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To Kandel, the research reflects a larger truth: that consciousness and decision-making, what we know of as the human mind, arises in the brain: "All mental functions, from the most trivial reflex to the most sublime creative experience, come from the brain." Articles about NEUROSCIENCE: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?page=1&tag=neuroscience 
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What’s actually going on in the mind of an alcoholic as he or she goes through the process of recovery? What are the cognitive mechanics underlying the initial, angry rebelliousness and, later, the genuine commitment to a sober life?
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Hardly a minute goes by in our lives when we don’t make them. Decisions can be as small as our choices of words or what to have for lunch, and they can be as big as how to plan for retirement or what treatment to choose for a disease. They can balance certainties against risks. They can balance short-term gratification against long-term benefits. They can clearly be right or wrong — but often enough, they involve likelihoods and possibilities that are uncertain, even in the light of all available information.
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We're not prisoners of our neural networks, either. "We can study cars and all their physical relationships and know exactly how they work," explains Gazzinga. "It in no way prepares us to understand traffic when they all get together and start interacting." Clearly, there's a balance between seeing people either as deterministic robots or as entirely in control of everything they do. "The way I sum it up is that brains are automatic, but people are free because people are joining the social group and in that group are laws to live by. We can understand brains to the nth degree, but it’s not going to, in any way, interfere with the fact that taking responsibility in a social network is done at that level."
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Thus, the very success of science can be viewed as evidence that free will exists. "In my view, if your theory says we don't have free will, then empirical evidence shows that your theory is wrong and you better go back and come up with a better one. I think that [reductionists] just haven't taken the time to properly look at emergence, complexity and how the mind works because if they had, they would not make such self-defeating statements that undermine the meaning of what they themselves are saying."
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