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  1. Dec 2022
    1. Descartes, and others, when they were considering that mind is separate from body — notice that that theory fell apart because the theory of body was wrong; but the theory of mind may well have been right. But one of the things that they were concerned with was voluntary action. You decide to lift your finger. Nobody knows how that is possible; to this day we haven’t a clue. The scientists who work on voluntary motion — one of them is Emilio Bizzi, he’s one of MIT’s great scientists, one of the leading scientists who works on voluntary motion — he and his associate Robert Ajemian recently wrote a state-of-the-art article for the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in which they describe what has been discovered about voluntary motion. They say they’ll put the outcome “fancifully.” It’s as if we’re coming to understand the puppet and the strings, but we know nothing about the puppeteer. That remains as much a mystery as it has been since classical Greece. Not an inch of progress; nothing. Well, maybe that’s another permanent mystery.

      !- example : permanent mystery - Descartes study of mind & body and voluntary motion - MIT researcher Emilio Bizzi concludes we don't know why