Week 6- Assigned Reading- The Astonishing Hypothesis

When Francis Crick talks about how we are "very core physical beings who have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that we are something more, something non-material, something transcendent", makes you really think about how big the human ego is. How can we be so certain that we are something more when in the sense of reality we are not certain about anything. How can we be so sure that we are transcendent? I mean let me ask you a question, where were you 5 years ago before you were bore? Will you can't answer that, because you don't know, I don't know. And after answering that question where are you going to be 5 years after you die? Probably at the same place you were 5 years before you were born. All we can be certain about is where we are now. To me it seems like we all live in different time worlds and that time starts to when you start. And because there was a beginning if you want to start with the big bang, than you know that there must be an ending. The only reason we know this is because there is a life cyle to things in life or we can also say that what goes up must come down because in life we have an equilibrium.

Francis Crick talks about where he has located what he calls "free will" in the brain. When he says that he found it he talks about what he calls his first assumption which is " that part of one's brain is concerned with making plans for future actions, without necessarily carrying them out. I also assumed that one can be conscious of such plans--that is, that they are subject to at least immediate recall." You see this everyday. Human nature is to want what it doesn't have or try to surpass what it already has because human nature is to be greedy. We look in the future when we should really just be looking in the present.

Then he talks about his second assumption which I liked the best because this has to deal with me a little more than the first one. And Crick said "My second assumption was that one is not conscious of the "computations" done by this part of the brain but only of the "decisions" it makes--that is, its plans." We all make plans, we all want to know what is going to happen in the future and this has to go back to human nature that we are scared for the future. You ask why
are we scared of the future? Well to start off we are scared because since we know that there was a beginning we know that there is an ending so, we are then scared for death why, because we are scared of the unknown because to many things can happen which we have no clue.
The bottom line is that we are scared for anything that we can't see or anything that hasn't happened yet.