Crazy Quotation Contest

The following is from Al Mele:

"I’m writing a book entitled Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. I’m thinking now that I’d like to quote (probably in my preface) two or three of the most outrageous claims made in the popular press in the last couple of years about what scientists have shown about free will, consciousness, or conscious intentions or decisions. It might be fun to make a contest out of this. Gardeners can provide crazy quotations (along with documentation) from the popular press about these topics. And then, if you’re willing, we can all vote on which quotation is the most outrageous. What will the prize be? Because I’m not only a modest man but also a man of modest means, how about a free copy of the new book for each of the top three entries? (Of course, the book won’t be out for quite a while, but I’ll make a note of the winners – consciously, I hope.)"

Comments

[Anibal]

I start the race to the "crazy quotation contest" on conciousnes or free will. For me this is particularly striking nonsense:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL.
It deals with a strange concept known as retrocausality that of course affect us in our free will.

[Al Mele]

Anibal,

When I try this link I get an "Item not found" message. Also, please reproduce the quotation you have in mind in your post. When it comes time to vote, I'll ask my assistant to compile all the quotations for everyone.

Al Mele

[Jamie]

I think that article that Anibal is referring to is this one: science hopes to change events that have already occurred

[Jonathan Farrell]

From an article in the The Daily Princetonian headlined "Math profs link particle actions, human free will":

"The professors, John Conway and Simon Kochen, have proven what they call the Free Will Theorem. It says that given three assumptions, if particles' behavior is truly predetermined, then people cannot have free will. In other words, if the behavior of a particle is fully determined by its past, so too are all the so-called decisions people believe they are making."

It seems that it is the mathematicians (rather than the journalist, say) who is making the jump from indeterminism to free will here. Later on in the same piece, Conway is quoted as saying, "If you bring up free will [in this context] in certain societies, people will say, 'Oh, you're a nut' straight away," Conway said. "Many will prefer a more mealymouthed term, like 'indeterminacy.'" (!)

The article can be found here:
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/11/24/news/11569.shtml?type=printable

(A longer article on the same topic which takes note of some criticisms of the way the term 'free will' is being used can be found here: http://siobhanroberts.com/pdf/free.pdf . Conway is aware of these criticisms and responds: '"I expected this," Dr. Conway says. "I deliberately and tendentiously and provocatively used the term free will for the particles, for the very good reason
that the theorem itself shows it to be the same property that has always been called 'free will' for people.')

[Wes Holliday]

My entry for the crazy quotation contest comes from a New York Times article, "Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't." Dennis Overbye writes:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

Here's a link to the article, which contains several other quotations that may be worth including: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html?ex=1325394000&
en=7d7a58876163384d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[Anibal]

Professor Mele, Jamie has put the correct link to the article i refered to.

[Anibal]

This is the quotation: "...The effect of your choice can be seen, in principle, before you have even made it."

or

"Such are the perils of retrocausality, the idea that the present can affect the past, and the future can affect the present. Strange as it sounds, retrocausality is perfectly permissible within the known laws of nature. It has been debated for decades, mostly in the realm of philosophy and quantum physics. Trouble is, nobody has done the experiment to show it happens in the real world, so the door remains wide open for a demonstration."

[Audrey Anton]

Hi Al!
You might be interested in reading about the recent debate concerning the free will of fruit flies. Here are some links:

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070516071806.htm

channel4.com/news/articles/.../flies+have+free+will/512567

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18684016

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11858-fruit-flies-display-rudimentary-free-will.html

I'm sure there is a wealth of crazy quotes from each of these sites, but my personal favorite is from the new scientist site:

"To test whether behaviour can be truly random, Björn Brembs, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, put fruit flies into a sensory deprivation chamber..."

Of course, I've taken the quote out of context...but that might be why it seems so funny :>

Cheers!

[Michael Tiboris]

This one, from the NYT is somewhat different - it deals with what can be discerned about people's unarticulated political preferences from fMRI's taken while showing them images of candidates or excerpts of their speeches. The article contains a number of "results", for example:

"Emotions about Hillary Clinton are mixed. Voters who rated Mrs. Clinton unfavorably on their questionnaire appeared not entirely comfortable with their assessment. When viewing images of her, these voters exhibited significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one. It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton."

or this one, which doubles down on the speculation at the end:

"Mitt Romney shows potential. Of all the candidates’ speech excerpts, Mr. Romney’s sparked the greatest amount of brain activity, especially among the men we observed. His still photos prompted a significant amount of activity in the amygdala, indicating voter anxiety, but when the subjects saw him and heard his video, their anxiety died down. Perhaps voters will become more comfortable with Mr. Romney as they see more of him."

[Dan]

For short & sweet, there's this Washington Post headline:
Scientists Spot Brain's 'Free Will' Center

The article is not as bad (as good? as fun?) as the headline.

[Bill Edmundson]

Coincidentally, Jonah Lehr is compiling "a list of the all-time worst literary allusions in the history of peer-reviewed science" for Slate, as a follow-on to his review of Daniel Engber's book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Oh, and that free-will center? George Eliot spotted it over a century ago.

"Zombie" Roaches Lose Free Will Due to Wasp Venom

[...]wasp uses a venom injected directly into a cockroach's brain to inhibit its victim's free will, scientists have discovered.

[...]

[R]esearchers then reversed the process: they injected an octopamine-like substance directly into the protocerebrum of cockroaches that had already been turned into zombies by wasp stings.

The result was significant recovery and restoration of the cockroach's free will.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071206-roach-zombie.html

[Al Mele]

Wow! I hadn't seen this one. I'll be reading it soon.

[RE]

Just a correction to the above: it's Daniel Engber's review of Jonah Lehrer's book on Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2178584/

[James A. Gibson]

"In our experience we are given to ourselves as free mental beings. But the scientific
way of looking at things leaves no space for a mental agent of the kind of a
free will which, if it is to result in deeds, would in some inexplicable fashion
need to interact with our nerve cells."

(Singer, Wolf: „Wer deutet die Welt?“, DIE ZEIT, no. 50, 2000.)

Taken from Ansgar Beckermann's paper, "Would Biological Determinism Rule Out Free Will?"

[Al Mele]

Right. Cartesian dualism. Some scientists believe that it's required for free will. Few philosophers do.