Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

Our brains renew themselves throughout life to an extent previously thought not possible.

Baruch Spinoza, who said, “There is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity.

I will argue that consciousness is not a thing. “Consciousness” is the word we use to describe the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism. That is why “consciousness” is a proxy word for how a complex living organism operates. And, to understand how complex organisms work, we need to know how brains’ parts are organized to deliver conscious experience as we know it.

24 It is worthwhile to take a moment to understand the difference between a structural and a functional network. “Structure” refers simply to the physical anatomy of a network: how many neurons, how they are arranged, their shape, and so forth. A functional network performs a certain function; it may have to do with speaking language, or it may have to do with understanding language. Importantly, the structure of a network does not reveal its function, or vice versa.

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

John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet’s experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness! The brain has acted before its person is conscious of it. Not only that, from looking at the scan, they can make a prediction about what the person is going to do. The implications of this are rather staggering.

Consciousness is not the product of a special network that enables all of our mental events to be conscious. Instead, each mental event is managed by brain modules that possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results of their processing. The results bubble up from various modules like bubbles in a boiling pot of water. Bubble after bubble, each the end result of a module’s or a group of modules’ processing, pops up and bursts forth for a moment, only to be replaced by others in a constant dynamic motion. Those single bursts of processing parade one after another, seamlessly linked by time. (This metaphor is limited to bubbles roiling up at a rate of twelve frames a second or faster; or consider a cartoon flip book, where the faster we snap the pages, the more continuous the movements of the characters appear.)

Chaos doesn’t mean that the system is behaving randomly, it means that it is unpredictable because it has many variables, it is too complex to measure, and even if it could be measured, theoretically the measurement cannot be done accurately and the tiniest inaccuracy would change the end result an enormous amount.

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.

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.