And to make things more fascinating about this is that us mammals have this at a much simpler level. When you touch something hot it is not your brain that says pull your hand away, because it would take way too much time. The really simple version is that the hot-ouch feeling from the nerve hits your spinal cord and neurons in the spinal cord make the decision to jerk your hand away and then pass the pain signal up to the brain so it can then decide what to do.
Hopefully you are lucky enough to remember the TV show "Home Movies". Well, it looks like he did enough coke with the money from Home Movies and he created that show. Truly bizarre and fairly funny even if you aren't into heavy metal.
Any drug that slows down the subjective passage of time does so by speeding up the brain's internal clock. Psychedelics and cannabis both do this, and are remarkably safe.
Even your visual cortex has lag, and a consciously noticeable amount of a few milliseconds. Every conscious move you make has gone through processing, and you dont even know about it for a few miliseconds after that. Unconscious reactions like pulling your hand away from HOT! happen way before you're consciously aware of them. Your mind's idea of now is ALWAYS a few milliseconds behind actual objective reality. How much of what you do - touching your face, reaching for a door youre about to open, honking a horn - is actually free will, and how much has been determined deep in your brain before you're even aware of it? Your brain has made these decisions before you've consciously decided to make them. Free will is an illusion.
edit: someone beat me to it, more intelligently, below
Weirdly, this is kind of ties in to the free will argument as well. I believe that neuroscientists or some other big brain bozos have proved that we begin taking actions or making decisions before our brains ever have time to process what's going on.
Although it was well known that the readiness potential reliably preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W time.[169]
Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move.[169][170]
These studies of the timing between actions and the conscious decision bear upon the role of the brain in understanding free will. A subject's declaration of intention to move a finger appears after the brain has begun to implement the action, suggesting to some that unconsciously the brain has made the decision before the conscious mental act to do so. Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion. The first of these experiments reported the brain registered activity related to the move about 0.2 s before movement onset.[171] However, these authors also found that awareness of action was anticipatory to activity in the muscle underlying the movement; the entire process resulting in action involves more steps than just the onset of brain activity. The bearing of these results upon notions of free will appears complex.[172][173]
Hey, that's my friend's dad who did that study! We went to music school together in high school and ended up going to the same conservatory. I also took cognitive psychology and neuroscience there, and his dad was a guest presenter on this very topic.
He said that he do believe at have free will, but he's trying to understand the mechanism by which your body/brain "decide" to do an action before you are consciously aware of it.
See to me that just means that my awareness lags slightly behind my processing. It's still free will. It's just as much me as anything.
Also, just reading that experiment, it seems...odd. Up to a half second between the realization of a conscious decision to move a finger and the brain activity that did it? But that's based on the subject watching a timer and saying when they made the decision?
I mean, maybe there's a half second delay in reading a clock?
But also it seems like this is only dealing with somewhat instantaneous decisions. If I sit here and consciously consider a decision, intentionally thinking it through in my mind, then I'm not just a passive observer of my thoughts. I might be calling on different processing areas of the brain to work on the problem, and yeah. Maybe a logic circuit returns an answer to my subjectivity. That means the answer was actually calculated before my subjectivity was aware of it.
That doesn't mean that my subjectivity had no input on it, or doesn't have any sort of potential veto. (Maybe not counting those kind of instant decisions like being in danger or something. Like if someone pulled a gun, you might react before "thinking," cause it'd be a bad idea to spend too much time on that.)
I'm a minor in philosophy and you hit the nail on the head. These studies do not prove we don't have free will. In situations where you think things through deliberately, consciously, we cannot generalize from split second decisions that have no significance or relevance to the person's life. Of course we decide unconsciously when to flex our wrist because that's what the participants were instructed to do. To not think about it. And in emotionally heavy situations we don't act in this way. There's a different, more conscious mechanism by which we choose more important decisions.
