{"id":25894,"date":"2015-01-20T01:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T06:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25894"},"modified":"2015-01-16T20:34:18","modified_gmt":"2015-01-17T01:34:18","slug":"qotd-neuroscientific-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/20\/qotd-neuroscientific-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Neuroscientific claims"},"content":{"rendered":"

One last futurological, land-grabbing fad of the moment remains to be dealt with: neuroscience. It is certainly true that scanners, nanoprobes and supercomputers seem to be offering us a way to invade human consciousness, the final frontier of the scientific enterprise. Unfortunately, those leading us across this frontier are dangerously unclear about the meaning of the word \u201cscientific\u201d.<\/p>\n

Neuroscientists now routinely make claims that are far beyond their competence, often prefaced by the words \u201cWe have found that …\u201d The two most common of these claims are that the conscious self is a illusion and there is no such thing as free will. \u201cAs a neuroscientist,\u201d Professor Patrick Haggard of University College London has said, \u201cyou\u2019ve got to be a determinist. There are physical laws, which the electrical and chemical events in the brain obey. Under identical circumstances, you couldn\u2019t have done otherwise; there\u2019s no \u2018I\u2019 which can say \u2018I want to do otherwise\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first of these claims is easily dismissed \u2013 if the self is an illusion, who is being deluded? The second has not been established scientifically \u2013 all the evidence on which the claim is made is either dubious or misinterpreted \u2013 nor could it be established, because none of the scientists seems to be fully aware of the complexities of definition involved. In any case, the self and free will are foundational elements of all our discourse and that includes science. Eliminate them from your life if you like but, by doing so, you place yourself outside human society. You will, if you are serious about this displacement, not be understood. You will, in short, be a zombie.<\/p>\n

Bryan Appleyard, “Why futurologists are always wrong \u2013 and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians: From predicting AI within 20 years to mass-starvation in the 1970s, those who foretell the future often come close to doomsday preachers”, New Statesman<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One last futurological, land-grabbing fad of the moment remains to be dealt with: neuroscience. It is certainly true that scanners, nanoprobes and supercomputers seem to be offering us a way to invade human consciousness, the final frontier of the scientific enterprise. Unfortunately, those leading us across this frontier are dangerously unclear about the meaning of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41,16],"tags":[686,39,810],"class_list":["post-25894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","category-science","tag-futurism","tag-junkscience","tag-skepticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6JE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25894"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25896,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25894\/revisions\/25896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}