
How Your Brain Decides Without You (2014) - electic
http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/how-your-brain-decides-without-you
======
laotzu
>We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and
involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were
voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide -
An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we
had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide.

-Alan Watts, Way of Zen

~~~
criddell
How is that different than Zeno's Paradox?

~~~
drostie
When Lewis Carroll discusses a similar logical problem in "What the Tortoise
Said to Achilles" it comes from the perspective of a Zeno paradox which cannot
be resolved in the same way.

Essentially, Achilles says "A, therefore Z." Tortoise says, "Well, suppose I
don't see the connection here, you have some symbols on this side and some
symbols on that side, could you help me?" So Achilles modifies this to, "A,
and A implies Z, therefore Z." And the Tortoise says, "well, that sounds very
good and I trust your proof that A implies Z but I'm still not seeing the
connection here. Could you help me connect those left hand things to the right
hand thing?" So Achilles modifies this to "A, and A implies Z, and (A and A
implies Z) implies Z, therefore Z." And the Tortoise says, "aha, of course '(A
and A implies Z) implies Z' ... but wait, now that I've written that down, I
again don't see the connection here...". Essentially the point is that our
generic rule that replaces "x and x implies y" with "x and y" is a process
which lives outside the declarative scope of formal logic. (In the Curry-
Howard isomorphism: you can have a value of type `x` and a function which
turns values of type `x` into values of type `y`, but these are definitions,
and there is no way to capture the true _process_ of applying the function to
the value -- just another declaration of another function which has type `x →
(x → y) → y` which is by itself never involved in a process.)

(As an amateur physicist, I hasten to remind everyone that Zeno won in the
end; there is a context which Zeno could have never foreseen where a Zeno
paradox makes a certain kind of motion impossible. The reason nobody can
travel faster than light is that if you take your spaceship and try to race a
light beam, first you throw down a beacon, and then you accelerate to speed
c/2 relative to that beacon -- in your shiny new reference frame, due to the
constancy of the speed of light in inertial reference frames, the light beam
is still moving at speed c away from you.)

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fmstephe
When reading any articles about psychology now I always have in the back of my
head the question "How many of these studies have been reporoduced?"

There are a lot of valuable insights from this kind of research but right now
it's hard to know which are the valuable ones and which ones are just air.

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ckaygusu
I had a bit spooky experience more or less 1 year ago. It was an emotionally
intensive period, at certain moments my body was giving off reactions that I
wasn't in control of. My mind wasn't completely detached from the situation I
was in, but enough so I was just watching myself... doing things.

This experience made me think in what state my mind will be at later ages. I'm
quite young now, and I've heard from so many people that at later ages one's
thought process is not as fluid or creative as it is in youth. It made me
think of all these moments of brillance I've had the pleasure of experiencing
will vanish as I age. I'm speaking of arriving at solutions to problems
without consciously thinking about them, like all of the sudden the solution
just pops in your head and, comparing to the state that you are in, moments
ago, having no clue what to do with the problem at hand, suddenly you
precisely know what to do. I have done nothing to achieve or deserve this
trait, but still, knowing that it will be taken away some time later and
having no control over the process, is depressing.

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joosters
My brain is part of me (who else could it be?) So how can it possibly be said
to make decisions without me?

~~~
ASalazarMX
You're throwing a baseball, but at the last moment you spot a kid running into
its path. You tried to stop your arm but it was already in motion. You decided
half a second too late.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Over...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Overview)

~~~
betenoire
It's not a question about the autonomy of body parts, it's the notion "I" am
something more than my parts. The parent question is a good one

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hashkb
It really is too bad that we are hardwired to suck at being corrected. It is
the source of so much social and organizational inefficiency.

~~~
danharaj
> It really is too bad that we are hardwired to suck at being corrected.

Why do you think that? Speak for yourself.

The foundation of human society is transmission of knowledge and skills. We
spend a great deal of our time learning from others, which involves correction
based on observation of others as well as instruction from others.

When people are receptive to being corrected, they are very good at being
corrected. When they resist being corrected, they are very bad at it. Why do
they resist? Probably because we often find ourselves in social situations
where accepting criticism from others is considered submissive and a penalty
to social standing.

People who consider each other equals tend to be very receptive to mutual
correction.

People who are vying to be the dominant one in a relationship are very hostile
towards being corrected.

