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Title: Raymond Tallis - Free Will and the Brain
Added: Jan 1, 2008
Author: ForaTv
Duration: 7:3
Description:
Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2007/10/28/Battle_of_Ideas_My_Brain_Made_Me_Do_ItBritish gerontologist, author and cultural critic Raymond Tallis addresses questions regarding free will and the brain.-----"Battle of Ideas: My Brain Made Me Do It" at the 2007 Battle of Ideas conference hosted by the Institute of Ideas.With the politics of behaviour in the ascendancy, there is increasing interest in what science can tell us about why people behave the way they do. The British government is funding the creation of the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners, with the express aim of training a 'parenting workforce' to provide science-based child-rearing advice to parents. In the USA, the MRI scanner and the neuroscientific community are entering the court room to give evidence about whether defendants can be regarded as being responsible for their alleged crimes. UK policymakers cite scientific 'evidence' to explain new interventions on everything from early years' education to the alleged impact of school dinners on academic performance. The science of nutrition now informs earnest discussions about how children's diets improve their classroom behaviour, in order to justify policing lunchboxes and putting school meals at the top of the political agenda. Studies of teenage brain development now regularly inform social debates about the impact of new technologies on young people.But how much can science tell us about behaviour? Do scientific findings justify the government's many interventions into the early years of children's lives? Should neuroscience enjoy an exalted place in the courtroom? Are policies being developed because of genuine advances in scientific knowledge - or is science being (mis)used, perhaps in the place of political conviction, to justify policies? - IoIRaymond Tallis was trained at the University of Oxford and St Thomas's Hospital, qualifying in 1970. He was a Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford (1987-2006). Outside his medical career, he has been awarded two honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon Causa) from the University of Hull in 1997; and LittD (Hon Causa) from the University of Manchester in 2002. In 2004 he was identified in Prospect magazine as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the United Kingdom.His numerous medical publications include two major textbooks, while most of his research publications are in the field of neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation. He has also published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and over a dozen books and 150 articles on the philosophy of the mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism.
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Channel: News
Tags: philosophy philosophers logic neurology neuroscience brain biology thoughts ideas free will freedom crime criminals fora.tv foratv fora tv
philosophy philosophers logic neurology neuroscience brain biology thoughts ideas free will freedom crime criminals fora.tv foratv fora tv
Youtube Comments: 300
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - The only reason that people DO NOT argue "the house is ITS foundations" is because People are NOT Houses. Everything else just follows. I know you'll argue "houses don't have conciousness", "houses do not have a soul" but then consider a person in deep vegetative coma, then tell me why should we think he will regain all his faculties and knowledge intact in his *soul* when he dies? People think about their thoughts, that's the concious "illusion".
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - Figure speech or not, people think this two are separate and almost not related or part of the same reality. AND IT IS OK FOR THEM TO SEE THAT WAY. The big time fail of modern physics is we haven't been able to cope with this reality and so find ways to better explain it than -well- Quantum physics. Science is NOT a complete omniscient discipline. It is also a common misconcept to think subatomic particles "come in and out of existence" just because we have limited...
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - ...means to meassure and track their position or mommentum and their energy given the queer *world* they thrive in.Where queer is NOT random. Quantum Physics DOES NOT show any evidence in favor of randomness in the universe, even more it supports the idea of a basic state of matter where uncaused events are Impossible... Vg; a subatomic particle CANNOT and will not turn into a Giraff, nor do anything any more "random" than -well- vanish from our sight...
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - .. and that again is given our understanding and how far we san SEE today. If you think about it, it is even as it almost had to be that way AT THIS scale, in order for IT to have a total and absolute start point, where randomness is at best obsolete to put the bigger machine at work. You cannot -with todays technology- predict exactly where every little spark of lit fuel will go when you turn the key on your car, but it is a fact everything that happens from there on is
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - .. set to happen and it will in very specific ways. That's determinism. and more important, THE LOGIC behind EVERYTHING we ever discover is deterministic, even if the whole world was not we could do nothing better but to live in a deterministic scene, or resign to reason.
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - ... just a piece of advice... "never" state things such as your quote "Scientist can NEVER precisely calculate... yada yada.." Science is an ongoing thing, it might very well be they ALREADY are able to do this and you don't even know about it. It seems people put their empathy in this subject and rush to conclussions, is almost as if they felt betrayed by their brains telling them "yeap, you are me, nothing more" "yeap I am matter, nothing more".
JustMereArt Says:
Dec 22, 2011 - Does that not strike you as something of a double standard? On one hand, you're asserting that free will is an illusion because our intuition of it is contradicted by the logic -- but, on the other, you're asserting that randomness may be an illusion because the logic of it is contradicted by our intuition. To quote Prof. Brian Cox, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is "one of the most famously misunderstood and misrepresented parts of quantum theory." [cont'd]
JustMereArt Says:
Dec 22, 2011 - The principle is derived from a fundamental equation; it is not the consequence of practical matters.Furthermore, the laws of QM apply to everything. Theoretically, a planet could vanish in the same way that electrons do. But its mass makes this so incredibly unlikely that we don't even consider it a possibility. So, even the macroscopic fails to be deterministic.
