Words&Dirt

“The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian always seemed to feel. People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.”

––The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 525-6

“Recently, with the advent of multivariate decoding, a powerful approach has emerged that allows one to identify how mental states are encoded in brain activity (see Haynes & Rees, 2006, for an overview). This can just as well be applied to intentions as to any other mental state (such as sensory percepts or memories). The idea is to invert the problem of identifying the code by assessing from which neural signals it is possible to decode the intention a person is currently holding in mind. Specifically, the method is to first measure the brain response of a person while he or she is holding various intentions and then train a computer to recognize the intentions from these brain signals. It is very useful to simultaneously measure as many parameters as possible (such as functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] voxels, EEG channels, multielectrode units, etc.) of brain activity as possible, for several reasons. First, it is not always clear a priori which neurons will be most informative about a particular mental state. Measuring many locations at once (as with fMRI) has the advantage that one does not have to preselect a priori where the information will be. This approach thus removes spatial biases. A second reason for simultaneous measurement of as many parameters as possible is that if information is distributed across multiple units, then it is essential to obtain as much information as possible about this ensemble. The reason is that information can be encoded in the conjoint activity of multiple units that cannot be extracted by measuring the individual units on their own.”

–– “The Neural Code for Intentions in the Human Brain: Implications for Neurotechnology and Free Will,” by John-Dylan Haynes, Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, pg. 160-2