You Are A Machine

For any remaining mind/body dualists out there: neuroscientist Patrick Haggard builds magnetic coils that he can hold close to your head, and use them to control your body via signals to your brain. “Transcranial magnetic stimulation” would be the technical term. (He thinks it means you don’t have free will, because he’s a neuroscientist and not a philosopher.)

The machinery can’t force Prof Haggard to do anything really complicated – “You can’t make me sign my name,” he says, almost ruefully – but at one point, Christina is able to waggle his index finger slightly, like a schoolmaster. It’s very fine control, a part of the brain specifically in command of a part of the body. “There’s quite a detailed map of the brain’s wiring to the body that you can build,” he tells me.

We sometimes say “the Large Hadron Collider is the most complex machine ever built,” but I’m not sure how it would directly compare to a human being. All part of the great bootstrap up to greater complexity, which will continue for a while until it all inevitably deteriorates into empty space.

64 Comments

64 thoughts on “You Are A Machine”

  1. Just to assign proper credit here, I believe schoolyard bullies long ago discovered a more rudimentary means of controlling other people’s body movements—a means often accompanied by such exclamations as “Haha, you’re hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!” On the other hand, I don’t think the bullies’ motivation was to refute mind/body dualism. 🙂

  2. “For any remaining mind/body dualists out there”

    This says nothing about dualism. Consider Descartes’s theory: the body is a machine, there is a separate soul, it interacts with the body through the pineal gland. Showing that you can make the body execute motions by stimulating other parts of the nervous system “confirms” the body’s machinelike character, but does nothing to address his hypothesis.

  3. I don’t think that a soul exists, but if there is, it seems as though these magnetic coils can overwrite what the “soul” tells the body to do. That might not necessarily refute dualism by itself, but I think that it does do a good job of shooting it in the foot.

  4. “All part of the great bootstrap up to greater complexity, which will continue for a while until it all inevitably deteriorates into empty space.”

    Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. As a teaser, consider the following 2 questions:

    1) Is it possible, in principle, to fully simulate a human brain inside a sufficiently powerful computer? Feel free, for instance, to use all of the resources in the solar system to build the simulation’s underlying hardware (i.e. to reproduce what iterative trial and error has managed to build with just a couple kilos and ~ 20 watts).

    2) How big is the universe?

  5. If everything will inevitably deteriorate into empty space, isn’t that nihilistic? Why bother if in the ultimate scheme of things, whatever we do doesn’t matter the least bit? Does it matter how complex our civilization will become if it’s ultimately doomed for total annihilation?

  6. Zach, are you saying that if you ever die, even if it’s a million years from now, your life now will have meant nothing?

  7. He is a philosopher – he just happens to be a natural philosopher. His take on free will is perfectly reasonable, given the way that concept has been traditionally thought of (ie, not just wordplay).

  8. Yeah, I’m still here. I believe the body and brain is very deterministic but it’s obviously reprogrammed when we consciously put values on our thoughts and experiences. Try and see for your self. The “soul” might not be ontologically different from the brain but it’s also not physical (I believe it has some properties that can’t be described by math).

    A real physicist should try to explain the mind though. It’s your job. Who else?

  9. “This runs shockingly contrary to the sense of freedom that we feel in terms of controlling our actions, on which we base our whole sense of self and system of morality. ‘As far as I know,’ says Prof Haggard, ‘all societies hold individuals responsible for their actions.'”

    Yes, and realizing that we are, very likely, deterministic biological machines might well influence attitudes and beliefs about *how* we should hold each other responsible. See for instance Greene and Cohen’s paper, “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything” at http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/GreeneCohenPhilTrans-04.pdf and “Holding mechanisms responsible” at http://www.naturalism.org/glannon.htm

  10. If a machine malfunctions, you fix it. If it can’t be fixed, you discard it. The same would hold for “people as machines”, except that we don’t know yet how to fix them, and since dismantling people would be inhumane, we incarcerate them. Even if we think we know how to fix people, we should be very cautious, otherwise we will repeat the mistakes of doing prefrontal lobotomies, shock treatment, involuntary sterilization, etc.. Thus “you are a machine” changes nothing, it is a stupid philosophers’ games, and artificial controversies. Whether or not “you are a machine” don’t we still have poverty to alleviate, challenges to face like global warming and any number of other more useful pursuits like real problems in science?

