Final Blog Entry

For some time now I have questioned the idea of “free will” and would like to discuss some of my thoughts on the subject along with presenting ideas of others that support my thoughts.

I do not know when i first came to the conclusion that we (humans) must not have free will but i do remember how i did. The easiest way to reach it is by asking a series of questions: Do humans have free will? Do monkeys have free will? Do dogs? Do birds? Fish? Squids? Worms? Bugs? Jelly fish? Sponges? Cells? Chemicals? Atoms? While this may seem tedious, generally people will at some point say “no ___ does not have free will.” Well my argument then would be what makes any higher level “organism” gain this ability to determine its own future to have an ability to control its actions at any moment. Ultimately I come to the conclusion that we are simply a complex organism making us no more than a very very very complex series of chemical reactions which are ultimately dependent on a set of physical rules.* This means that our perceived to be “conscious” actions which we “choose” to do are really predictable reactions to the world around us. To clarify, the definition of the verb ”to think” is To decide by reasoning, reflection, or pondering and the definition of the verb “to decide” is To influence or determine the outcome of while the definition of the verb “to react” is To act in response to or under the influence of a stimulus or prompting. I would argue that our day to day actions and movements which we define as being controlled by thought and resulting decisions are truly reaction to stimuli of our environment which in the end change our brain chemistry/structure such that we will react uniquely to a stimulus whenever it is presented to us. Finally I ask the question when, where, and how are our inevitable reactions to the world around us perceived as being conscious decisions resulting from “free will.”

 

Questioning the perception of free will is not rare, when searching on the Internet i stumbled over a couple of interesting experiments done to explore the concept of “intent.” The two articles Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act** and Conscious intention and motor cognition*** discuss the results of experiments in which subjects were asked to voluntarily move their hand or push a button and to look at a clock to acknowledge when they had initially decided to move. The results of the experiment are described in the first article’s abstract:

 ”The recordable cerebral activity (readiness-potential, RP) that precedes a freely voluntary, fully endogenous motor act was directly compared with the reportable time (W) for appearance of the subjective experience of ‘wanting’ or intending to act. The onset of cerebral activity clearly preceded by at least several hundred milliseconds the reported time of conscious intention to act.”

 The second article had similar results and made a conclusion on how preparation for action leads to a sense of control and agency:

“recent findings suggest that the conscious experience of intending to act arises from preparation for action in frontal and parietal brain areas. Intentional actions also involve a strong sense of agency, a sense of controlling events in the external world. Both intention and agency result from the brain processes for predictive motor control, not merely from retrospective inference.”

 To support the concept that free will is an illusion one could interpret these articles as saying that our initial mechanical reactions to the world around us begin in our “subconscious” and that later detection of our uncontrollable reactions are then perceived and understood to us as a choice rather than an inevitability. However, the question this argument points at is the same as the question asked throughout this class, it is the question of how, where, and who is having this perception and therefore is the question of where is consciousness in the brain?

 

 The concept of where consciousness is in the brain is explored in ”What Can Neuroscience Explain?”, John Symons’ critique on John Horgan’s book The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation.**** Specifically, in this article Symons’s discusses what Horgan believes are the three obstacles that face neuroscience. The first obstacle is “Variability,” as in the uniqueness of each individuals brain, which Symons quickly pushes aside as not being a serious issue since variability is commonly found in science and that it is the function of science to “average” the variability with theory. The second obstacle is the “Binding,” referring to the “binding problem.” The binding problem is the struggle in neuroscience to explain how the many facets of the brain come together to provide us with the feelingof “oneness,” the sense of having a unified consciousness, that we all have. Symons discusses the problem and refers both to Horgan and to philosopher Daniel Dennett:

“The binding problem is a genuine problem for neuroscience. However, readers should be alert to the way the problem is presented in Horgan’s book: ‘the binding problem – the Humpty Dumpty dilemma, to use my term – remains very much unsolved’ (1999, p. 43). Horgan’s formulation of the bindingproblem suffers from the common flaw of assuming that all neural discriminations must end up united in a single representational space in the mind-brain … As philosophers like Dennett frequently point out, incautious formulations of ‘the bindingproblem’ often presuppose that there must be some single representational space in the brain (smaller than the whole brain) where something like Horgan’s Humpty Dumpty comes together again (see Dennett, 1991, p. 357). For Horgan, binding is a matter of ‘construct[ing] pictures of the world from many disparate pieces’ (1999, p. 43).”

