My presentation on the #neuroscience of decision-making and #freewill in Vienna this past month:
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@brembs Quick question, Bjorn: is it your position that every emission of an operant is the result of a "decision"? Also...do you really want to say that "circuits make decisions"?
Thanks,
Glen
@gmsizemore
I think I have about 10 slides or so at the beginning that I thought would help get people warmed up to the idea that there are many different cases of decisions and that some would question whether some even would be decisions. Ah well...
@brembshttps://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/philosophical-foundations-of-neuroscience/
"Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes sense to say 'it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.' (Philosophical Investigations, § 281)."
"To attribute such capacities to brains is to commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as “the mereological fallacy”, that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes that are properties of the whole being."
@gmsizemore
Let's think of a leech in a pond. It's stationary, but from one moment to the next, it swims to a different place, without any external stimuli having changed.
A little later, I catch the leech and dissect its nervous system. In the dish, the isolated nervous system again produces the same swimming pattern and then stops. In the dish without sensory organs, there can be no stimuli:
https://youtu.be/-DmH3NxnUvM?si=zhe2YWAf2p_2Tam4
What do you call the identical neural processes in both cases?
@brembs "Spontaneous behavior," is what I call the _behavior_ - but NOT the neural activity. That is the same thing I call the movements that Victor Hamburger measured. Why? What do you call them? Let me guess..."a decision."
There would be a basis to call the animal's _behavior_ "a decision" because one can easily imagine that term being emitted in ordinary language, the arbiter of meaning; "Oh look! It just _decides_ to move!"
@brembs It would be mereological misconduct, however, to call some portion of the physiology "a decision." And I would add that "make a decision" is a description of behavior, not its cause. "Decisions" and "choices" are dependent-variables.
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