RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE :

A New Thinking Emerges About Consciousness : Descartes Notwithstanding, Some Neuroscientists Find the Answer in Chemistry, Not Philosophy (Shankar Vedantam, May 20, 2002, Washington Post)

The feeling you have as you read this sentence, [Harvard professor Daniel] Wegner argues, is an illusion pulled off by a complex machine in your skull. It not only reads and understands this sentence, he says, but also makes you feel as if you have experienced the reading of the sentence. In other words, the brain, not content with being a remarkably complex machine, also convinces itself that it isn't a machine at all.

But why would it bother? The brain, Wegner contends, produces consciousness to give itself a feeling of having done something. This feeling helps the brain recognize similar situations when they arise -- the next article in the newspaper, for instance. Being aware of its actions, the brain-machine can better decide whether to read another article.

"When you drive to work, you don't feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, 'I'm going to get up and go to work,' " Wegner said in an interview.

"We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain."

Wegner cites numerous examples to show that intentions and actions are produced by different mechanisms in the brain -- while they are timed to occur simultaneously, they sometimes don't. During hypnosis, for instance, people's bodies act apparently without their will. Yet their movements are still produced by their brains, suggesting that conscious intention doesn't always precede action.

Other experiments have shown that people are not aware of most brain activity. Until they focused on it, for example, most readers would not be conscious that they were stringing together the words in this sentence, applying the laws of grammar and extracting meaning. Wegner says the relationship between conscious will and action is like that of a magician's wand and the rabbit he pulls out of a hat -- it only seems as if the wand made the rabbit appear.

These views--of man as merely a complex machine, or as merely a bundle of pre-programmed survivalist impulses, with no free will--may be perfectly good science, but they are also repellant and anti-human. If this is where science and reason lead us, why follow? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 22, 2002 7:53 AM