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The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correl… - Michael S. Gazzaniga
" "The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correlated with our mental lives. We use “consciousness” as shorthand to easily describe the functions of a multitude of inborn, instinctual mechanisms such as language, perception, and emotion. It becomes evident that consciousness is best understood as a complex instinct as well. All of us come with a bucketful of instincts. Our incessant thought pattern jumps around. We have feelings about one idea, then its opposite, then our family, then an itch, then a favorite tune, then the upcoming meeting, then the grocery list, then the irritating colleague, then the Red Sox, then … It goes on and on until we learn, almost against our natural being, to have a linear thought.
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About Michael S. Gazzaniga
Michael S. Gazzaniga (born December 12, 1939) is an American neuroscientist, author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Michael Steven Gazzaniga
Alternative Names:
Gazzaniga, M.S.
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M. S. Gazzaniga
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Michael S Gazzaniga
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Gazzaniga, Michael S.
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Additional quotes by Michael S. Gazzaniga
We live in the era of the “bottom line” mentality, with TED talks, sound bites, and news summaries. There is so much information to digest, we can only hope to grasp the world with compact and seemingly complete stories. We don’t want to be left dangling.
We are all suckers for this information diet, and we all have come to depend on it, just like we have all succumbed to the instant gratification of texting and cell phones. And yet what separates the dilettante from the sophisticate is the appreciation that everything is not simple. The trick seems to be able to talk clearly while remaining fully aware of the underlying complexity of any story. For me it is the overwhelming realization that when trying to figure out how the brain does its masterful trick of
enabling minds, we are barely at the starting line. Dig as deep as you want into human history: As long as there is a written record of thought, there is a record of humans wondering about the nature of life. It becomes obvious that all of us are just hopping into an ongoing conversation, not structuring one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Humans may have discovered some of the constraints on the thought processes, but we have not yet been able to tell the full story.
In order to know the actual location of the electron, a measurement must be made, and here is where the troubles begin for the die-hard determinists. Once a measurement is made, the quantum state is said to collapse, meaning that all the other possible states the electron could have been in (known as superpositions) have collapsed into one. All the other possibilities have been eliminated. The measurement, of course, was irreversible and had constrained the system by causing the collapse. Over the next couple of years physicists realized that neither the classical concept of “particle” nor that of “wave” could fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects at any one point in time. As Feynman quipped, “They don’t behave like a wave or like a particle, they behave quantum mechanically.”18
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