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Honestly I have no idea where this sudden rage came from. I wasn't being sarcastic or condescending and was appreciative of the case you were trying to make.
I'm not making a "case" because I am speculating.
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Maybe I can show why that is true. You can run MRIs of brains which inherently align and flip in a much greater way, atomic level particles. If the theory of quantum fluctuations actually affecting thinking was true then people should not be coming out of MRIs and I believe even CAT scans unscathed.
OK. Thats why I pointed out that modern computers are hardened against exactly that sort of interference. I further observed that biological systems appear to employ multiple redundancy to obviate this problem. So I do not see that MRI or CAT scanners pose a problem.
As an additional layer, you can build an information system to do error trapping; so even if anomolous results are encountered they do not necessarily ripple onwards to have observable effects; thats a solvable design problem.
Remember I said it was a SIMILE not a description.
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What's more brain research is being run regarding influencing brain processes with EM fields. It does work and yet it is hardly the level of change you are talking about occuring from a much smaller alteration.
POTENTIALLY occurring. In addition, there are good reasons for thinking that only a portion of the brains activity is electrical, and that a substantial part is chemical. That would severely mitigate the influence that magnetic fields can impose, if certain statements are "written" into a hormone and released into the bloodstream. That also implies delays - so who knows, maybe the effects of exposure to EM fields are only observable a week after the effect, and thus hard to correlate with the event. And third, the photo-electric effect putrs hard limits on necessary energy quanta to make any changes at all, and so quite a few environmental factors may simply not arise to a significant threshold.
You see "quantum level fluctuations affect thinking" is NOT precisely the claim I made. The only reason they were mentioned at all was to provide a basis for saying that merely becuae the system is mechanical does not necessarily means it is mechanically deterministic in simple, cause-and-effect, correlatable manner.
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Here is a simple question, why is it not possible that our identities or 'centers of free will' are portions of the brain? That is to ask, why are we not the organ which assesses success of actions versus other criteria which it built up over time (an idea of identity or values) and selects from that? Why do our conscius perceptions have to be an organ which senses the illusion of making that same decision?
IMO 99% of human functions can be carried out without the conscious mind being involved to any significant degree. Quite a range pf psychological problems may limit a persons communicative abilities, and thus severely limit socialisation, but they are often able to to feed themselves and might well, in an uncsontrained environemnt, be perfectly succesful in their own right without our complex thought patterns. Equally, if stone tools go back in the human lineage as far as we think they do, then they must have been made first by creatures significantly less "intelligent" than us.
And yet, if you sat down to learn the art of stone-knapping, you would very much engage your thinking mind for that purpose. Is that actually necessary, or an epiphenomenon of the act? That is what appears dubious to me in the orthodox causality of thought -> action.
I see many similarities in other animals - just today the news is reporting that cows get depressed, have conflict avoidance strategies, and generally appear to have quite a rich psychology. Many animals use tools in one form or another. So it is not clear to me that the very high level strategic functions we experience as our "self" requires a special organ or structure or facility that is not also found - to a lesser degree - in the dumbest critters. To me, it looks like an emergent property of a very complex substrate.
And that implies that the substrate must first change, and then the change will be relfected in the epiphenomenon. That does not imply that such changes - which amount to decisions - are totally unconscious, random, or senseless. The direction of apparent causality need not undermine the quality of decision. If you feel that you make the decision "to have the blueberry rather than the raspberry pie", I think that is a "conscious" reflection of a decision that was made mechanically. That is your self-status monitoring system reporting on your self-status, I think.
But I am not claiming that things happen in only one direction. If you can turn a wheel by turning an axle, you can turn the axle by turning the wheel. They are connected - and similarly I would think there is some facility for the "strategic command" element to push commands back down the chain in the other direction. That would be precisely why such a system would provide a survivability advantage. But I suspect that the range and scope of those commands is rather limited, under most circumstances - too many of the sub-systems are beyond the strategic elements' control to prevent feedback from the sub-systems determing some of the content of the strategic element itself.
The very idea of things, lessons, insight, being built up "over time" inplies that those lessons must be recorded somewhere. So, in as much as I am a product of my environment and circumstances, I am an object that other items in the world have acted upon, and I am changed by those actions. These changes compel my conscious thought to change with them, as they are converted into material data somehow, somewhere, in the brain itself, thus changing the substrate from which the epiphenomenon arises.
As I said, I am not trying to argue for a one-way relationship in which the conscious mind is merely an echo of unconscious process. All I am trying to do is attack a one-way process in the other direction, in which we conceive of ourselves as our "free will" and think of changes as being processed and accepted or discarded by that "analytical" organ. My model is one of endless interaction and iteration between the "conscious" mind and IM the far far larger quantity of automated functions. Thats why free will looks erroneous to me - it implies a mind free of impositions, which then chooses. I think we have to consider that this sense of identity is highly abstract, is probably not a single process or facility or organ but the emergent property of many such sub-systems, ands can itself to be subject to changes in the sub-systems regardless of the measn by which those changes come about.
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