Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

You would not infer causality at all. Not only do you not infer that your neighbor is angry because you left the gate open and her dog got out, you don’t infer that the dog got out because you left the gate open. You don’t infer that the car won’t start because you left the radio on. While you would be good at spatial relations, you would not grasp the causes and effects described by physics. You will not infer any unobserved causal forces, whether they be gravitational or spiritual. For example, you would not infer that a ball moved because a force was transferred to it when it was hit by another, yet because of your inability to draw inferences, you would do better in Vegas at the gaming tables. You would bet with the house and not try to infer any causal relationship between winning and losing other than chance. No lucky tie or socks or tilt of the head. You would not string out some cockamamy story about why you did something or felt some way, not because you aren’t capable of language, but again because you don’t infer cause and effect. You won’t be a hypocrite and rationalize your actions. You would also not infer the gist of anything, but would take everything literally. You would have no understanding of metaphors or abstract ideas. Without inference you would be free of prejudice, yet not inferring cause and effect would make learning more difficult. What processing comes bubbling up in your separate hemispheres determines what the contents of that hemisphere’s conscious experience will be.

How come the left brain doesn’t complain about the fact that it is no longer conscious of things on the left side of space? Imagine having your brain disconnected. Imagine waking up in your hospital room the next morning and, as your surgeon walks in to see how you are faring, you only see the left half of her face. Don’t you think you would notice that the right half is not there? The thing is, you would not. In fact, your left hemisphere wouldn’t even be conscious of the fact that there is a left half of space. But this is the weird part: I spoke as if the new, split version of you were just your left hemisphere, and that is not true. You are also your right hemisphere. The new “yous” have two minds with two completely separate pools of perceptual and cognitive information. It is just that only one of the minds can readily speak. The other initially cannot. Perhaps, after many years, it will be able to produce a few words.

During replication, those nucleotides are read and translated into linear strings of amino acids (which make up enzymes and proteins) by a rule-governed process. The set of rules is called the genetic code. The DNA contains the sequence, but the code is implemented by RNA molecules. Certain DNA sequences, called codons, which are made up of three nucleotides, symbolize certain amino acid sequences. There is no ambiguity, but there is also not just one codon for each amino acid. For example, six different codons symbolize arginine, but only one codon symbolizes tryptophan. But the components of the DNA sequence (the symbol) do not resemble the components of the amino acid sequence (its meaning), just as the words that symbolize the components of a recipe do not resemble the components themselves.

Libet has provided us with an intriguing possible mechanism for explaining why we think we are doing in real time things that we have in fact already done.

Crawford concludes that Homo sapiens could not have evolved on the savannas but instead were holed up at the beach, gathering along the shoreline.

Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left hemisphere’s unrelenting quest to explain these bits and pieces that have popped into consciousness. Notice that popped is in the past tense. This is a post hoc rationalization process. The interpreter that weaves our story only weaves what makes it into consciousness. Because consciousness is a slow process, whatever has made it to consciousness has already happened. It is a fait accompli. As we saw in my story at the beginning of the chapter, I had already jumped before I realized whether I had seen a snake or if it was the wind rustling the grass. What does it mean that we build our theories about ourselves after the fact? How much of the time are we confabulating, giving a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true? This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism

Nagel states that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.” “Like” does not mean “resemble,” such as in the question “What is ice skating like? Is it like roller skating?” Instead, it concerns the subjective qualitative feel of the experience, that is, what it feels like for the subject: “What is ice skating like for you?” (For instance, is it exhilarating?) Nagel called this the “subjective character of experience.” It has also been called “phenomenal consciousness,” and, although he doesn’t say it, it is also referred to as qualia.

This incessant interplay between cognition and feelings, which is to say between cortical and subcortical modules, produces what we call consciousness.

Science results from a profoundly social process. The common portrayal — that science emerges from a solitary isolated genius, always laboring alone, not owing anything to anyone — is simply wrong.

I am not suggesting that single cells are conscious. I am suggesting that they may have some type of processing that is necessary or similar to the processing that results in conscious experience.

Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?

Evolutionary theories allowed materialist theories of consciousness to come in two flavors: emergentism and panpsychism. The former proposes that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter once that matter achieves a certain level of complexity or organization. Sperry was leaning heavily in this direction. The latter, panpsychism, tosses the whole problem out by suggesting that all matter has subjective consciousness, albeit in a wide range of types. The idea here is that there is no need for the idea of emergence and complexity to explain consciousness. Consciousness is a primordial feature of all things, from rocks to ants to us.

some types of neurons may be found only in specific species.

chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.

The classic example from biology is the huge, towerlike structure that is built by some ant and termite species. These structures only emerge when the ant colony reaches a certain size (more is different) and could never be predicted by studying the behavior of single insects in small colonies.