(I) Various
physicists, working with cesium-filled chambers and the like, have reported
results that, at least as reported in the press, seem supraluminal. Their technique is admirable;
their results, at least as entertaining as that of the Euler disk; but they
by no means dethrone the position of the speed of light in a vacuum, c, which still reigns at the center of
physics. Their surprising lab results
may be compared with the paradoxical distinctions of group-velocity vs. phase
velocity, in wave phenomena, or unphysical illusions such as in the thought-experiment of flipping a flashlight left to right-- millions of years later, on the arc of heaven as it were, an illumination mimics that trajectory with distances multiplied by a zillion, so that the 'signal' moves supraluminally, though nothing is actually moving left to right. A
curiosity. Einstein in heaven is not tearing his wild white hair.
(II) Various neuroscientists, sticking electrodes into
hapless experimental subjects, detected electrical blips in the brain, as many
as seven seconds before the fellow (responding to the prompting, “Coffee tea or
milk?”) at last says, “Tea please.”
Neuroscientists -- an excitable lot -- froth over this. “We feel we choose, but we don’t” enthuses
one from the University College, London (whom I shall not name, so as not to
defame; quotation from 1 Sept 2011 Nature). Furthermore (adds one of his henchmen, in the same issue):
It’s possible that what are now
correlations could at some point
become causal connections between brain mechanisms and behaviours. If that were the case, then it would
threaten free will, on any definition by any philosopher.
[“… any … any…” : sic;
sic.]
The only reason such illation might have any color of
probability, is that the neuroscientists (whose characters were formed in the
laboratory, pithing frogs) regularly choose actions too trivial to reflect our
real humanity. In the case above
-- I lied about the Stewardess Trilemma, really all the experiment was about
was pushing some damned button, a button which moreover had no effect upon
anything. Boring beyond belief. No
doubt the experimental subjects were in a coma throughout the experiment, or
Dreaming of Babylon; meanwhile the
burblings of the subcortical tissues continued, much like the similar
borborygmus of the bowels; until
eventually a finger twitched: Ah
what the heck, push now.
Not to knock it -- such results might even scale up. Thus, to take the creature dear to the
Churchlands, the sea-slug: quite
possibly its “choice” to slime-right or slime-left, at any given instant, owes
its promptings largely to meteorological and other influences, with any
accompanying mentation bearing but the faintest resemblance to the decision to
enter the priesthood, or to see if cohomological algebra can yield insights
into Yang-Mills theory. But it
doesn’t scale up to us -- at least, not
to us at our best. Prior, say, to
coming up with the Urysohn Metrization conjecture, and then coming up with its
proof, there was plenty of unconscious ruminating, and well more than seven
seconds’ worth. No mathematician
denies it; all proclaim it.
(Poincaré stepping onto the bus.) But that doesn’t
mean that the truth of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, or even the validity or
coherence of our proofs thereof, are caused
by, or bear any structural resemblance to, the sort of subcerebral singultus that
so fascinates the guys in the lab. While button-pushing may be close enough to a reflex action, that you could imagine it might just fall out of biochemistry, without invoking mind or will at all, that really doesn't work to explain such mental palaces as the UMT.
After all: Free
will, like the Cosmos itself, is a gift from our Maker, not just something we
picked up at WalMart. Hence there is no a-priori reason why it
should be intuitively understandable, or even analytically explicable (without
millennia of hard work, and even then may lie beyond our poor powers), any more
than is the Cosmos.
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