Free Will? Perhaps It Is Still There

We've been hearing that we don't have any free will because the subconscious brain seems to respond well before the conscious brain issues a motor command like, "move finger."

I'd like to address this issue from the perspective of a systems analyst. First, we have three pertinent modules: conscious, subconscious, motor. The information conveyed back and forth between these modules consists of commands like delay, move, start. etc., and feedback information like completed, movement detected, etc.

The investigator informs the subject that he (his conscious mind) is to issue a command to the fingers to move after a period of time to be determined by the conscious mind. [The conscious mind cannot measure time objectively but via the subconscious, in the form of possibly the cerebellum, it can count periods of time.]

So, here's how I think it plays out. The conscious mind issues a series of "delay" commands to the subconscious mind and the latter dutifully obliges and informs the conscious mind that the requested delay has completed. Fine, so far.

The conscious mind now decides to move and simultaneously it informs the subconscious not to count up any more delay periods and to implement the finger move. [although we can voluntarily move our skeletal muscle, we do not do it alone. We must use the subconscious to connect to the motor neurons. Let us recall that the motor neurons were connected to the subconscious way before the cortex came along.]

Motor neuron autonomous activation by the subconscious is suppressed and relegated mostly to the conscious mind when the conscious mind is awake; otherwise, we may be engaging in some really odd behavior when awake [this exact scenario may take place only when the action is novel before it has been entrenched in the subconscious.]

Let's get to the nitty-gritty, the conscious mind issues the command to move but it has to go through the subconscious. It is at this point that the researchers picks up a signal to move coming from the subconscious but the conscious mind is not conscious of the movement starting to occur until much later. It thinks that it has commanded the fingers to move and the fingers have obeyed but it actually took place earlier as a result of the command by the conscious mind to the subconscious mind. The conscious mind may actually have to wait for feedback from the fingers in order to determine that it has exercised its "free will." And this adds to the delay in free will being recorded by the researchers.

To recap, I believe the discrepancy occurs in this manner because a) the conscious mind has to utilize the subconscious to access the motor neurons b) the delay in implementing the conscious mind's free will is picked up by researchers as an artifact of the process/protocol of conscious motor control.

I Don't Love Corporate Types but Elon Musk is something else.

We know Mr. Musk is waging war in the fight for clean air and renewables in the personal transportation arena, and he is doing it in a unique way that he hopes will benefit his agenda. If he has any ulterior motives for his paradigm shift, I do not fault them and I sincerely hope it will only serve to catapult Mr. Musk to the top of the transportation game while simultaneously helping to destroy the idiotic, moronic, of-benefit-only-to-lawyers-and-government patent system.

The deal is for anyone to freely use the Tesla electric car patents while promising to allow Tesla to use any patents developed by anyone taking advantage of Tesla's "generosity." I put it in quotes for obvious reasons and because I tend heavily towards skepticism; but, to my way of thinking, we desperately need a different system.

While I commend Senators Leahy and Smith and their 2011 congressional act to cut fees by 42%, it is still too high for what the inventor gets. I would rather see it under $100 for 12 years and issued automatically. What you are getting is certification that you submitted the patent on a certain date. If you encounter an infringing party, you can then do what you would normally have done--you sue them in court.

This idea of Mr. Musk could turn out to be a real game changer. It's brilliantly simple. You use my patents and I get to use yours. It remains to be seen what will happen when the lawyers get involved in the game, though. They no doubt already are and further involvement guarantees that a simple idea gets perverted into something even more complex than what we have now.

I call upon Mr. Musk to also pursue my plan as it complements his plan very well.


Tesla Motors offers all its patents for good faith use - CNET 

RightsLink to what? Lower costs? Big Effen Deal!

When RightsLink came along, I have to admit I was ecstatic for it promised to provide access to scientific periodicals FOR FREE to patients and family caregivers; but as capitalism or, shall we say, greed would have it, that would not last.

Above, you see what the American Association for Cancer Research is now attempting to do--charge for access. Admittedly, it is a small price compared to what these greedy people normally try to get away with but, if they have their way, you'll end up paying hundreds of dollars to them over a year's course for the privilege of accessing what most likely is taxpayer-funded research.

So, what is my idea for this post? I'd like to see our government ask all researchers who benefit from our tax dollars to post their DRAFT manuscript on NIH or university website for anyone to see. There is no need for them to wait for their manuscript to be accepted by a journal.

This is a win-win because the greedy publisher still can do its capitalist thing and the taxpayer can have access for free. Now, the original draft may not have been proofread thoroughly but I'll bet the  researcher worth his salt will submit a nearly perfect manuscript. Also, it may not have the perfect font or the perfect formatting but the entire text will be there along with any pictures submitted to the journal.

It is also a win for the researcher because he/she gets to publish way before the journal gets around to doing it and, market forces being what they are, the greedy publishers will have to add-on a ton of value to the manuscript to make it that much more appealing than the free draft version. Let them capitalize all they want--greedy monopolistic bastards.

Oh, and AACR, don't bother telling me that it was all a mistake by some webmaster you just hired--I'll not buy it!