We still play basketball with a ball, we still play baseball with bats, we will still be playing games with keyboard/mouse :)

Dunno man, Cyborgs, just became real :))

Found a book you should love :D

Wonder how much lag there is from the brain to the fingers. But what excites me most about these things is the introspective ability to see various processes underlying our own thinking in realtime.

Like imagine how much actors improved with invention of the mirror and recording. Now we can maybe get that mirror effect with some of our own thoughts - instant feedback makes new thinking possible :D

In fact, some may claim that this mirror effect is one of the key things that makes consciousness special in relation to other processes in the brain.

If so, the concept of mirror and instant feedback is extremely important, and so it's not - on the face of it - impossible that a new level of thinking is reached each time we adapt to another layer of instant feedback.

Other people work as instant feedback, but more internally, language in all its forms lets us externalize our own thoughts. So maybe we can spawn a new kind of language with this extra type of self-reflexive relation to ourselves.

What do you think?

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Interesting, i know there are countless of possibilities with this technology.I think it would be extremely interesting, if the computer could log and interpret our thoughts via images(paint program) and text. In my opinion one of the hardest things to do is, putting thoughts into words. I feel like sometimes a single thought is so amazing, that a whole book could be written and it still wouldnt do it justice.
This would enable us to look and analyze our thoughts more objectively. Since emotions warps the meaning in real-time( usually )

Cool book btw: :) anything with the word anomaly, interests me :D

yeah, or even words "steal" the thought from us, constructing it in a particular way.

i tried yesterday to observe the thought as pre-articulate. we have this sense of what we are thinking, before we think it, but while thinking it, words crowd the mind and make it determinate.

without these wonderful languages we have developed thought would surely be base and primitive, but it is also true - it seems to me - that our current languages limits us very much :\

i admire artists very much because often they find this limitation too much to bear and so at least go on to non-standard forms of communication, and at the limit even breach and develop new forms.

that book i think tries to do this with a kind of fiction that aims at refiguring the way we think to ourselves and speak about situations in the world. also includes occult numerology etc. lol :D

anomaly is a great word. i take it you've exhausted fusion anomaly. an article taking the position "anomalous monism" was the first philosophical aritcle i really enjoyed :D may be a bit dry for regular reading though :\

This reminded me of the studies on the 'illusion' of the free will (Libet, 1985; etc...) where they tell the experimental subjects to think 'go' at any time they want to and then press a button. Usually there's a readiness potential to be observed before the conscious thought is there.

Might this be a hint towards the kind of pre-articulate thought you described?

that experiment is extremely interesting. Especially intriguing to hear subjective reports of a similiar case. watch from 34:55 to around 39:00. mindblowing :o

it seems to be a hint insofar as the situation is symmetrical: that before consciousness there is a process initiating it, then we feel this process, and in this feeling know and anticipate what it entails on a higher order.

so from my perspective this is a feeling that I have some knowledge that a process is going on, i.e. a given thought, and can "observe" it appropriate certain elements, this or that word, etc. into its full explication

this is really frontier of knowledge, so take each word and metaphor with a grain of salt! surely this will appear to us ridiculously incomplete in even a few decades time

So it might all boil down to:
How do you express with words what cannot be expressed with words?

woah, this guy is mumbling so weirdly, it's really hard to understand him as a non-native speaker. :/

He is talking about TMS, right? Why should he be able to consciously control the effect of the stimulation and change the direction of the movement of his foot? I don't think I understand what he's trying to say.

problem with boiling down is that we get the illusion of a logically framed question, that in reality is much more vague and problematic

for instance word could be facial expression, rail flick or a grunt. the idea of expression is not at all determinate enough that we can relate something unexpressable, what would that be?, to the scientific understanding of the brain

most we can say is that if i reach out to grab this bottle, then naturally the specific way in which i will do this, by having a hand made of bones, joints, muscly flesh, nerve fibers and so on will limit my approach as much as it makes it possible

so if "way of grabbing the bottle" is "way of making thought determinate" then the question is multifold and open to several interpretations of how this could be different, corresponding to the vague condition of empirical knowledge we are currently in

??

