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What is Confabulation?

Michael Gazzaniga writes in Who's in Charge that "listening to people's explanations of their actions is interesting ... but often a waste of time." [p.78] "The left brain uses what it has and ad libs the rest." [p.88] Confabulation is the brain's hard-wired impulse for "giving a fictitious account of a past event."

In the book, Gazzaniga explores some of the hottest issues in the study of the human mind, including consciousness and free will.

"Consciousness is distributed everywhere across the brain," says Gazzaniga [p.64]. For example, patients with a localized brain stroke may lose conscious awareness of their left arm, even believing it belongs to someone else. "Consciousness involves a multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes" [p.102] Any sense of unity in consciousness is merely confabulation.

To some extent, says Gazzaniga, we humans are hard-wired. "The medial frontal cortex gives one the feeling of the urge to move". [p.113] The lateral frontal lobes are responsible for "sequencing behavior" like planning [p.49]. Specific areas in the temporal lobe allow you to recognize animals and fruits [p.50]. We have specialized brain functions for detecting cheaters and making moral judgements [p.69].

However, Gazzaniga says that "social interactions make us free to choose" [p.215], which I find odd. Perhaps it would be better to depersonalize it. Human impulses come in sets or pairs. People constantly balance competing desires (using their frontal lobes). The desire to steal from a rich man is (usually) counterbalanced by the fear of punishment. The cortex mediates between competing impulses in the context of new information from the senses.

How does the cortex do this? Gazzaniga doesn't know. "These interactions will only be understood with a new vocabulary" [p.107]. "A unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain." [p.220]

Gazzaniga believes in "emergence" but I have my own explanation, which is Resonance. Think back to the days when physicists explained black body radiation in terms of oscillators. Billions of neurons in the brain, each firing 200 times per second, are like oscillators that constrain all the other oscillators in the brain. The mind is a statistically emergent phenomena - the lowest-energy state of these oscillators - but it often takes time for the brain to re-adjust after it has been perturbed by new information. In a sense, the mind is a set of resonance frequencies (or standing waves) derived from the brain's activity, but the brain doesn't affect the mind deterministically, since there's always quantum uncertainty from one level to the next.

This also opens the possibility of genetic encoding of desires, fears and impulses.  If indeed the cortex reduces our experiences to multidimensional resonance frequencies, perhaps the frequencies have a unique signature that can be coded in the genes and retrieved during brain development.

Gazziniga doesn't discuss human difference. Yet our genes constrain our impulse thresholds, and genetic variations among us are responsible for human individuality. Your genes define what you want, and who you are. While Gazzaniga admits that "overall [brain] connectivity pattern is under genetic control" [p.21] and "if the capacity is not built-in, it does not exist" [p.19], he shies away from the key question: Why do some people enjoy being serial killers and others don't? Why do some enjoying leading, while others enjoy following?

Finally, I don't believe that consciousness is required for free will. By my definition, free will is the freedom to follow your design, whether you're conscious of it or not.

How to increase your willpower

USA Today has a dilemma.  Tell the people what they want to hear, or report the truth.

On one hand, telling people what they want to hear sells more newspapers.  But if they report falsehoods, they lose credibility.

To their credit, USA Today is transparent about their crass motives.  In a recent article, they acknowledge that most people (71%) "think willpower is something they can learn," so they cravenly devote most of the article to reinforcing this (false) popular notion by publishing the discredited theories of a crackpot psychologist who advocates that people "work on ways to delay instant gratification" and "practice self-control".

Again, to their credit, USA Today seeks to retain a modicum of credibility, by quoting one of the country's foremost experts (executive director of the American Psychological Association), who throws cold water on most of the article's content.  "Studies show that some people are better at resisting temptation than others, he says.  'They seem to innately have more self-control'."  (In other words, willpower is not learnable.)

It's a neat trick, popularized by such noted charlatans as Dr. Phil.  Tell the majority what they want to hear, and hope they miss the few sentences that you devote to the truth.

A review of Sam Harris' Free Will

Sam Harris, in his new book, asserts that we humans don’t have Free Will.  First, I'll discuss why I disagree, and then I'll state what I think is the real issue.

Harris agrees with me (and Schopenhauer) that we humans have the freedom to do what we want.  But we can’t choose our wants themselves.

However, "wants" (or genes, for that matter) are not something you have; they are who you are.  They define you.  I consciously choose based on who I am, based on my design, including my genetically constructed brain, with its cognitive abilities and specialized brain modules that implement primal needs/preferences/ desires/interests.  Implementing "desire" in neurons is no easy feat, but that's another topic.

And what is consciousness?  The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each connected to 7,000 other neurons (or to the senses), each firing at 200 times per second.  The whole brain begins to hum and resonate with the environment like a tuning fork.   We are continually thrown off balance by external stimuli or internal wants/interests/desires that perturb the system, and the brain struggles to regain resonance.  Past memories and future plans/predictions are all thrown into the multi-dimensional resonance mix.  We often have competing desires (e.g. fear and greed), which the brain’s resonance engine resolves in the environmental context.   But we only sense and retain things for which we were genetically built. 

Consciousness (by my definition) is the emergent “pop” of resonant frequencies (or semi-stable standing waves) in the brain.  Perhaps one day we'll invent conscious computers by this very principle.

So if we are free to do what we want (based on who we "genetically are"), and consciousness emerges from the resonance of the human brain with its internal and external environment, then what is the real issue?

It's the unfairness of genetic diversity.  It's the fact that we’re all born unequal, with different wants/ desires/ interests, which essentially come from our unequal genes (and the unequal “resonance engines” they construct), and which lead to inequality in pay, opportunity and status.  (According to Business Week, "needs, desires, and weaknesses [are] coded into our DNA.")

Are genetic inequalities within the realm of justice?  Not for those already living, since our genes define who we are.  I decide freely based on who I am (by my design).  If your “wants” aren’t in sync with social expectation (e.g. you want to kill people), then you’ll end up impoverished and perhaps incarcerated.  The legal system will throw you in jail for being “you”.  Laws are written by genetic beings to control other genetic beings, whom they fear.  But you can’t change someone’s genes without changing who they are (the exception being non-development genes). 

In the future, with the advent of affordable genetic testing, parents will decide their children’s genes before they are conceived.  This will restore fairness and equality in society.  Create a future generation who freely choose the things that will make them more prosperous, and eliminate those who freely choose to be serial killers.

Why America's politics are so polarized

I'm reading Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart, in which he asserts that high-IQ individuals are increasingly segregating themselves from the rest of society. They meet at top universities, inter-marry, live in gated communities, get astronomically high-paying jobs in finance, business, law, etc... and rarely mingle with the common folk.

With the rise of highly-leveraged financial markets and hedge funds, control over billions of dollars in physical assets is consolidated by relatively few individuals. (Contrast that with a day laborer who controls only the fruits of his own labor.) It makes sense for corporations to seek out high-IQ talent and pay them millions, since an additional two or three IQ points may net an additional $100 million in profits on financial transactions.

It used to be that small towns across America had more high-IQ citizens scattered about to shape, nuance, inform, moderate, or otherwise influence local opinion, perhaps serving as mayor or town council members. In short, to act as community leaders, to inspire and motivate others. But now, high-IQ students are whisked away after high school graduation to attend an elite university like Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and they rarely return (nor do their children).

America's average towns are suffering a brain drain. Those left behind are more easily incited and influenced by simple-minded, all-or-nothing, charismatic zealots on television, like Rush Limbaugh. And since the high-IQ elites are overwhelming liberal, when they move away their hometowns become even more conservative on average.