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Complex Numbers #954359 added March 15, 2019 at 11:58am
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Duck!
I'm not sure there's anything new here, but it's an interesting read.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-your-brain-decides-without-you
How Your Brain Decides Without You
And already we have a misleading headline.
Your brain can't decide anything without you, because the concept of "you" is tied up in your brain.
Or something. It's not like we really understand consciousness.
The structure of the brain, she notes, is such that there are many more intrinsic connections between neurons than there are connections that bring sensory information from the world. From that incomplete picture, she says, the brain is “filling in the details, making sense out of ambiguous sensory input.” The brain, she says, is an “inference generating organ.” She describes an increasingly well-supported working hypothesis called predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world.
Okay... but what I'm not seeing in the article is anything about how one's preconceptions are coded in the first place. Genetics? Environment? Some combination?
Likely, they don't know.
But the fact is there that they are coded, and thus there might be ways to change that code. Nice if you want to change it. Not so nice if there's some external input that can change what "you" are without your conscious consent.
This has implications on our conception of "free will," incidentally. I've been saying for a while now that the classical definition of "free will" is bogus - the idea that, given the exact same set of circumstances, we could have decided differently. That's no excuse for acting badly, of course, but it does imply a kind of determinism.
Like I said, interesting stuff. But there's a brewery out there called Duck Rabbit, and their logo is based on the duck/rabbit illusion featured in the article. And now I want one of their beers. Apparently I have no control over that. |
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