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Michael Gazzaniga - The Interpreter (Lecture 3)
The third in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael
Gazzaniga. Recorded 15 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the
University of Edinburgh.
The interpreter is the device we humans enjoy that provides us with the
capacity to see the meanings behind patterns of our emotions, behavior
and thoughts.
This concept is central to understanding the relationship
between our brain and our strong sense of self. In a way, it is the
device that liberates us from our automatic ways spelled out in Lecture
1 and 2. The interpreter constructs the sense that there is a “me”
arising out of the ongoing neuronal chatter in the brain and making all
of life’s moment-to-moment decisions.
Our compelling sense of being a
unified self armed with volition, deployable attention and self-control
is the handiwork of the interpreter, for it brings coherence to a brain
that is actually a vastly parallel and distributed system. This view
stands in contrast to much neuroscientific theorizing or existential
musing about our unified, coherent nature.
In most models of brain and
cognitive mechanism, one can identify, as Marvin Minsky once said, the
box that makes all the decisions.
Yet if
modern neuroscience has taught us anything, it has taught us, as I said
in Lecture 2, that our brain is a highly parallel and distributed
system with literally millions of decisions being made simultaneously.
There is simply no place within this sort of architecture from which a
single decision system could operate. Instead, this parallel processing
is producing an organism that looks like a self-motivated, morally
coherent, decision-making and conscious entity. Indeed, understanding
how it works will emerge from understanding the workings of the
interpreter and the brain that enables it.
Moreover, this understanding
will allow us to rid ourselves of the homunculus problem once and for
all, while, perhaps paradoxically, setting the stage for why you are
to be held responsible for all of your actions.
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By The University of Edinburgh
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The third in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael
Gazzaniga. Recorded 15 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the
University of Edinburgh.
The interpreter is the device we humans enjoy that provides us with the
capacity to see the meanings behind patterns of our emotions, behavior
and thoughts.
This concept is central to understanding the relationship
between our brain and our strong sense of self. In a way, it is the
device that liberates us from our automatic ways spelled out in Lecture
1 and 2. The interpreter constructs the sense that there is a “me”
arising out of the ongoing neuronal chatter in the brain and making all
of life’s moment-to-moment decisions.
Our compelling sense of being a
unified self armed with volition, deployable attention and self-control
is the handiwork of the interpreter, for it brings coherence to a brain
that is actually a vastly parallel and distributed system. This view
stands in contrast to much neuroscientific theorizing or existential
musing about our unified, coherent nature.
In most models of brain and
cognitive mechanism, one can identify, as Marvin Minsky once said, the
box that makes all the decisions.
Yet if
modern neuroscience has taught us anything, it has taught us, as I said
in Lecture 2, that our brain is a highly parallel and distributed
system with literally millions of decisions being made simultaneously.
There is simply no place within this sort of architecture from which a
single decision system could operate. Instead, this parallel processing
is producing an organism that looks like a self-motivated, morally
coherent, decision-making and conscious entity. Indeed, understanding
how it works will emerge from understanding the workings of the
interpreter and the brain that enables it.
Moreover, this understanding
will allow us to rid ourselves of the homunculus problem once and for
all, while, perhaps paradoxically, setting the stage for why you are
to be held responsible for all of your actions.
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