Tor Norretranders, "The User Illusion" 에서

 

 

 

 

Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness

Down to Size (Danish 1991, Translation 1998)

 

 

 

If such a simple act as moving a finger starts in the brain a whole second before the muscle activity, when do we consciously decide to initiate the act? [Kornhuber and Deecke's 1965 experiments] (p 215)

 

If the brain started sometime before I decided to move my finger, do I possess free will? (p 216)

 

[A]s Libet put it [about his 1979 experiments] a few years later, "This leads me to propose that the performance of every conscious voluntary act is preceded by special unconscious cerebral processes that begins abut 500 ms or so before the act. (p 219)

 

Human reaction times are a lot shorter than 0.5 second.... Well, it can, because reactions are not conscious.... "If consciousness is itself  a product of cerebral activity, surely there is nothing odd about cerebral activity starting before consciousness appears." ... It is not our consciousness that initiates, for only the conscious is conscious [precisely because consciousness is a primary phenomenon.... the criterion for consciousness is quite simply consciousness, p. 220]. (p 221)

 

[C]onsciousness has to be the result of cerebral mechanisms so boring that we are unconscious of them, consciousness can never be in charge. (p 222)

 

Deeke's commentary on Libet ...: "A 'preconscious' appearance, if there any, of ... [the readiness potential] does not particularly disturb the neurologist, who is familiar with the various infraconscious brain operations and ... asks himself why ... biological evolution may have invented consciousness: for the sake of data reduction. That's why the method of introspection is limited. Introspection may fail, but this does not mean that all that is not accessible to it is supernatural." (p 224)

 

But the main problem with Dennett's model is that the notion of lots of drafts for consciousness existing in parallel does not explain the clear sense of unity one experiences subjectively in being conscious. Nor, then the real problem: How are all our experiences and thoughts coordinated into an illusion that consciousness does the deciding? (p 239)

 

From the conscious experience of making the decision until it is carried out, 0.2 second passes [in libet's 1985 experiments]. Can our consciousness manage to stop the act before it is carried out? This is Benjamin Libet's own salvation for free will: the veto. (p 243)

 

"He[Rabbi Hillel] said, fifty years before Christ, 'Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you!' That is a much clearer rule than the Christian 'Do unto others what you want them to do to you.' When you think about it, it does not yield meaning." Libet says. (p 244)

 

William James wrote, "The universal conscious fact is not that 'feeling and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.'" (p 310)