JustMereArt Says:
Dec 22, 2011 - Also, are you getting your definition of "random" from the Mighty Boosh? An electron doesn't have to be able to "turn into a Giraff" to qualify as acting randomly. It just has to have more than one possible future available to it at some point. I'm simply defining "random" as "not completely determined."
JustMereArt Says:
Dec 22, 2011 - What? No. Why would you even expect me to argue that?My point is that, just because the functioning brain is a necessary condition for the mind, doesn't mean that it is the mind. Agreed, I think it probably is - but we need to understand how consciousness can exist before we make this conclusion.This doesn't entail me suggesting a "soul with knowledge" or anything like that, just an un-physical aspect of a human being.
servant714 Says:
Dec 24, 2011 - this man is one of the most honest scientists I have ever seen, too many scientists today act like journalists, they take a few meaningless facts and create a whole story from it. Science is wandering dangerously into fiction, let's stick to the facts and to hell with public opinion.
AtticusAmericanus Says:
Dec 29, 2011 - I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
AtticusAmericanus Says:
Dec 29, 2011 - I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
DrErkencho Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - Well.. yeah... just as "un-physical" (whatever that *really* means) as the *mind* of my laptop right now.The fact we are far more complex and capable of "perceiving" the thinking process as it unfolds from within ourselves thru different stages DOES NOT imply an "un-physical" --- anything. As said before, it's been researched, and tested, so far all we can say is consciousness is just a *trick* of a region of our brain thinking -about- our thoughts, all the time.
DrErkencho Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - No double standard at all!! - ok let's pin it one by one -BTW nice debate ;)- Free will is an illussion because as far as we can understand it we have to come to this conclussion or resign to Physics as we know it and, well- we do not have an alternative model -for starters-, also the idea of free will being something of that nature is perfectly compatible with Occam's Razor and DOES NOT entail we cease to act as we do and will, it is a delussion that we CANNOT escape.
DrErkencho Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - About our intuition, IT is part of a Physical process as well, it is NOT a bi-product of reality that sits on any higher level. Point made, it is our intuition -thru our reasoning- that needs to shift to the correct, more complete, and more representative scheme of what's attempting to mirror. Our "intuition" is a product of evolution, and we did not evolve looking at quantum fluctuations and the sub-atomic mayhem, so it is of little use *at that level*, right now.
DrErkencho Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - Finally, you are placing the carriage before the horses. Intuition likely came first, before, logic; just as a natural evolutionary advantage, but as soon as the structures of logic took place in our brains and proved further more effective than intuition, they expanded and "took over". Most animals live by intuitive thinking, we humans DON'T, we are logical, and logic is obviously superior to basic intuition, it enables us to perceive our "fabric" and that of nature.
JustMereArt Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - Well, okay, consciousness is a trick. But who is it tricking? There has to be a 'self', which is the subject of the illusion. To say otherwise is to disagree with 'Cogito Ergo Sum.'I simply meant "un-physical" as in "unable to be explained by physics." You make a good point though; something could be un-physical by this definition because it's unable to be explained by physics yet.
JustMereArt Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - But I was accusing you of a double standard because, in some cases, you placed logic over intuition - in others, you did the opposite.You suggest "resigning to physics as we know it" but, to do that 100 years ago would be to disregard all of quantum mechanics as illusory. And, yeah, but Occam's Razor is starting to look more like a chainsaw. Rolling a dice twice, getting two 6s and declaring that the dice is loaded is compatible with (and favoured by) Occam's Razor.
JustMereArt Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - That's true. I rather like Sam Harris's quote that "the illusion of free will is itself an illusion." It's like being told you're in a dream; you can contemplate it and accept it - but then a freight train comes crashing through the walls and the illusion becomes true again. I wouldn't call it a "delusion" though. "Delusion" implies something that has negative consequences.
JustMereArt Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - Yeah, I know all this. We probably agree on a lot more things than you realise. I'm an atheist, determinist, UCL student - I'm just applying my empiricism very rigorously. Your arguments would be improved if you assumed more from your opponent.Don't take any of my disagreement personally btw. It's great to be debating with somebody who clearly has a real passion for it. It's just that these conversations tend to be fuelled by a kind of academic pugnacity...
JustMereArt Says:
Jan 2, 2012 - No, I'm not. I know intuition came first. Actually, this is one of Tallis's arguments against the mind being a computer. The human mind judges most activity by qualia; its logical faculties are pretty small. However, a computer masters mathematics long before it 'feels' anything (if they're even able to.)
HedgehogRebellion Says:
Mar 31, 2012 - LUCK-->DNA-->BRAIN-->Personality-->Decisions-->LIFEIf you do not understand this...then you need serious help.
undusklabe Says:
Apr 7, 2012 - cool!!!
DrErkencho Says:
Dec 20, 2011 - ... determinism still rules the macro Cosmos and that is a demonstrable fact. The fact is we simply cannot tell what 'will be' based on the billions of posible outcomes. It's simply not possible to do with the entire universe as a probe, but CAN and has been done thousands of times at smaller scales. And even more, to your surprise Quantum physics enables determinism more than it ever denies it, determinism is routed at the core of reason for starters...