[lit-ideas] Re: BBC NEWS | Health | Brain scan 'can read your mind'
- From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:32:55 -0600
Ursula Stange wrote:
A student in my first year phil class wrote the following in response
to the brain scan story...
-----------------------------------
I love the metaphysical implications of this sort of thing! If fMRI's
are really able to show that action preceeds thought (Matti has
brought this up in Systems and Theories in Psychology this year)then
the logical result is that thought, as we perceive it, is really a
byproduct of behavior. Put another way, thought (the (meta) conscious
variety)is merely a reflex that we are able to perceive after the
fact. Yikes! Could the hard determinists and the behaviorists be right!
Let's look at it another way: "We" think with our whole being. "We"
decide to do something. We start doing it, but we need some kind of
record of what we have decided,so we make a "snapshot" of the decision
that gets sent to the part of us that remembers stuff, the part we're
here calling the "conscious" mind. That's of course only a small part
of us; "we" are deciding things all the time that involve all of these
elements. The role of the "conscious" mind (the part that remembers the
decision, the part that we mistakenly think is thinking it before the
decision) is to record it so that when we look back at it later, we can
tell if it was a good decision or not.
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