 The following and final obstacle is “Explanatory Gaps,” referring to Joseph Levine’s idea that science will always be unable to explain consciousness in any meaningful way. I found this to relate very much with the binding problem and even more so as Symons argument continued. Here he began to discuss the idea of “qualia,” which is “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us” aka perception in its most abstract sense. At one point Symons interestingly states that “Faith in the reality of qualia poses the greatest obstacle to the scientific explanation
of the mind.” I believe that the idea of qualia and the binding problem are related to one another. Somehow we have blurred together the many inputs from our brain into a point of perceived consciousness. A consciousness that perceives inevitable actions as intent, a consciousness that is fed different wavelengths of light, frequencies of air pressure and chemicals that have been analyzed and simplified as color, sound, taste, and smell. A consciousness that paints the picture of reality in which we live our lives yet ultimately is an illusion resulting from a myriad of chemical and physical reactions following predetermined rules. We live our lives saturated in the illusion of consciousness perceiving a reality that is not real a life that is not lived. We do not yet fully understand the nature of the illusion nor can we separate ourselves from it. We have been seated in it and are now forced to ride until the illusion ends and consciousness disappears.

 

*While Quantum Mechanics states we cannot be certain about anything and that all the rules of physics are defined soleyby probability, thereby forcing all predictions of future events to be saturated with probabilities. Yet this truth does not conflict with the idea that people have zero control over the outcome of events.

** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273

***http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925808

****http://www.springerlink.com/content/r3120t6482w77565/fulltext.pdf

Perception Blog 10

Studying for our pending final test, I catch myself deep in thought on the creation of perception. The “creation of perception” referring to the mysterious and abstract act done by the brain in the brain that provides us with what we commonly refer to as a sense or a perception. Specifically, the consideration of color and motion, the two perceptions I am currently studying, has led me to question a great deal of our perception of reality.

On the subject of color, I remember a question I used to have, and most do: does my blue look like your blue? Does my red look like your red? etc. Obviously we can never know the answer to these questions, at the time I thought maybe you could see with an MRI different reactions to the same colors in different people. Either way, recently I was discussing this briefly with a friend of mine, after studying the mechanism of color perception, and I began to explain that the ratio of all three cones, especially the L and M cones, is variable in all people; therefore, I know that my colors are probably different than your colors. However, I corrected myself after saying that. I had said that the ratio of cones affects the colors perceived, this is not true, rather the ratio of cones simply affects our power to distinguish to separate “colors” more or less accurately at different points in the spectrum. This difference, however, does not affect the perceived colors themselves. After coming to this conclusion I began to question these “colors” which i stated were independent from cones. Color is made and distributed in the mind, how this is done is not known but the colors believed to be very much real. Evidence of the minds mechanism of creating colors is found when looking at a spectrum of colors of different wavelengths. Specifically, you will find red at the highest wavelengths and blue turning purple at the shortest. The purple seems to contain red in it and even more near the fringes of our visual spectrum. This is the result of our minds consistency, its prescribes red to the wavelengths at the furthest ends because the mind confuses the two ends, thereby making them both red-like.

Color, just like all forms of perception, is quickly overlooked and presumed real, yet, along with other forms of perception, color is slowly being understood and appreciated to be nothing other than a creation of the mind. Motion is considered very differently. Motion presumed real as well, not only can you “see” something move, but you can feel it move and hear it move etc. Therefore there appears to be lots of evidence supporting the idea that movement that is perceived is real. However, after studying for this test, motion appears to be more of a sense and a perception than simply a truth. By saying motion is a perception I think I am saying that “motion” is created in the mind based on the change in the location of a visual stimuli over time. If this is true, must one ask if motion, the perception of objects moving fluidly through space and time, is a creation of the mind, an illusion, than what is “really” happening? Without trying to sound crazy, I believe I am wondering if our scientific understanding of the movement of objects through space and time is biased and falsely based on our perception of motion? Now to ask this I need to say that I am referring to not only our visual perception of motion but also the contributions towards detecting motion made by all the senses, mixed together to paint the perceptual illusion of motion. Is movement as fluid as it seems? Should scientists attempt to prove motion is as constant as we perceive it to be? Or should we assume that we are adding this fluidity to something that could be very different, perhaps when particles move they make “jumps” at the speed of light over very short distances at rates which appear constant to us. And finally, is it possible that our perception of motion is essential in our understanding and perception of time? I do not know, but these questions and the realization that perception may truly be more the creation of the mind than a window to the world will give me lots to talk about in my final blog.