I thought it was pretty clear. I'd even urge you to watch the whole interview. In fact, he reminds me of Feynman in the double sense of ability to teach and make clear what is complex and difficult, and also to be captivated and excited by interesting scientific/philosophical questions he has struggled with his whole life.

It's just like the example with my tounge. Only instead of the autonomy of my tounge, he used the autonomy of the experimenters to decide when to stimulate his cortex. Again, the idea is that we take posession of what the brain can anticipate, whether this be the activity of my tounge, or the activity from some specific part of the brain controlling movement of the foot.

Nope, I almost can't bear listening to him, he doesn't say a single fluid sentence; it's only mumbling and unfinished thoughts.

What I understood was:

I'll stimulate the part of the brain that makes my foot go outwards.

Then I'll do that again and again trying to make my foot go inwards instead. When it (expectedly?!) goes outwards I think to myself "well I wanted to move it outwards anyway".


This doesn't make any sense to me. I suppose I didn't understand him correctly.

Nono. The expectedly is from the perspective of the brain.

The thing is that the brain recieves the signal that the foot will go inwards before it goes inwards (clearly, because they stimulate his brain), so brain sends one copy of this signal to consciousness, and one signal to the foot to move it.

Consciousness therefore will get the message, and understand why the foot is moving, and in this sense it "knows about it" and predicts it, and therefore it is felt as your own.

If we simply put electric signal into foot to make it move, there would be no copy of the message to move the leg sent to consciousness and so it would feel entirely alien to the person experiencing it, like the foot moved for no reason out of nowhere.

The thing is that the brain recieves the signal that the foot will go inwards before it goes inwards (clearly, because they stimulate his brain), so brain sends one copy of this signal to consciousness, and one signal to the foot to move it.

If we simply put electric signal into foot to make it move, there would be no copy of the message to move the leg sent to consciousness and so it would feel entirely alien to the person experiencing it, like the foot moved for no reason out of nowhere.

So have you decided yet whether there's a signal to the consciousness? I don't get your post either, neither do I understand the transcript of the video (thanks for it, nonetheless).

Especially this part:

I can tell you I’m cheating. Put the stimulus and then I
move, I feel it, I’m moving it. And he said well, you know, there’s no way to really
know. I said, I’ll tell you how I know. I feel it, but stimulate and I’ll move the foot
outwards. I am now going to do that, so I stimulate and the foot moves inwards again.
So I said, well what happens? I said but I changed my mind. Do it again. So I do it
half a dozen times.

It really doesn't make any sense to me. Does it to you? I think the guy's horrible at explaining anything verbally. I'd like to read one of his papers ...

edit: Seems like "I of the vortex" (2001) is available at my uni library, I think I'll get it tomorrow with some other stuff I've been meaning to get.

He's brilliant at explaining this verbally! *wraargh*

So here's that classic, one teacher doesen't fit all students case. And i'm not going to judge you if you don't judge me.

But by any objective standards he's a brilliant neruoscientist, a giant in his field with over 500 published papers, and I can promise you that what he says makes sense.

The problem here, as usually in the frontier of science, that new ideas challenge our intuition, and so there's no logical one-sentence explanation that will get the job done.

There has to be some wrestling with things we take for granted.

Now i'll try my best to describe it, since I too, (as he says elsewhere in the interview) pride myself in being able to explain things simply.

1. You sit in a chair
2. Someone stimulates a part of your brain.
3. You feel something X, and move your foot in.
4. You feel as if you willed moving your foot in.
5. You say, well, i decided to move my foot in.
6. You tell them, to try stimulate again.
7. You feel something X, and move your foot in.
8. Well, again, you say, I decided to move my foot in.

9. So now the person stimulating your brain is starting to wonder what's going on.

10. You say, alright, i know i cheated, i can prove it, this time when you stimulate, and i feel X, i will move it OUT.

11. Person stimulates, and foot moves inwards.
12. You felt X, and feel as if you decided to move foot inwards.
13. You say, well, again, i changed my mind. try again.
14,
15,
16,.... etc.

