07 April 2010

The phenomenon of consciousness seems to be in. The Dutch professor Victor Lamme (psychology department, University of Amsterdam) wrote recently a book. It says: 'free will doesn't exist'. That sounds to me rather depressive.

And in a video interview he states for you tube, that he don't know what consciousness is in reality. So he is looking for the key of that. To find out what it is, and where in the body, the brain? it is located. At the same time the NRC weekly, a supplement of the daily paper NRC Handelsblad, reports about the research practice with patients in coma, since 1997 of the Belgium neurologist Steven Laureys, born in 1968. He too is looking after how to define consciousness and what makes us to be conscious of whatever. Philosophers make clear, the magazine says, that we never will know what consciousness really is. He doubts. In 41% of the patients, qualified as being vegetative and unconscious, the diagnose was incorrect. And he says that we now become more and more the tools to give an answer on these questions. He refers to those because he had them himself already in his youth. And those questions are related with the big scientific questions of today he says: about the Universe and the human consciousness.At the same time, the VPRO radio and television broadcasting magazine in the Netherlands, reports about an interview with Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher, specialised in the human brain, on board of the Beagle, a sailing vessel (the city of Amsterdam) making the same trip as Darwin did around the world. In this article he makes clear how we (human beings) learn from trial and error, so from the bottom up engineering. What happens, he calls are ' mechanical processes' , like neurons transmitting information or not. And if not, that has its consequences. Again it is this bottom up hierarchy that offers the possibility to construct a mechanism that is able to react according to the circumstances by trial and error. And that is the essence of our being free. By inventing the phenomenon of languages to communicate, the human being became free of the slow process of genetic evolution. The magazine says. And we gained the insight that we can make choices, because by trial and error we have some knowledge of what we should do! Or not!

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