{"id":7817,"date":"2011-12-14T15:04:53","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T23:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=7817"},"modified":"2011-12-14T15:04:53","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T23:04:53","slug":"you-are-a-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/14\/you-are-a-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are A Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For any remaining mind\/body dualists out there: neuroscientist Patrick Haggard builds magnetic coils that he can hold close to your head, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/science\/8058541\/Neuroscience-free-will-and-determinism-Im-just-a-machine.html\">use them to control your body via signals to your brain<\/a>.  &#8220;Transcranial magnetic stimulation&#8221; would be the technical term.  (He thinks it means you don&#8217;t have free will, because he&#8217;s a neuroscientist and not a philosopher.)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The machinery can&#8217;t force Prof Haggard to do anything really complicated \u2013 &#8220;You can&#8217;t make me sign my name,&#8221; he says, almost ruefully \u2013 but at one point, Christina is able to waggle his index finger slightly, like a schoolmaster. It&#8217;s very fine control, a part of the brain specifically in command of a part of the body. &#8220;There&#8217;s quite a detailed map of the brain&#8217;s wiring to the body that you can build,&#8221; he tells me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We sometimes say &#8220;the Large Hadron Collider is the most complex machine ever built,&#8221; but I&#8217;m not sure how it would directly compare to a human being.  All part of the great bootstrap up to greater complexity, which will continue for a while until it all inevitably deteriorates into empty space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For any remaining mind\/body dualists out there: neuroscientist Patrick Haggard builds magnetic coils that he can hold close to your head, and use them to control your body via signals to your brain. &#8220;Transcranial magnetic stimulation&#8221; would be the technical term. (He thinks it means you don&#8217;t have free will, because he&#8217;s a neuroscientist and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}