"All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion. For instance, the physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brains motor regions can be detected some 350 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some 'conscious' decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness ( long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of ones actions. Notice that distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' systems of the brain gets us no where: for I no more initiate events in executive regions of my prefrontal cortex than I cause the creaturely outbursts of my limbic systems. The truth seems inescapable: I, as the subject of my experience, can not know what I will next think or do until a thought or intention arises; and thoughts and intentions are caused by physical events and mental stirrings of which I am not aware."
Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape
"Where does conscious reasoning come in to the picture? It is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made. And it is, after all, the only way we have to explain to other people why we made a particular decision. But given our lack of access to the brain process involved, our justification is often spurious: a post hoc rationalisation, or even confabulation - a 'story' of the confusion between imagination and memory".
Chris Frith
"Introspection offers no clue that our experience of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, depends upon voltage changes and chemical interactions taking place inside our heads. And yet a century and a half of brain science declares it to be so. What will it mean to finally understand the most prized, lamented and intimate features of our subjectivity in terms of neural circuits and information processing?
With respect to our current understanding of the mind, the major religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled, any naive conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the minds obvious dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of reasoning, feeling love, remembering life events etc. all the while being independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a person suffering from total aphasia ( loss of language ability) still think and speak fluently? This s rather like asking whether the soul of ag diabetic produces abundant insulin. The specific character of the minds dependency on the brain also suggests that there can not be a unified self at work in each one of us. There are simply too many separable components to the human mind, each suseptablle to independent disruption, for there to be a single entity to stand as the rider to the horse.
The shoul doctrine suffers further upheaval in light of the fatal resemblance of the human brain to the brains of other animals. The obvious continuity of our mental powers with those of ostensibly soulless primates raises special difficulties. If the joint ancestors of chimpanzees and humans did not have souls, when did we acquire ours? "
Sam Harris
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