Perception Blog 8

First, I would like to respond to the question “What is the difference between adding and subtracting colors?”
The way I differentiate the two is adding colors is (when projecting colors on to a screen) sending more than one wavelength of visible light into your eye, thereby stimulating the perception of multiple colors ultimately leading to the perception of white (when all three types of cones are equally active). Color subtraction, on the other hand, is (when mixing paints or pigments) the filtering of wavelengths of light. To better explain, I say “filtering” because what is happening when you look at something you have painted red under “white light” is all the wavelengths of light contained in white light hit the “red” surface and all are absorbed except the wavelengths corresponding to the color red. Therefor the light has been filtered from all wavelengths to just the ones that we perceive as “red.” So if we mix paint we are mixing filters and thereby further decreasing and filtering the wavelengths that will be reflected until we ultimately get a black color from all wavelengths being absorbed and none reflected.

Yet the question I would rather discuss is why did John Keats lament Newton’s “unweaving of the rainbow”? John Keats lament Newton’s dissection of light and thereby the perception of color, which Keats refers when saying rainbow, because Newton was replacing the illusion and mystery of perception with science and reason. Perhaps one would initially believe that such a replacement is a step in the “right direction” a movement towards a better understanding of the world around, our perception of that world, and thereby reality as a whole; however, I support and understand the lament felt by Keats and worry about what is to come as we further unweave the rainbow of reality. One of the biggest questions in life is “why,” such is our questioning of the world, reality. Man kind made endless attempts to answer this question either through religion, science, magic etc. But ultimately, our ability to “think” forces us to always question and attempt to better understand the world around us. By far the most popular way to do this is through religion, because it is a way to both explain the world and give people a sense of control and comfort. The unweaving of the rainbow done by Newton was a step that removed some of the mystery of perception and thereby removing a piece of the mystery of reality. The more we unweave the rainbow, unweave reality, through the exploration of the brain, the closer we will get to a point where mystery is gone, where perhaps we will fully understand how it is we think and perceive all of reality. At such a point the mystery of life will be lost. Therefore, I share the lament of John Keats towards Newton’s “unweaving of the rainbow” and fare forward, embracing future unweaving, yet not without losing myself in the rainbow from time to time.

An Interesting Website

Check it out:

http://www.mindhacks.com/

Perception Blog 7

Today I saw a commercial for a television show on The Science Channel called “When Senses Collide.” The advertisement began with a strange sentence and then followed by saying that for some individual this sentence tastes like an earwax and cheese sandwich (disgusting). The commercial continued by stating that there are people who can “taste colors” and “see music” etc. http://science.discovery.com/tv/senses-collide/senses-collide.html

 While watching the commercial I thought to myself that this was not entirely unbelievable and I wished to learn more. However, after further thought, I realized that the show must have been based on synesthesia, which is defined to be a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes sensation from another sense, such as hearing color. I remember discussing this condition a neuroscience class I took last year, however, in that class we simply discussed the condition in which synesthetic people would somehow perceive a color superimposed on all letters and numbers. We only briefly mentioned the idea of other senses being cross-hardwired such as taste and touch. What was especially interesting when first learning about synesthesia was that so very little is understood about what is different in the brain of a synesthetic person that leads to their incredibly different perception of the world.

The reason I mention the commercial for “When Senses Collide” and the condition of synesthesia is that, as I said, when I first watched the commercial for this show I felt as though I could relate to the same cross sense perception found in synesthetic people. Specifically I found that I could relate with the concept of hearing something and having it leave a “bad taste” in your mouth. Surely this is not nearly as extreme as the cross senses perception one has with synesthesia, but this very basic cross senses experience forces me to ask if perhaps the concept of one type of stimulation evoking sensation in another sense may not be as foreign as it would seem. I would argue that amongst the dense cross connections we have throughout specific areas of the brain and throughout the entire brain there are some cross connections of different senses leading to a slight synesthesia in all of us. A benefit of this, evolutionarily, would be simply that, as found with synesthetic people, having crossed senses is a good thing; it allows you to more deeply analyze a stimulus. The stimulus can be more deeply analyzed because now you are giving it qualities that transcend the qualities that it could be assigned from the basic sense that detect it. These thoughts have also led me to wonder again about the perception of different stimuli by people who are blind, deaf, or lack any of the main senses. Presuming that these people cannot see or hear etc. because of deficiencies in the perception organ and not in their brain, I wonder if they more commonly experience a synesthesia-like crossing of the sense with the sense that they no longer receive stimuli for. For example, would a deaf person have a slight visual sensation when hearing, touching, tasting etc., at least more so than you and me. And if that cross sensation is perhaps resulting from cortical plasticity and the expansion of the cortical regions used for “active” senses overlapping areas normally prescribed for their “inactive” sense. Either way, such synesthesia would allow, in theory, those handicapped individuals to better interpret the world around them by more thoroughly analyzing and perceiving their limited stimuli.