Finally you realize it only feels *as if* you willed your foot to go inwards. For each time, if we look at it objectively, you had no choice. You can't decide to move foot outwards. You only say, after the fact that it moved inwards, that you willed it to move inwards.

Take it or leave it!

Ok, then I did get it.

Except one thing:

i know i cheated, i can prove it,

What's that supposed to mean?


And tbh, it's not really shocking that you feel something you do as "wanted" by you.
The interesting thing is that this attribution (from "doing" to "having wanted to do it") is so strong that you apparently can't fight it. And this sounds surreal to me, because the person involved should _know_ that he doesn't have chance to do anything else than what the TMS makes him do.

edit: But in the end, he realized that he only felt as if he made the choice when in reality he didn't have a choice.

So what's the shocking relevation? That you usually think that any movement you make is a "wanted" movement? Why is this surprising and in what way does this change our understanding of the human mind or the 'free will'?

When you do something without being made so by the TMS, who can tell whether a) you actually wanted to do it or b) you only think you wanted to do it?

To me, this is the most important question and I don't see how the experiment described leads to an answer.

Well, the idea was that the stimulation was supposed to move his foot in. But he will think that he cheated, because he felt that *he* moved the foot in! So for all he knows, he felt X, and then just randomly decided to move his foot in, which would destroy the experiment.

But it turned out, his feeling of cheating was his brain cheating him - saying to him that *he* did the move, and not the stimulation on his brain. xD

Oh, alright.

I was assuming they had also done the experiment on people who didn't know what exactly the TMS was making them do in the first place.

edit: See my edit in the post above. :)

You are far too concerned with *establishing* why this is interesting and coming to rest on these questions. You have to stop and admire the understanding you have gained at this juncture.

What this entails, what any understanding like this entails, only becomes obvious in months and years of thinking about it. It raises new questions, and puts our free will in a new light.

As for me, it allowed me to see simple things like the experiment with the tounge, which also extends into the realm of thinking. And it's much easier to start questioning oneself, "was this really me?"

So just go easy on the ultimate answer and take some time to see some of the implications that might follow from this. The more creative implications you find, the better! Imagine strange things! :D

I agree with you. And it is pretty interesting that an action forced by TMS is thought as wanted by yourself. I wonder if that's the case for every person and every kind of action. :)

It's just when you said that the interview was 'mindblowing', I thought there was more to it than I understood (and tbh, I only understood like 20% of his mumbling).

Well, mindblowing is perspectival, and I think since you already know about Libet, it's not so mindblowing maybe.

Part of why it was special to me is because i really appreciated the way he communicated it, and made me really realize from the inside perspective - as if i had experienced it myself, the insufficiency of the feeling.

Mindblowing IF one doesn't know so much about the brain, AND, like the way he presents and describes his experiences and so on. xD

Anyway! Nice chatting with you! Final starts soon :D

Yep, thanks for sticking with me even though I probably sounded ignorant and/or stupid. :D


Go cypher! \o/

LLINÁS: Well yeah, its an instrument that has a coil that you put next to the top of the
head and you pass a current such that a big magnetic field is generated that activates
the brain directly, without necessary to open the thing. So if you get one of these coils
and you put it on top of the head, you can generate a movement. You put it in the
back, you see a light, so you can stimulate different parts of the brain and have a
feeling of to what happens when you activate the brain directly without, in quotes, you
doing it. This of course is a strange way of talking but that’s how we talk. So I decide
to put it on the top of the head where I consider to be the motor cortex and stimulate it
and find a good spot where my foot on the right side would move inwards. It was
*pop* no problem. And we did it several times and I tell my colleague, I know
anatomy, I know physiology, I can tell you I’m cheating. Put the stimulus and then I
move, I feel it, I’m moving it. And he said well, you know, there’s no way to really
know. I said, I’ll tell you how I know. I feel it, but stimulate and I’ll move the foot
outwards. I am now going to do that, so I stimulate and the foot moves inwards again.
So I said, well what happens? I said but I changed my mind. Do it again. So I do it
half a dozen times.

BINGHAM: And it always moves inwards?