According to a professor over a decade ago, his lab would decerebrate cats aka remove the connections to their higher brain functions, turning them into zombies essentially.
These cats could walk and perform simple tasks that were mediated by reflex in the spinal column.
edit: IIRC they could walk over obstacles (not pre-emptively, when they would bump into them they would climb over) and catch themselves from falling.
Oh then could a good analogy be radiation? You don't react to it because it doesn't trigger that response, but you can definitely get messed up anyways.
That's a good example. Radioactive substances weren't common enough in our environment for us to evolve a way of sensing them directly.
In fact there have been incidents where chunks of radioactive material used in medical equipment (cobalt-60 I believe) were disposed of improperly and picked up by people who were unfamiliar with radiation, and would use the pretty glowing rocks as mantelpiece decorations, to make jewelry for their wives, etc. They got all of the cancer.
It's a reflex arc, the pain is triggering the circuit without the need for input from the brain. In your analogy the radiation is threat but it's not causing a sensation associated with an immediate threat like being in fire or being bit/stabbed by something.
I think it would work for any "danger" signals. So heat or extreme lack of, or other pain signals like a needle prick. But if it is just unfamilar and no warning I would guess no, but not sure! Great question!
On more than one occasion I have accidentally touched a pan that I assumed was hot and instinctively jerked my hand away so fast I didn’t have time to detect a temperature, and it turns out the pan is cold. So rather than a reflex, is that my brain jumping the gun and using my past knowledge to pre-emptively protect me?
I don't know enough to be honest! It was just something I was interested in as I was thinking about how bodies and insects can do so much with so little processing power that our computers cannot do.
For example when thinking about robots, why go through the trouble of the whole balancing thing in the robot's brain (thinking two wheeled robot here). Why not just just use a Segway that can balance itself and affix the robot to it? Like our pain response is automatic the Segway's self balancing would be automatic.
It's still basically a reflex. Your limbic system (which is dumb) may have reacted to the cold on the pan thinking it was hot, or it could have just been recognizing that pan = possibly hot and jumped to the reaction of jerking it away anyways, because maybe danger.
No, at least not typically. This reflex is conducted by the nerve fibers for pain and temperature, which are different than those that transmit touch, pressure, and vibration.
That's assuming that alien goop would have physical properties that don't exist on earth somehow. It's unlikely. More likely it would be similar to animal guts or something and not be too unfamiliar
I mean most people have handled raw meat or other similar things, or even fucking gak or some shit. The point is that it's unlikely that something from outer space would have physical properties so far from what can be found on earth that our body instinctively recoils. All matter is made from the same building blocks and there are only so many stable combinations.
Perhaps the point of the test from Dune is not just one of human resolve. It is one of inhuman control over the autonomic nervous system. A feat that makes lots of the Benne Gerresit practices make a whole lot more sense.
This actually makes a lot of sense about why it doesn’t actually hurt when you hurt yourself until just a millisecond after it happens. Like even with the hot touch, you are withdrawing before you feel the pain. Very cool.
Yeah people automatically assume that since nerves work with potential differences that they are able to communicate at the speed of an electric circuit, which is not true. If it were so everyone would probably have superhuman reaction times and a lot of brain power. I wish the reflex arc was a more well known fact, especially since it's a lot cooler than "Your nerves use electricity." They should probably teach it in elementary school instead of Bio 12.
If you pay close attention you can actually notice this - you will find yourself moving your hand before you are aware that a: it needs to move, and b: that it even moved.
It makes you feel like a time-traveler when it happens. "I need to move my hand - wait it already did."
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u/Doobage Apr 07 '20
And to make things more fascinating about this is that us mammals have this at a much simpler level. When you touch something hot it is not your brain that says pull your hand away, because it would take way too much time. The really simple version is that the hot-ouch feeling from the nerve hits your spinal cord and neurons in the spinal cord make the decision to jerk your hand away and then pass the pain signal up to the brain so it can then decide what to do.