Goodreads: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (checkpoint 3)

Audiobook: 2hrs 30mins \ 22hrs 42mins

This covered part of chapter 3. He began discussing things that have been historically (and currently) thought to be independent of each other. The main one that stuck out to me was the mind and body (previously referred to as the ghost in the machine, dualism). More and more, scientists are discovering that our behaviors can be explained by physical processes occurring in the brain. This goes in the face of many previously and currently held concepts of the mind being separate from the physical body; that the mind makes decisions freely on its own and isn't something that can be known or discovered through natural processes.


Since human skills such as creativity, memory, logic, reasoning, intuition, etc. are all thought to be results of physical and chemical processes occurring in the brain, we should be able to mimic this in a reproducible way, such as in a computer (e.g., Watson built by IBM that is currently a participant on Jeopardy). If some part of the brain changes physically or chemically, that person actually changes as well.

There have been studies that can predict what the subject is thinking based on brain activity, externally monitored. As science progresses, it may not be too far fetched to say that a detection device could know every thought going through the human brain, conscious or sub-conscious, so long as it emits magnetism from the moving neurons.

Many of these ideas are very controversial in the public eye, however, I don't see that as the case in the scientific community. I've also seen some other studies that are able to predict, based on brain activity, what a person will choose, given a set of questions, even before the person consciously knows they have made the decision. Even consciousness, it is stated, is only a mere illusion that the brain uses to trick us into believing that we actually have free will, when in fact our consciousness is only the brain telling us what it has already decided to do based on mechanistic physically and chemical processes.

Here are a few videos that I have watched in the past, and you can also following the surrounding related videos for more content:








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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI1624SwYnI