Do you believe in free will or determinism?   Either way,  imagine you are creating a life form, and that you want it to have free will.  You figure out that you need to design an organ that would be responsible for this.  You decide to call it the "free willer".

What would this organ do? You realize that it must make decisions, as that is what "will" allows you to do.  But how will it do so?  You realize that learning is involved -- that this organ needs to take into consideration past events. Oops, you have just created the deterministic willer!

Ok ok, let's back up a minute.  If we don't take into consideration past events... well then the decisions it would make would have to be random.  Is that what we want? Not really, random decisions won't get this new life form very far!

What other decision mechanisms could we come up with for this organ?  Well it could be influenced by some predetermined set of rules or genes that get better over time, but that's just another determinism!

Ideally what we want is something that is influenced by past events (learning). Something that can improve its programming over generations (genes). And finally something that can decide to do OTHER than its deterministic inputs dictate (the free part).

Turns out that the brain marries randomness with learning and genes in a perfect way to achieve just this!  We already have an organ that will purposefully introduce randomness into our thinking process so that we can come up with unique solutions and choices that are not predetermined by the universe or by our genes and past experiences (at least not exclusively).

Here's a paper I wrote about this that goes into this in more detail.  The brain is sooo cool.

want to learn about why the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the coolest part of the brain?

Flow, Education, and Ritalin
My eyes are glued to the screen. They rarely blink. They become irritated but I do not notice. I am in the zone. The force is with me. I feel it flow through me. I am coding. Even though the coding paradigm may not apply to everyone, we all know that feeling of hyper-attention. When an activity is so engrossing that the rest of the world fades away, we are left mano-a-mano, tête-à-tête, our ego and the task battling together for mutual gain.

I watch my cursed boulder tumble down my mountain. I heave a sigh of relief; my aching muscles allowed a brief respite. As I stand on its majestic craggy peak, I survey my mountain beneath me. My boulder is now far out of sight, but I can feel it down below in the darkness waiting for me. I send my thoughts out to it -- my boulder you are my work, my affliction, my friend and my enemy. I shall see you soon enough. In these seemingly countless days, logically countable but practically indistinguishable, my mind is not always so clear. At this instant I am aware -- tomorrow I may not be. I grasp the moment, tenderly. Let me slow it down and take joy in my thoughts. Before my curse -- I can barely remember -- I took my thoughts for granted. Mortal, I had a limited amount of time for thoughts, yet I did not enjoy them. Immortal, and now each thought is precious -- I have forever and thus have infinite thoughts, yet I take joy in each, insignificant as it is. The absurdity continues, the one constant along with my rock and my mountain to keep me company. Yet as I stand there, the cold rare mountain air turning my breath visible, I am happy.

Instead of writing seriously, I wrote an imaginary interview. BTW:Living in a van... happened in real life; C.com/"light goop" ...well it was supposed to be about the future!

FRAMBERG MAGAZINE INTERVIEW (Issue: March, 2018)
Today we interview Tim Tregubov,  one of the visionaries behind a small company that might just be changing the way we interact with the world.  C.com is responsible for MultiPhen technology and the company is developing promising new applications that will further integrate adaptive intelligent systems with the human system.  The company is being heralded as a forerunner of a new type of business model which they are calling engaged activism.   We will find out what makes him tick, what C.com is all about and how it originated.

What is the mind when it is happy and when it is unhappy? Most likely the answer is different for each person, but to understand it for myself I first need to discern when it is that I am happy. When I think about happiness the first concept that comes to mind is friendship. I have always heard people say that in college you make friends for life. The kind of friends that will be with you your whole life and will stick by you through everything. I never believed them. A lot of my friends are part-time, we sometimes keep in touch, mostly through the noncommittal medium of facebook. More recently however, I managed to make some friends who I feel I could call lifelong. I have always been slightly afraid of people, and social situations are often uncomfortable for me, yet I have unfailingly been drawn to take project classes. This seemed uncharacteristic for me until I realized that the times I feel most comfortable with someone are when there is a common external goal that we share. C.S. Lewis thought that true friendship, which he categorized as the love called philia, could only exist between people who share a common vision or activity. He claimed that because this was the least biologically necessary love, when it truly existed, it was the most admirable. He lauds friendship and says, "To the Ancients, Friendship [notice the capitalization] seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life…"¹ Through friends that I made over many shared hours in computer labs I now see more clearly what he meant. Lewis's various categories become blurry at this point yet the importance he places on shared interest remains.

Is it possible for humanity to consciously direct our own evolution and if so can we evolve to be better, smarter and faster? Can we evolve ourselves to be able to sustain an utopic society? In my intro to psychology class one of the professors told the following story. A professor experimented on his own newborn by reading Greek poetry to him. He read the same couple of paragraphs to him every day until the infant was six months old and then stopped. When the boy turned ten his father started having him memorize Greek passages. He counted how many repetitions the boy would need to fully memorize a passage and found that those paragraphs that the boy had previously been exposed as an infant required half the repetitions that the new passages took. This story is anecdotal and would require a better designed longitudinal study to prove, however it was inspirational for me and one of many such stories in that class that convinced me to change my major from computer science to cognitive science. I learned in that class that if we utilize the power of our learning brains, the possibilities for achievement both individually and as a society could be endless. I became fascinated with the question of how we can harness our learning, and specifically how technological solutions could be combined with cognitive science research to take learning to new levels.

They are afraid -- the great firewall of China, the blocking of Facebook in Pakistan, Bangladesh and others, Iran’s blocking of foreign media and the eventual temporary internet and text message blackout following 2009 presidential elections (Zuckerman, 2010), these are just a few instances of how powerful social and citizen media have become and how governments are attempting to cope with the loss of informational control. In countries where the press is tightly controlled, citizens, and often foreign media as well, turn to various self-reporting outlets such as Twitter, Indymedia, YouTube and other blogging sites. These social media networks allow not only information to disperse across borders with unprecedented ease (such as the case of Iran’s bloggers) but also allows cross-scale interaction between transnational actors and local, previously out-of-sight groups (such as the Mexican Zapatistas) (Dodds,K., 2007). It has become common to see Twitter and YouTube posts referenced on various American news outlets as part of their main news segments (Zuckerman, 2010).