Monkeys Have Telekinesis

Monkeys have telekinesis. Well, not really. But this is fascinating.

My first instinct was to think about the impact of this study on the body mind question (really an age-old area of questions in philosophy: what is the nature of the mind? What is the nature of the mental causation of physical actions?). But it is largely an engineering breakthrough. Not to minimize; it’s an incredible engineering breakthrough. But for quite a while now, we’ve known that muscles work with electric impulses, transmitted by nerves, and having their origin in the brain. The interpretation/realization of these impulses is now mysterious only insofar as it is scientifically complex.

Obviously, science has not yet completely eviscerated the brain of its mystery. The signals powering the prosthetics in this experiment are pretty far down the causal chain. Thoughts directing actions come only after intent, identification, and a whole host of other thoughts not directly related to action (such as those driving a rambling, sprawling blog post). Those thoughts must still have some fundamental electrical basis, right? What would it be for a machine to start reading those thoughts, to get aboard the chain a little earlier? Actually I suppose this is what we’d call artificial intelligence – crossing over from a machine simply following instructions to a machine forming intentions (perhaps based on pre-programmed meta-intentions, but still…).