While it would be ridiculous to ask a person who has been blind all their life if they see a color when perceiving other senses (even though if anyone would it would probably be those who have always had such a handicap), one could ask someone who once could see but now cannot if, after living with the handicap for a long enough time, they notice that they are prescribing some sort of visual qualities to stimuli of the other senses. Such understanding could be essential for further exploration of synesthesia and the world of perception.

 

Perception Blog 6

Vision is a central aspect of life, however, the thought that what we “see” everyday is the world being analyzed by our brains, like a person looking at a picture, is incorrect. When we “see” we are not looking at a direct image of the world, instead the act of vision is nearly the opposite, it is focusing light, photons, on to our retinas and then taking the resulting stimuli and slowly with ganglia cells through the visual cortex creating an image which we then can analyze in our brains. The reason that it is difficult to think about the perception of light, vision, the way we think of all other senses is because vision alone is what we use to truly define an image of the world. When we smell scents and think of the processes of smelling something we can isolate the fact that the sense of smell is truly the perception of chemical stimuli in the nose. With vision, however, we foolishly choose to ignore the fact that it is the perceptionof light and focus entirely on vision being the analysis of an image, the true image, of the world. Indeed such an understanding is incorrect for the image itself is the perception of vision. Vision, the most complicated and obscured senses, provides nothing other than that picture-like image of the world. And what we believe to be vision is simply our frontal cortex’s higher thought processing of that image provided by vision: the retina through the visual cortex. By understanding this truth, one can more intimately unveil the secrets of vision and the complicated processes occurring when we sense patterns of photons of different intensities and frequencies and condense all those resulting stimuli into what truly appears to be simply a picture of the world. Therefore we must understand that this “image” of the world is created solely through our visual system and is not necessarily the only or even the true world. Yet by understanding how our visual system does create such an image via processes starting with ganglia cells in the retina to far more complicated analysis processes occurring in the visual cortex we can better understand how the true world is in a sense skewed by our brains when we attempt to “see.”

Perception Blog 5

Roger Carpenter said, “The eye is at once the master and slave of vision.” I do not know exactly what he meant by saying this. To dissect this statement, he first describes the eye as being the master of vision, meaning the perception of vision. Such a statement appears to be obviously correct. Truly we owe our ability to detect light, in the visual spectrum, at least initially to visions perceptive organ, the eye. The eye is the initial step in the mechanism of “vision.” However, for this reason the eye alone cannot be defined as the master of vision. The eye is purly they sight of initiation of vision; in fact, one could very easily argue that every nerve and cell necessary for the visual process / mechanism is the master of vision. Indeed many could further argue that the eye is perhaps the most expendable participant in the act of vision by referencing to current breakthroughs in both the understanding of the brain and technology that are allowing the blind to see again. Such technology is similar to a cochlear implant for the deaf in the sense that it bypasses the perceptive organ, in this case the eye, and stimulates either remaining receptor cells or, in more extreme cases, neurons in the visual cortex (For more examples see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4411591.stm , http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/606938.stm. In conclusion, while the statement that the eye is the master of vision seems intuitively correct, a deeper investigation into the mechanism of “vision” illustrates the eye’s near expend-ability when compared to more important aspects of the visual pathway, such as the visual cortex.

Roger Carpenter, after saying that the eye is the master of vision, finishes his paradoxical statment by contradicting himself and saying that the eye is at the same time the slave of vision. Analyzing this side of his statement, independent of the contradiction, I find myself confused and lacking an intuitive response, agree or disagree, that I had regarding the first half of his statement. The eye is “the slave of vision,” perhaps he is simply referring to the fact that we use our eyes to see and as a result they are the slaves of our vision. I do not like this interpretation and or thought of our eyes being the slaves of vision. I would more immediately say that if anything we are the slaves of our eyes with respect to vision, but as I argued earlier, that is not entirely the case. Therefore I feel forced to end this blog further questioning this concept of the eye being the slave of vision for I currently cannot make anymore progress in unveiling the meaning Roger Carpenter had behind this statement.

Perception blog 4

I find the perception of “vision” to be, if not the most important sense, the most interesting of the senses. This should not be surprising because humans rely greatly on vision when perceiving reality. One of the most interesting qualities of the perception of vision is how when perceiving the world through vision we believe we are directly interpreting an image of the world, like a camera. This thought that our brains are interpreting a “picture” of the world in our visual cortex, that has been provided by our retinas, is incorrect.

Many people, when learning about the process of visual perception, make the initial assumption that when an image of the world is flipped and focused on the back of your eye that that image is coded and sent to your visual cortex where you then interpret it as a picture. This is not entirely true. In fact, the function of perceiving vision is nearly the opposite of what most people think. Our eyes signal much less information of the world than we assume to our visual cortex and it is our cortex which then pieces it all together to form a picture of the world.

