation of reality about as well as the “little people in our brains pulling levers” theory of the Pixar movie from a couple years ago.
That’s fine when determining your own beliefs - I certainly won’t begrudge you for it. But it isn’t worth much in a debate when the claims you have faith in don’t agree with observations of reality.
No, it’s just subjective experience and other people trying to communicate their subjective experience. I don’t have evidence that thoughts drive future behavior (premeditation), but it’s very intuitive and I’m sure there is some way to test it with current technology.
IMO 1-3, yes to different degrees. 1 & 2 would not get him off the hook for murder but if I were deciding on the appropriate sentence they would be mitigating factors (law allowing my discretion). With regard to 3 the biblical story of God hardening Pharoah’s heart comes to mind (not implying God is a demon, but this is something that comes up in more traditional free will debates).
You are steeped in knowledge of numerical computer architecture.
So, perhaps you can imagine an architecture that produces what you experience within your own brain. Everything you observe is stored in memory. You can read memory by reconstructing the scene that stored the information. You experience this recall when you see an old movie. You watch the scene and it becomes familiar and you recall the name of the movie. The more you watch the more you recall. The address of the data is the data. Like an addresses at addresses diagnostic.
What architecture would function that way? Not a numerical simulation but a a relational architecture.
I’d bet the software YouTube uses to automatically screen video uploads for copyright infringement works that way. All the numbers are abstracted away, and the head honcho writing the formula at a high level probably dictates in plain English.