  11. ObsessiveMathsFreak

    If people are machines which are not responsible for their actions, and who therefore cannot be held accountable for those actions, then equally people cannot be rewarded for their actions either.

    Applying the latter logic tends to halt application of the former fairly quick.

  12. Re: 14
    If people are machines which are not responsible for their actions, and who therefore cannot be held accountable for those actions, then equally people cannot be rewarded for their actions either.

    This does not follow. “Held accountable” is a moral statement, and requires no action. I can can hold you accountable for your actions, and that just means I find you morally culpable. However, rewarding is an action. I can, for instance, reward a rat for a particular action in order to influence their behaviour. This does not mean that I believe a rat that has performed the action to be morally superior to other rats; the reward is merely a way of moulding behaviour.

    I don’t know why everyone freaks out and thinks that anyone who doesn’t believe in “free will” must not believe that we are justified in responding to other peoples’ actions. Humans, being animals (and machines), are still responsive to external influences. Our drive to be happy and to create an environment in which we are safe and comfortable, and our ability to do so by providing incentives for particular kinds of behaviour, have absolutely nothing to do with free will.

  13. The fact that we tend to deny that we are machines (we can get away with doing that) makes religion still viable despite science and technology. The moment we could no longer deny that we are machines, e.g. when all humans in biological form have been replaced by electronic versions, few people will still believe in God.

    Or would a robot who knows that there are only transistors in his head go to church on Sunday?

  14. More evidence that Sean does not understand mind-body dualism. This has absolutely no ramifications for dualist theories of mind whatsoever. Please read a relevant book on philosophy of mind and stop embarrassing yourself, Sean.

  15. Ironically enough, Scott Aaronson’s initial response with the schoolyard bully example is as much of a refutation of mind-body dualism as is Haggard’s transcranial magnetic coercion. Namely, none at all.

  16. Philip Rittenhouse Jr.

    Well I don’t know how much more this could effect philosophy when you consider the fact the earth itself has a magnectic field not to mention solar flares. If a couple of magnetic coils can effect a person is it possible the earths magnetic fields effect people on a constant basis? Can a solar flare create havoc in people the way it can effect our electronics. I don’t know to me it seems even a passing comet with a strong enough magnetic field may effect people in ways we don’t understad. With everything that goes on in the universe it makes one wonder if some of the ancient myths and legends refering to the “heavens” controlling or effecting our destinies have some sort of truth in them.

  17. Bruce of Canuckistan

    @20 Philip

    The effect of “Transcranial magnetic stimulation” is due to the field’s rate of change, which induces a voltage across conductive brain tissue. From what I’ve read, the strength involved is in the range of 1 Telsa, changing over a period of 10ms or so. So about 10,000 times stronger than the earth’s field, and changing 10x faster than you could snap your head around.

  18. Somehow this post didn’t trigger a lot of materialistic responses. Now it’s finally shown that we are machines, so why don’t they come here and celebrate?

  19. I don’t follow this. Of course we are machines, in that we are made out of stuff. That’s been known for 200 years (the early experiments in respiration are proof enough for me). And external forcings can get you to do things involuntarily. That, too, has been known a long time. None of that says, by itself, what kind of machine we are. In particular, it doesn’t prove that we are congruent to a Turing machine, nor does it prove that we can best be controlled by Skinner type behaviorism.

  20. Have you seen the size of that paddle? Have you ever watched ‘The Mentalist?’ Can you say ‘fraud’, ‘grifter’, ‘charlatan’, or even ‘esteemed scientist having fun?’ Wow! His finger moves and there is a jump in electrical patterns. A scientific breakthrough of the first order! No way he could possibly be doing it himself. Amazingly not subject to the ordinary scientific demands of reproduction in other labs, or peer review publication.

    I may be wrong, but it’s worth considering that maybe Haggard is off in left field and laughing.

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