~~~
jschwartzi
There's another reason to resist being corrected: your colleagues are in the
middle of having a knee-jerk reaction to something you did for good reason,
and they can't explain why they don't like it in this instance, only in
general.

~~~
danharaj
Ah yes, when the person being corrected corrects the person correcting them :)

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richardboegli
For those who haven't read up about emotional intelligence

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Intelligence)

~~~
richardboegli
Not sure why I was voted down, it relates to the same things talked about in
the parent post...

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knughit
If you play one of those modern games with he AI assist, like Final Fantasy
Sims or StarCraft , are you really playing the game?

~~~
Splines
(I don't know what this has to do with the article, but it's an interesting
question)

Sure, why not? Games are just a simulation of something, and an AI assist
removes some of the user-interacting parts of that simulation.

You don't need to manually reload your weapon in Counterstrike, nor do you
need to worry about where to place your feet. Similarly, you don't need to
pathfind for your units in Starcraft, nor do you need to manually fetch every
single resource.

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dschiptsov
There is no You in the brain. That You is an illusion produced by the
conditioned mind. Animals doesn't have any You.

99.9% of activities which brain controls are "non-verbal", which means have
nothing to do with the prefrontal cortex, Wernicke's areas, etc.

To put it simply, almost everything is non-verbal (doesn't require your self).
We grossly overemphasize importance of that You we are obsessed with.

~~~
_nedR
"Animals doesn't have any You."

How can you possibly know that.

~~~
dschiptsov
It seems like there is a fundamental difference between awareness of a fit
back signals from various systems (fear, hunger, cold, pain, etc.) and
awareness of the self as an separate entity. Animals obviously have fit back
awareness but probably does not have the concept of the self, like toddlers
and young children.

Self comes with language acquisition, which rewires the brain. That's why
almost no one remember their baby days, it seems.

Before that language conditioning you are a perfect animal.)

~~~
_nedR
Oh ok. Looking up what you told me i learnt that what I thought was 1 concept
called conciousness, could be defined as 2 separate but related concepts -
Qualia and self-awareness.

Looking up the wiki article, it seems most animals don't pass the mirror test
of self-awareness although few have (such as primates, dolphins, magpies).The
mirror-test has been criticized by some as human-centric approach which could
give false negatives meaning possibly more animals could be self-aware.

Your connecting of awareness and language is interesting. Do you have any
sources to look at (articles, books ,etc)? Quite interesting field really.

Thanks.

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codeulike
Clicked on article expecting it to not be very good.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

~~~
lemevi
I didn't really like the article. It was too conversational with unnecessary
anecdotes. While reading it I was pretty much annoyed by how the writer didn't
respect my time and couldn't just spit out what their main idea was. Like I
shouldn't need to read three or four paragraphs to find out if the topic is
something I already know about or interesting to me.

This article is basically a fluff entertainment piece for people who just
enjoy reading for the sake of it and want to feel smart for it when they're
done.

~~~
ksk
>While reading it I was pretty much annoyed by how the writer didn't respect
my time and couldn't just spit out what their main idea was. Like I shouldn't
need to read three or four paragraphs to find out if the topic is something I
already know about or interesting to me.

And yet, you did the same thing for your comment.

Anyway, your preferred style of writing does exist and its called a research
paper. Thankfully, the world is big enough to accmodate other styles of
writing.

~~~
lemevi
You really added to the conversation with this, thanks.

~~~
ksk
Thanks! (/s) I expressed a positive sentiment to counter your negative one. If
you simply want a list of all the facts about the human body, you know where
to look.

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oldmanjay
I can see the duck and the rabbit at once.

I don't have much of an opinion on the rest of the article.

~~~
ryanmaynard
I did as well. However, I imagine that articles that aren't a touch hyperbolic
seldom make it to the top of the news aggregators.

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guard-of-terra
"People who have discovered they have a brain and were frightened by it"

If you are not your brain, who are you?

~~~
nhaehnle
My line of thinking when I saw the headline was very similar. If you believe
that your brain decides something without you, that just means you don't have
a good understanding of who/what you are.

~~~
Zigurd
Or it could mean that what you think of as "you" can't access the parts of
your brain that makes decisions. Just like it can't access how you digest
food.

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charlysisto
Another case for duck typing... (a shameless rubyist)

~~~
charlysisto
I guess appreciating humour has something to do with one's brain perception -
or the lack of thereof.

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glxc
i wish this article appeared on their facebook page so i could like it to
share it with my network

this article is a month old, so maybe it went away?

~~~
bbcbasic
Huh?! You can share URLs on Facebook.

~~~
glxc
I know! but there is a big difference between "sharing" an article, and
"liking" an article and having it show up on friends' feeds. its the
difference between actively and passively sharing a viewpoint

