Bruce Hood is currently the Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol. He has been a research fellow at Cambridge University and University College London, a visiting scientist at MIT and a faculty professor at Harvard. The author of Supersense, and most recently The Self Illusion, Bruce also presented the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
Posted in: Little Atoms
David Roemer
October 3, 2012
Free will means human beings possess a center of action that makes them unified with respect to themselves and different from other humans. In other words, humans are finite beings. Bruce Hood stated that humans do not have free will. This is just a theory to answer the question: “What is the self?†It is clear from his remarks that the only other theory he grasps is dualism, the theory that there is a spiritual little man inside our brains that controls our body. Another theory is idealism, which is that a spiritual being is all that exists and the human body is an illusion created by God. The theory with the most evidence is that the self is a mystery. This is expressed by saying humans are embodied spirits. Or, the human soul is spiritual. Or, humans are indefinabilites that become conscious of their own existence. Bruch Hood has a blind spot about the human mind at all its levels: observation, inquiry, judgment, and deciding what to do with our bodies.