Predicting the Will

Interesting Peice from Scientific American on the prediction of will:


Neuroscience supports this belief. The late physiologist Benjamin Libet noted in EEG readings of subjects engaged in a task requiring them to press a button when they felt like it that half a second before the decision was consciously made the brain's motor cortex lit up. Research has extended the time between subcortical brain activation and conscious awareness to a full seven to 10 seconds. A new study found activity in a tiny clump of 256 neurons that enabled scientists to predict with 80 percent accuracy which choice a subject would make before the person himself knew. Very likely, just before I became consciously aware of my menu selections, part of my brain had already made those choices. “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control,” Harris concludes. “We do not have the freedom we think we have.”


Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-free-will-collides-with-unconscious-impulses
Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/C2CAA889-979E-BACC-B8467A9CA1C4FA51_1.jpg

Simulating Life

I just posted the page above, The Problem of Consciousness, and then a thought occurred after reading an article published on the NY Times website.  They announced that an organism has been simulated for the first time by software.
If consciousness is the software running on the hardware of the neuronal firings in the brain as the hardware, then could software that has inputs and outputs to the external world and programed to experience emotion, be created that includes a subjective I-natured consciousness?  If so, and there is no way to tell either way (see the post on consciousness on the tabs at the top of the Home page), but it does generate some interesting questions on the inherent potential for consciousness in the raw materiels permeating the universe.
If we are conscious 'meat-machines' then why can we not create something similar from scratch, or even in a simulator?  Why can we not play God?
I am going to Publish han entire Page with Dan Dennett's 'Where Am I' to show the philosophical implications of recreating and redistributing consciousness, and what it means to be awake.

Here is an excerpt from NY Times article listed in the sources at the bottom of the page.  This is an amazing feat, and as technology and science continue to advance, perhaps one day neuroscience and philosophy will tread common ground...

"STANFORD, Calif. — Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.....

...The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out complete experiments without the need for traditional instruments.

For medical researchers and drug designers, cellular models will be able to supplant experiments during the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new understanding of basic biological principles.

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a “first draft” but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail — in this case, all of its 525 genes.
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Marshall

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/science/in-a-first-an-entire-organism-is-simulated-by-software.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Hello World

Hello.  This is the first post in this blog, and I want to start into some science and philosophy!  I created this site for everyone to come and discuss with me that which we can not due to time and geographical constraints.  Please feel free to start a topic, and please post on others!

marshall