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Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain: Scientific American - 0 views

www.sciam.com/article.cfm brain freewill neuron responsibility
shared by isaac Mao on 22 Aug 08 - Cached
  • In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.
  • isaac Mao on 22 Aug 08
     
    这可以解释为什么在一个极权国家，人们趋向于不负责任
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Science News / Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will? - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...ic_particles_have_free_will%3F brain freewill
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  • Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.
  • “If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.
  • claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.
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  • That’s certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don’t imagine, say, that a fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all along.
  • This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.
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Science Friday Archives: Do You Want to Believe? - 0 views

www.sciencefriday.com/...200810037 freethinking freewill
shared by isaac Mao on 04 Oct 08 - Cached
  • People who had written about a situation in which they were not in control were more likely to draw non-existent connections between the coincidences, the researchers found.
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Free will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

en.wikipedia.org/Free_will FreeWill Brain
shared by isaac Mao on 05 Oct 08 - Cached
  • It is claimed by some that quantum indeterminism is confined to microscopic phenomena.[54] The claim that events at the atomic or particulate level are unknowable can be challenged experimentally and even technologically: for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. However, this only amounts to macroscopic indeterminism if it can be shown that microscopic events really are indeterministic.
  • Hard incompatibilism is defended by Derk Pereboom, who identifies a variety of positions where free will is seen irrelevant to indeterminism/determinism, among them the following: Determinism (D) is true, D does not imply we lack free will (F), but in fact we do lack F. D is true, D does not imply we lack F, but in fact we don't know if we have F. D is true, and we do have F. D is true, we have F, and F implies D. D is unproven, but we have F. D isn't true, we do have F, and would have F even if D were true. D isn't true, we don't have F, but F is compatible with D. Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will,[13] p. xvi. Pereboom calls positions 3 and 4 soft determinism, position 1 a form of hard determinism, position 6 a form of classical libertarianism, and any position that includes having F as compatibilism. He largely ignores position 2
  • Compatibilist models of free will often consider deterministic relationships as discoverable in the physical world (including the brain). Cognitive naturalism[118] is a physicalist approach to studing human consciousness in which mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of many very complex self-programming feedback systems (for example, neural networks and cognitive robots), and so must be studied by the methods of empirical science, for example, behavioral science and the cognitive sciences like neuroscience and cognitive psychology.[101][119] Cognitive naturalism stresses the role of neurological sciences. Overall brain health, substance dependence, depression, and various personality disorders clearly influence mental activity, and their impact upon volition also is important.[113] For example, an addict may experience a conscious desire to escape addiction, but be unable to do so. The "will" is disconnected from the freedom to act. This situation is related to an abnormal production and distribution of dopamine in the brain.[120] The neuroscience of free will places restrictions on both compatibilist and incompatibilist free will conceptions. Compatibilist models adhere to models of mind in which mental activity (such as deliberation) can be reduced to physical activity without any change in physical outcome. Although compatibilism is generally aligned to (or is at least compatible with) physicalism, some compatibilist models describe the natural occurrences of deterministic deliberation in the brain in terms of the first person perspective of the conscious agent performing the deliberation.[7] Such an approach has been considered a form of identity dualism. A description of "how conscious experience might affect brains" has been provided in which "the experience of conscious free will is the first-person perspective of the neural correlates of choosing".[7]
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