Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine'

This is an interesting new idea. If we can be affected by forces outside of us for example by magnetism, does that have a bearing on whether we should be held responsible for all of our actions?

In the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Queen Square in London, the nerve centre – if you will – of British brain research, Prof Haggard is demonstrating "transcranial magnetic stimulation", a technique that uses magnetic coils to affect one's brain, and then to control the body. One of his research assistants, Christina Fuentes, is holding a loop-shaped paddle next to his head, moving it fractionally. "If we get it right, it might cause something." She presses a switch, and the coil activates with a click. Prof Haggard's hand twitches. "It's not me doing that," he assures me, "it's her."

The point here of course is not simply to perform a simple parlour trick - a rather dull experiment to affect the involuntary movement of someone's fingers, but to illustrate the larger question of how our world, the surrounding atmosphere in which we inhere every day, actually has a profound effect on us and in ways we cannot often imagine. And what happens when some of us are hot-wired differently from others? Doesn't that also mean that we are affected by nature in lots of different ways as well? Both negatively as well as positively? And if this is true, what happens when some people do odd things, for example, murder another human being? Can we really hold them to account in the way we always have?

As Prof Haggard says,

"What happens if someone commits a crime, and it turns out that there's a lesion in that brain area? Is that person responsible? Is the damage to the machine sufficient for us to exempt them from that very basic human idea that we are responsible for our actions? I don't know." He refers to a major project in America, where "lawyers, neuroscientists, philosophers and psychiatrists are all trying to work out what impact brain science has on our socio-legal sense of responsibility".

It seems we may have to re-evaluate what truly constitutes our notion of true free will.

Uk university tuition costs to hit £36,000

As if it wasn't bad enough that there are proposals to reduce UK degrees from 3 to 2 years, that there is a shortfall of government funding to the tune of more than 30% over the current government's term in office, and that the quality of education is suffering with large intakes of foreign, mostly Chinese, students with the concomitant drop in standards.

Now we find that the costs of UK degrees are set to spiral out of control to the tune of £36,000 for a typical three-year degree course!!

"Virtually all taxpayer funding will be removed from the majority of degrees and students will have to borrow tens of thousands of pounds to cover the doubled cost of courses. Universities will have to charge at least £7,000 a year to cover the loss of central government funding and some elite degrees are expected to cost up to £12,000 a year."

These are understood to be the key findings from a long-awaited review of university funding conducted by Lord Browne, the former head of BP. But you have to ask yourself why anyone would send their kids to a uni in the UK any more when there are far more attractive options elsewhere in the European union?

I predict a mass exodus of undergraduates spreading their money around the European union and it will hurt the UK economy even more at a time when every pound is need domestically to be spent at home! Again this is just another example where the UK government is displaying remarkable shortsightedness(a recurrent theme on this blog if you wish to read more on this topic).