Life in the Universe

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http://hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65

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Free Will versus the Programmed Brain

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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain&sc=WR_20080826 People are starting to understand that a human being is just a collection of neurons. Things are determined. Humans are behaving as per how the brain works. Brain has 100 billion neurons and the complex connections help in the complex behaviour. Neurons are so big that there is no place for uncertainty principle or principles of quantum mechanics. Or could it be that the dendrites and axons are smaller than neurons that uncertainty principle may apply. I guess that even if that is true, it may not be the reason for the stable complex behaviour and free will. But overall I do believe that a human brain is a determined machine. Quantum uncertainty would not apply. At the same time, I would say that every human being is morally responsible for his own actions. Another way of saying this is that my brain is determined to say that "things are determined but I am morally responsible for my own actio...
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http://discovermagazine.com/2010/nov/15-the-brain-router-in-our-heads-processing-bottleneck/ Telford speculated, the brain needs time to reset itself after a pulse of thought before it can carry out another one. If we don’t have enough time between two tasks, we slow down on the second one—a lag known as the “ psychological refractory period .” Each time we perform a task we perform it in three steps. Step 1: Take in information from the senses. Step 2: Figure out what to do in response. Step 3: Carry out that plan by moving muscles. The mental activity that takes place in Step 2 includes some of the most sophisticated forms of thought we are capable of: weighing lots of information, thinking about our short-term and long-term goals, and figuring out how to meet them. But when we have any two simple decisions to make, we must wait for the first task to move through a bottleneck before taking on the second. Instead of carrying out many steps simultaneously, we have to do them one at a t...
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https://www.mindful.org/difference-between-being-and-doing/ " If we looked long enough, we would see that a limited number of core patterns of brain activity and interaction seem to crop up as recurring features in a wide variety of different mental activities. These core patterns reflect some basic “modes of mind.” " The basic strategy to achieve such goals involves something we call the “discrepancy monitor”: a process that continually monitors and evaluates our current situation against a model or standard—an idea of what is desired, required, expected, or feared." " But once the self becomes involved, it is much more difficult simply to let go of the goals we have set ." " the mind will not be fully tuned in to the full actuality of present experience. It will be so preoccupied with analyzing the past or anticipating the future that the present is given a low priority. In this case, we are only aware of the present in a very narrow sense: The o...
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