Sublime

The brainstem directly controls our states of arousal, determining, for example, if we are hungry or satiated, driven by sexual desire or relaxed with sexual satisfaction, awake or asleep.

But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them.

Lashley’s principles seemed like a coverup” and that Lashley must have simply “concocted his doctrines.”42 Pietsch sought to disprove Lashley’s and Pribram’s theories by damaging salamander brains and examining whether they still exhibited feeding behavior.43 To his surprise, no matter what he did to the salamanders’ brains, they not only lived but

This is what the thalamus calls your ‘options.’ This is the extent of our ‘free will.’

This system works to protect us in our outer environment.

One source of evidence is work by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist who has dissolved the brains of many creatures to determine how many neurons are present. She’s found a lot of interesting scaling laws. She has a paper discussing the human brain as a scaled-up primate brain.60 Across a wide variety of animals, mammals in particular, there

Although it might seem a little bass-ackward that the brain uses hormones to influence its own activities, this sort of biological hack job is the type of thing that evolution by selection specializes in: solutions to problems that are cobbled together based on hardware that already exists.

Third, we are fearful creatures and go to great lengths to preserve a sense of certainty, even when we know it to be false.