While difficult to explain these two theories, the main difference between the two theories is where the picture like image of the world is formed: in the eyes and then sent to the brain or in the brain compiled from smaller signals from the eyes.

The later of the two theories is the one I believe to be a more accurate description of the perception of vision. This concept of vision relies greatly on the brain’s ability to “compile” visual signals sent to the brain from the eyes into what we “perceive” to be a continuous image of the world. For this to happen the brain must make many assumptions that are based on our visual memory to form our image of the world. Visual illusions, ranging from a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat to seeing little black spots appear when looking at a grid of white and black boxes, help prove that truly the theory it is the brain and not the eyes that create our image of the world. Visual illusions are purely based on tricking our brains by taking advantage of the common assumptions it makes when compiling an image of sight. I hope that as we learn more about the visual perception that I can further piece together this understanding of how vision works and where this “image” of the world truly comes from.

Perception Blog 7

In class on Wednesday we discussed the theory of a face recognition site in the brain. We later found that people who are experts in distinguishing certain objects such as cars and birds lost that expertize and or use that same area of the brain when identifying such objects, along with faces. Therefore we redefined that area of the brain to be the “expertise” area of the brain arguing that humans, being an especially social mammal, must be experts in recognizing and identifying faces. I, however, believe that our new definition is not digging deep enough into the data presented on that region of the brain. I would argue that it is a place where, after being presented sets of stimuli with similar characteristics, we fuse the characteristics of an object together and understand the object as a whole. For example, when first presented with the stimulus of an image of a car one’s initial reaction would be to focus on the many different shapes, textures etc of the car. However, after being presented similar images of cars again and again you would eventually understand the basic layout of the complicated images of cars. At that point your analysis of the car’s image becomes less conscious and that is when the area of the brain we were discussing becomes active.

What I like about this theory is the idea of a less conscious, subconscious, analysis of an object such as a car. Proof of a possible subconscious action can be found when one tries to describe the specific physical qualities of a persons face. If you are to think of someone you know well, whose face you would easily recognize, you would find it difficult to describe the specific physical features, the intricacies of the face. I believe this to be true because, being experts of faces, we no longer focus on the sub-features of a face instead we take it in as a whole. Therefore, if we can recognize a face, yet we are not consciously remembering every little physical detail, we must be somehow subconsciously analyzing that face. I believe this would hold true to many bird and car experts; that they would at some point struggle to fully explain the physical differences between two birds or cars but rather have a deeper feel and recognition of these objects/animals.

As a quick side note, I mentioned in class that the images of flipped faces with either eyes or mouths that were not flipped and the fact that most people would say that those images seem truer than the completely flipped ones did not really support the thought that we just look at faces as a whole. Instead, I believe this phenomena would show how while we may indeed take faces in as a whole, we do (as social creatures) focus on very specific aspects of someones face for communication of words and emotions, such as the eyes and mouth. Therefore when we view a picture of an upside-down face, after we see a basic structure that implies the face is upside down we then focus on the eyes and mouth as we normally would. However, we do not flip these elements of the face with the rest of the face and are more drawn to the image where the mouth and eyes are right side up. I would like to know where brain activity is when one is given the choice to choose one of these two flipped images and if there is any in the earlier mentioned “expertise” area of the brain.

Perception blog 3

This week we finished our discussion on the olfactory system and began to discuss gustation. One of the key aspects of gustation that I found interesting was the concept of “taste,” and specifically what defines somethings “taste.” The answer appears obvious: taste is what your taste receptors recognize and are stimulated by and the taste of a specific food is simply the combination of taste sensory responses. However, as we talked about in class, this is not quite the case. Taste is not only the unique combination of bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and umami but also it is the temperature, shape, or even texture of the food you are eating. Today I had a very good experience that helped me reflect on this fact that taste is more than what is seen by gustation receptors. I had one of the best home made burgers I have had in a very long time. Besides the fact that it was “tasty” it was warm and was, while granular, tender and would melt in your mouth. Needless to say it was delicious so much so that I promised I would mention it in my blog. The point is that taste is a complicated property of food and is beyond what taste receptors perceive. Much like with touch many factors are involved in our understanding of what we eat, including texture, temperature, and shape. However, I am forced to ask, after defining “taste” as more than what gustation receptors detect and include what would be described as touch sensations, are these factors (which seem to be essential aspects of taste) integrated into the part of the brain that deals with “taste” or are these different entities of taste all dealt with independently in the brain such that taste is music for the mouth?