LLINÁS: Always. So I said, oh my god, I can’t tell the difference between the activity
from the outside and what I consider to be a voluntary movement. If I know that it is
going to happen, then I think I did it, because I now understand this free will stuff and
this volition stuff. Volition is what’s happening somewhere else in the brain, I know
about and therefore I decide that I did it. It happens in science as well. You actually
take possession of something that doesn’t belong to you.

BINGHAM: So what was your, so you’re saying because there’s this straight-forward
linkage between the stimulation and the foot moving inward, right and that’s going to
happen every time- even if you will yourself to move it out and it still moves in, are
you saying that you never less thought your sensation was of having moved it out?
LLINÁS: No! The sensation is different- it was I who did it.

BINGHAM: Even though I was moving it in.

LLINÁS: It moved it in and the sensation is, well I moved it in. I could not, my
system, I could not have a feeling different to what I would have had had I moved it
inwards. So I want to move it outwards, when I feel the stimulus, I move it outwards
and move it inwards. Did you feel that there was a problem? No I didn’t feel there
was a problem, I moved it inwards! But you thought, you decided you were going to
move it outwards! Yes, but I moved it inwards. And then you think and you realize
that you are saying it after the fact that you moved it inwards because it moved it in the
inwardly manner and you knew this was going to happen so you take possession of it.
In other words, free will is knowing what you are going to do, that’s all. Not necessarily willing it. Sorry. Now for other reasons, you may find that the rest of the
nervous system other than what it wills basically wants to do that, you properly
educate it; you think it’s the most intelligent thing to do and so on. But the feeling that
it’s you who’s doing it is a simplification. It is not you who’s doing it, it is many cells
deciding to do it.

you can actually see this principle at work in yourself

1. observe yourself in a mirror
2. open your mouth and retract your tounge
3. keep your tounge still
4. you will feel that you moved your tounge in a certain way
5. say to yourself "i will, no matter what, keep my tounge still"
4. you will feel that you moved your tounge in a certain way.

4,5,4,5,4,5 until you realize that you appropriate the movement as "willed" by you the moment it occurs, when it fact it's just a spontanous movement outside your control.

6. you will see your tounge as an alien creature outside your control, that you nevertheless have some fluid command over, and that you feel as your own.

figured this out by myself btw, so only one betatester so far. would love to hear if this works for you too, and if it works in the same way!

yep, it's the same for me.

That's interesting. But tbh, since I felt it very difficult to contract the necessary muscles it might just be a result of them being overused.

lol. well. don't need to contract them really. just keeping it steady in some position it apparently doesn't like to be in.

them? hmmm.. it! xD

dunno if there's more than one muscle involved. It kinda feels like it.

Well the only position that's too uncomfortable to hold for me is retracting it _and_ curling it up to the top of my mouth. And this puts great stress on the muscle(s), both in tongue and jaw.

:D:D:D

cracks me up anyhow. i'm trying to think of some other part of the body we don't have this measure of control over, but then you'd prolly have to observe your stomach or something and then the point is lost.. maybe if you observe yourself closely as you throw up or caugh or cry, we'll have the same ambigous sense of *doing* it deliberatly while at the same time kinda knowing we are not in control.

maybe if you observe yourself closely as you throw up or caugh or cry, we'll have the same ambigous sense of *doing* it deliberatly while at the same time kinda knowing we are not in control.

I would assume this can already be explained _and_ has nothing to with the kind of sub-conscious "pre-thoughts" we were originally talking about.

explain exschplained. you got a 13:37 post anyway! :D

haha, well dunno.

Actually I rather wanted to say:

Originally, we were talking about voluntary movements (or actions or thoughts...), but crying and vomiting are rather involuntary movements, so I think we are a bit off track.

