On Monday, September 2, 2013 2:11:05 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: > > On 9/2/2013 7:34 AM, chris peck wrote: > > The study you're citing firstly claims the 60% of the variance they > uncovered is explained by 'spontaneous' brain activity not 60% of all brain > activity. More importantly, by spontaneous they just mean brain activity > that has not been triggered by external stimuli: > > > And how could they possibly know whether some brain event was triggered by > a stored perception of you grandmother when you were five?� All they can > say is it wasn't triggered by a *present* external stimuli. >
Yes, that's true of course, but 1) 60% is a lot of stored perceptions triggering themselves for no reason. 2) The spontaneous activity is associated with behavioral changes. Kind of an odd thing for an archive of stored data to do independently of external stimuli. We should ask, at what point do *present* stimuli go dormant, and of how long, before they spontaneously (non-spontaneously) resurface as something that looks exactly like free will would look? We should not expect that free will can be proved to any greater extent than this. Again, if we were dealing with something which we knew for a fact had no intention or creativity, then sure, what the study shows is only that we don't know where 60% of the activity is coming from, so maybe it is just housekeeping or scheduled tasks running, or whatever. Since we do have a sense that there is a difference between behavior that is intentional, accidental, coerced, and subconsciously driven, and that those categories are distinct, it would be absurdly unscientific and biased to rule out this rather large footprint in the brain as belonging to our own shoe. Thanks, Craig > Brent > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
