This particular throwback doesn’t really ‘throw us back’ too far. It’s from Issue 90 and it’s a column from Barney, in which he talks about science, the brain and crashing – not in that order.
This content is exclusive for Premier users.
If you are a Subscriber log in.
Subscriptions start from just £1.99
Fascinating. In the same vein… I was a pretty hardcore (tho not particularly good) rock climber in my youth, & I often experienced something similar around falling off – in my perception of the event I **knew** when I was about to fall off anywhere up to maybe a second before the actual fall, & was always utterly cool about it (as opposed to times when I was right on the edge but didn’t fall, when my perception was that I was scared rigid). This fits Libet’s model rather neatly; my conscious mind only found out about the fall half a second or so after it happened & I had already survived, so “knew” in advance of my conscious perception that I would fall but it would be OK (because the conscious mind was still functioning to process potentially, but not actually, fatal experiences that had already occurred).
I don’t think this necessarily knocks out any idea of free will tho, coz I still have complete freedom where the decisions don’t have to be made instantaneously (so, nearly all the time then…).
There’s a nice philosophical argument around whether it’s ever going to be possible for anything as simple as a human brain to fully comprehend the workings of something as complex as a human brain. But let’s leave that for another day.
The idea that the brain is too complicated for something like the brain to understand is a fallacy – from a reductionist viewpoint, anyway. Thousands and thousands of people can understand small components of the brain in extreme complexity – the issue is the infrastructure (technological and cultural) required to render that knowledge accessible. The (perhaps secondary) issue is that phemonema such as consciousness are emergent properties of neuronal systems, and as such don’t lend themselves to reductionist study particularly well. All you can do is look for clues and try to reconstruct. But it’s going to be a fun bicker for a decade or two yet 🙂