Notes
1. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Back Bay Books; 1991), p. 314.
2. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum: Or the True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature.
Originally published in 1620; James Spedding, translator (Amazon Digital Services, Kindle edition; 2009), sections XXXVIII to XLIV3. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; Book 1: Of the Understanding. Originally published in London in 1738; reprinted and edited with an introduction by D. G. C. Macnabb (Cleveland: Meridian Books; 1969), p. 134.
4. Eric Kandel, The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House; 2012), p. 203.
5. Karl K. Szpunar and Endel Tulving, “Varieties of Future Experience,” in M. Bar (Ed.), Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future (New York: Oxford University Press; 2011), p. 1.
6. Lawrence W Bursalou, “Simulations, Situated Conceptualizations, and Predictions,” in M. Bar (Ed.), Predictions, pp. 27-39. Bursalou's situated conceptualizations are patterns somewhat like implicit hypotheses. When a component of a previously stored pattern is experienced, pattern completion in memory gives rise to predictions about what will happen next.
7. Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins; 2011), p. 82.
8. Y. Pinto, E. H. F. de Haan, and V A. F. Lamme, “The Split-Brain Phenomenon Revisited: A Single Conscious Agent with Split Perception,” Trends in Cognitive Science 21:835-851, 2017.
9. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge, pp. 75-104.
10. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2011), chapter 7.
11. Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2012) pp.
2-3); Koch cites the philosopher David Chalmers as the originator of the term.12. Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2002); Koch, Confessions, chapter 7.
13. Thomas Huxley, as cited in William James, Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (Originally published by Henry Holt & Co.; reprinted New York: Dover; 1964), chapter V.
14. Koch, Confessions, p. 78.
15. For review, see Patrick Haggard, “Conscious Intention and Motor Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Science 9:290-295, 2005. Benjamin Libet's experiments on consciousness have widely been interpreted as having something to do with “free will,” a major philosophical thicket that we will stay out of. Suggested readings include the sources mentioned in Notes. 1, 7, and 11; see also Peter Ulric Tse, The Neural Basis of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2013).
16. C. S. Soon, M. Brass, H.-J. Heinze, and J.-D. Haynes, “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,” Nature Neuroscience 11:543-545, 2008. An update of Libet's experiment. Experimenters scanned numerous brain regions simultaneously while the subject chose a button to press. By correlating the activity in each brain region with the final decision, Lau et al. could deduce not only which regions were involved in the decision, but also predict which finger, right or left, was going to move. The brain activity preceding the movement began as much 10 seconds before the subjects reported making their decisions; see H. C. Lau, R. D. Rogers, P. Haggard, and R. E. Passingham, “Attention to Intention,” Science 303:1208-1210, 2004.
17. Critics dispute the interpretation of the Libet-type experiments, arguing that the preceding activity does not necessarily imply that the path from unconscious processes to conscious thoughts to action is a serial (linear) process, but that the prior unconscious activity causes two downstream consequences that occur in parallel, one leading to the finger movement and the other to the conscious thought.
Another possibility is that consciousness represents an emergent process that arises spontaneously from a kind of competition among a number of cortical modules for awareness. Consciousness may not be a process simply caused by some other preceding activity, but an emergent principle that takes place on its own time scale which is always appropriate to that time (i.e., it is not “too late” to be involved in action), as Libet had argued.18. Haggard, “Conscious Intention.”
19. August Kekule's dream; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekule.
20. Otto Loewi's dream; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Loewi.
21. Raymond S. Nickerson, Conditional Reasoning: The Unruly Syntactics, Semantics, Thematics, and Pragmatics of “If” (New York: Oxford University Press; 2015).
22. Sinead L. Mullally and Eleanor A. Maguire, “Prediction, Imagination, and Memory,” in M. S. Gazzaniga and G. A. Mangun (Eds.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2014), p. 605.
23. R. M. J. Byrne, “Counterfactual Thought,” Annual Review of Psychology 67:135-157, 2016.
24. S. L. Mullally and E. A. Maguire, “Counterfactual Thinking in Patients with Amnesia,” Hippocampus 24:1261-1266, 2014.
25. Byrne, “Counterfactual Thought,” ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Mvller-Lyer illusion of unequal line lengths; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mvller-Lyer_illusion.
28. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final 'Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage Books; 1993).
29. Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (New York: Penguin Press; 2015).
30. Richard Feynman, as quoted in James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (New York: Little, Brown and Company; 1992). Feynman tended not to dumb down his ideas to get them across to anyone except physicists. When asked to explain quantum mechanics to a layman, “in terms that I would understand,” Feynman replied that “In terms that you understand, I don't understand it.”
31.
Vicki Daitch and Lillian Hoddeson, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press; 2002), p. 57, quoting J. Bardeen.32. James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (New York: Flatiron Books; 2018), p. 105.
33. The disgrace of Lance Armstrong; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_ Armstrong.
34. The Jan Henrik Schon scandal; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schon_scandal.
35. Firestein, Ignorance, p. 78.
36. Political and social influences in spread of Ebola epidemic; see https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Ebola_virus_epidemic_in_Sierra_Leone.
37. The entire saga of Stanley Pons's and Martin Fleischman's ill-fated report of a roomtemperature energy-generating fusion process is well told here:
But see http://coldfusionnow.org/peter-hagelstein-on-the-fleischmann-pons- experiment/ for a contrary view that Pons and Fleischman were, in a sense, right. The fusion process works, but the reaction requires more energy to be supplied than it produces, making it potentially useful for some purposes- but hardly a cure for the global energy crisis. Also see https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/its- not-cold-fusion-but-its-something/.
38. F. Wolfe-Simon, J. Switzer Blum, T. R. Kulp, G. W. Gordon, S. F. Hoeft, J. Pett-Ridge, J. F. Stolz, et al., “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus,” Science 332:1163-1166, 2011.
39. Wolfe-Simon et al.'s paper (cited in Note 37), generated great controversy and technical commentary when it was posted online. The end results were that her paper had not demonstrated that arsenic could substitute for phosphorus as a building block of life, but it did generate a number of other interesting insights and questions. The gist of the critical commentary is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/05/ science-publishes-multiple-critiques-arsenic-bacterium-paper.
40. I. Tagkopoulos, Y.-C. Liu, and S. Tavazoie, “Predictive Behavior Within Microbial Genetic Networks,” Science 320:1313-1317, 2008.
Bacteria can learn; see http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080508/full/news. 2007.360.html.
41. M. Gagliano, V V Vyazovskiy, A. A. Borbely, M. Grimonprez, and M. Depczynski, “Learning by Association in Plants,” Scientific Reports 6:1-9, 2016.