Science does not disprove free will

June 18, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis9 Comments

Someone contacted me through Quora recently because they were having an existential crisis — it was stimulated by the ostensibly scientific notion that humans do not have free well.

Any theory that insists that we do not actually make choices is going to causes distress among many people who valorize academic thinking. Many hard-nosed metaphysicians simply don’t care about the mental well-being of the general public. I find this attitude simultaneously patronizing and irresponsible.

Is reality continuous or discrete?

January 29, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis2 Comments

A performing artist stands among large planets while juggling smaller ones and their satellitesReality is whatever it is… only our models of it can be considered continuous or discrete (or true, or false, or useful).

I say this like it’s obvious, but it’s a potentially controversial opinion. 🙂

People have a strong tendency to confuse the map with the territory. So a very successful theory becomes synonymous with reality itself.

But things get murky when we investigate all the details of the theory. If we are being extra cautious about what we consider “real”, then we can always wait for experimental confirmation before believing in the existence of some thing or process proposed by a theory.

Synchronicity, Coincidence and VALIS

January 9, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis, Odds & Ends

Synchronicity is coincidence right?

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the concept:

“Synchronicity is a concept, first explained by psychiatrist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related.”

Since meaning is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose you get to decide if a coincidence is an example of synchronicity or not.

But from a mainstream scientific perspective, synchronicity is criticized for pretty solid reasons. Here are some Wikipedia excerpts again:

“Critics assert that standard science, causality, physics, statistics, and probability (for instance, Littlewood’s law or the law of truly large numbers) suffice to explain alleged (in Jung definition) “synchronistic” events, it doesn’t mean that similar events can not exist (see for instance: mathematical coincidence) but the explanation as synchronicity is criticized, so the term coincidences is used instead.”

[…]

“In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or is a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study, or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence that challenges a preconceived idea, but not to evidence that supports it.”

And now for some wild sci-fi speculation!

Which is the most evolutionarily advanced part of the human brain?

December 3, 2019Posted inneurologism

This is a potentially controversial issue, since there is no consensus yet on the evolution of the brain, beyond a very coarse-grained chronology. Broadly speaking, neocortical areas are new, hence the term “neo-cortex”. But among cortical areas, there is still some disagreement about which areas emerged most recently in primates.

Based on what we know about development in the womb, along with structural findings, my labmates, who are neuroanatomists, suggest that the “eulaminate” areas — the ones that have sharply defined layers — may be the most recent, evolutionarily, compared to the “agranular” and “dysgranular” cortices, which have less sharply defined layers. These less sharply defined areas are also labeled as “limbic”.