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Who's In Charge? Free Will And The Science Of The Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Ecco
November 2011
On Sale: November 15, 2011
272 pages
ISBN: 0061906107
EAN: 9780061906107
Kindle: B005UD1EVG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The father of cognitive neuroscience and author of Human
offers a provocative argument against the common belief that
our lives are wholly determined by physical processes and we
are therefore not responsible for our actions A powerful orthodoxy in the study of the brain has taken
hold in recent years: Since physical laws govern the
physical world and our own brains are part of that world,
physical laws therefore govern our behavior and even our
conscious selves. Free will is meaningless, goes the mantra;
we live in a “determined” world. Not so, argues the renowned neuroscientist Michael S.
Gazzaniga in this thoughtful, provocative book based on his
Gifford Lectures——one of the foremost lecture series in the
world dealing with religion, science, and philosophy. Who’s
in Charge? proposes that the mind, which is somehow
generated by the physical processes of the brain,
“constrains” the brain just as cars are constrained by the
traffic they create. Writing with what Steven Pinker has
called “his trademark wit and lack of pretension,” Gazzaniga
shows how determinism immeasurably weakens our views of
human responsibility; it allows a murderer to argue, in
effect, “It wasn’t me who did it——it was my brain.”
Gazzaniga convincingly argues that even given the latest
insights into the physical mechanisms of the mind, there is
an undeniable human reality: We are responsible agents who
should be held accountable for our actions, because
responsibility is found in how people interact, not in brains.
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