Assuming there is actually a difference between what I call (in)voluntary. :D

well yes, that is exactly it, but there are traces of it.

for at least in my own case, i feel as if i'm doing the "throwing up" and "shedding the tears" ... but these are very subtle feelings, as we would expect, and opens the possibility that there is a continuum of feeling, from totally involunary to feeling or iron will.

we saw with the tounge that it was half-and-half almost, and that's why it's such a good example. while in moving my index-finger i can control it like a true dictator! :D

but you are right that the feeling of willed action, if it is there at all in shedding tears, sneezing and vomiting, is very minimal compared to other cases (:

another example may be schizophrenia, where they say "they hear voices" .. for usually, at least in my case, at least sometimes, when i think about things, it's almost like a voice, but it feels like it's my own. so maybe they don't get the signal that a voice is coming, and so instead of taking it as their own, see it as an alien intrusion.

but this is speculation, and i have many clues like this that guide my effort to understand these things, but on the face of it they may appear to be completely different phenomena. and it would take too long to explain how they could be connected.

but with this sense of free will, and in the broadest sense, what kinds of actions that happen in me and from me that i take possession of as my own, as from my own will, are very general concerns that will have impacts on a range of different issues we do not yet understand fully.

yep, with a different metaphor:

When you "hear voices", there are verbal information in your phonological loop, but you somehow aren't aware of the fact you _yourself_ put these information in there.

When you sneeze, you assume that you (partly) created the incentive to do it, but in fact you somehow aren't aware that the incentive was generated (entirely?) by something else (your receptors receiving a tickling in your nose).

You know the feeling when you are about to sneeze, but then suddenly you can't, even though you want to. That's when you realize you aren't in control.

There we go! Now you're exploring and thinking like a champion! :D

Keep those things going! And keep it speculative! Peace.

Hehe, of course all this was meant as a vague intellectual game, not as a real hypothesis. ;)

That's the whole point! The mind wants to come at rest, and settle on some simplest logical answer. But reality is muddy, and our concepts are like playthings anyway, so ability of understanding these things relies on ability to play around with these things while, of course, deep down - hidden from view - in our logical core, keeping it real. :D:D

about what?

about what i said? if it's just air to you that does not stir anything up then leave it be

or if you're more of a concrete type then just tell me what you think about that study in post #46, which is what i was getting at anyway

The future of gaming is TONY.

check OCZ NIA, This already exists, i saw a video of a guy playing UT3, then the hot booth babe came around next to him, and he fucked up badly in game, it was on youtube!

Aw, kick-ass, thought this Miguel guy was the one with the break-through in this field

If you find that UT3 link by any chance, it would be awesome :)

i tried numerous times, but i cant seen to find it :( sorry

argh, thats a shame, tnx anyways for searching

http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2011/04/08/pe...ubc-study/

cool, huh?

"Like imagine how much actors improved with invention of the mirror and recording. Now we can maybe get that mirror effect with some of our own thoughts - instant feedback makes new thinking possible :D"

And this is just the first result! Lots of new possibilities :))

"assisted meditation"

as soon as it is cheap enough!

volunteered for a psychological study today that used an MR machine. she said it costs around 500 dollars for only an hour of use

Interesting ye,it has to do with focus/concentration
Lots of possibilities with it ;)

assisted meditation? hm, well the point of meditation is calming down,relaxing and lovering your resonate frequency.
Probably a much cheaper solution is the brainwave binaural frequencies, you can downloaded it @ piratebay :P

true, i tried it. but it's not really *that* effective i think. i'm not sure. my introspective ability is the limiting factor in any case, for i am not able to see anything but with this vague feeling of depth and relaxation how i'm doing

Try this.. easiest ..most straight forward, technique on how to "astral project" which what deep mediation is in essence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IhZAHV_xl0&am...r_embedded


Its really easy to understand, check out more of his videos if you need further help (Astral Projection Re-Loaded Part 1), tell me how it goes, im 100% sure youll be able to pull it off, looking forward to hearing about your experience

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20344-m...skull.html

another one, lulz.

"Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed a way to cognitively enhance the brain’s activity by placing electrodes directly on the surface of the scalp, using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)."

"Researchers have shown that tDCS can be used as a cognitive enhancer to help people learn a task involving precise hand movements and as a way to boost mathematical skills. The technique is also being investigated as a treatment for depression, chronic pain and migraine."

\o/

>a task involving precise hand movements

I smell cheating making a huge comeback in gaming "soon" :D

cool article btw.