> Scientific studies have shown that decisions are registered in the brain’s motor cortex milliseconds before a person decides to move, suggesting that in the brief moments before you become aware of what you will do next, your brain has already decided your next step.
I always find the conclusion to this being that it shows we don't have free will to be missing a key point; it only means that if we are expecting our 'consciousness' to exist outside of our physical reality.
Our consciousness and our free will and everything that is us IS our brain and body and biochemistry. Of COURSE our brain waves show up before we are aware of them, because our brain waves ARE our awareness. It is not coming before our awareness, it IS our awareness.
I feel like the conclusion people make is along the lines of, "Hah! See, you aren't in control of your actions, your brain is!" That is us! Yes, our decisions are influenced by the physical world because we are part of the physical world. This is the same as the example of Charles Whitman. Yes, his actions were at least partially caused by his brain tumor, because his brain tumor was part of him. It changed who he was, but that is still him. Your brain is a physical thing, that doesn't make it not you.
The coupling of "responsibility" and "free will" has always been a questionable feature of the modern justice system, I personally don't have any issue with that part in your linked article.
However, on "free will" itself, the GP's point (which I agree with) is that the logic that "you don't have free will because XXX determines your choices" is flawed in the sense that, if XXX is actually you (or at least a part of you), then there's no conflict. The fallacy or problem is that it is very hard to define who oneself is, and as such we have culturally been indoctrinated to believe that we aren't our brains, we aren't the society that influences us, but some sort of abstract thing that totally lies beyond the reach of the physical world. (And many people believe this assumption even though they logically know that's not true.)
In a sense the reason for this flawed assumption might come back to the concept of "responsibility". When society wants to blame and punish some poor soul for making their own "free choices", it's convenient to invent this abstract, ill-defined but "free" personality so that the rest of society can distance itself away to disclaim any associated responsibility. Because, if we don't apply this mental trick, upon closer inspection, a lot of "moral wrongs" committed by "bad people" would turn out to be the result of influences of their environment. We want to pretend bad people are inherently bad, so nobody else gets a share of the blame.
I don't know. Freewill has been meaning less and less for me over the years. Right now I'm between "there is no freewill" and "there might some, but waaay less than we usually think there is.
I'm no Zen monk, but having studied a bit of Zen-Buddhism and having practiced meditation for close to 10 years in a regular manner, the idea that we might not have freewill doesn't sound all that bad.
I think people are putting way to much emphasis on the concept of an "I" who has or doesn't have freewill. Trying to figure out whether or not we are "free" is like the eye who tries to see itself, or the fire that tries to burn itself. Maybe science is finally catching up to the Buddhist concept of the absence of ego.
For me the biggest implication is that, and this is my own personal lighthouse in these dark and uncertain times, true freedom is not having options or the "freedom" to choose. True freedom is not needing anything to be my real self and to be at peace. Zen is the real self.
How can one prevent a drop of water from ever drying up?By throwing it into the sea.
If it exists, we can make our own decisions and change them however.
If it doesn't, we wouldn't know anyway. Because if free will does not exist, then even your choice of whether or not to believe in it is predetermined. I would have no choice on whether or not to post this, you would have no choice on whether or not to read it, no choice on whether or not to respond, etc. Turtles all the way down. Even if I were to type all of this up and then not post it, that's what I would do. I didn't have the choice to do that. It's just the sum of the stimuli working on me. All of which also does not have free will.
But there is absolutely no way to test it either. No matter what test you can conceive, the test would be different by the very nature of being held at a different time. Let's say we put you in a room. And in this room, is a table, chair, and a marshmallow on a plate. You have to stay in the room for 30 minutes. You may eat the marshmallow or not. No reward or punishment is given depending on your actions. Then the next day, we do it again, to see if you make a different choice. If you make a different choice, does that prove you have free will?
No. Because it is a different day and today the circumstances are different because yesterday you participated in the test, whereas yesterday when you participated in the test, it was the first time you had. That very experience informs your future decisions.
The only way to truly test free will would be to rewind existence itself and see if you could make a different decision on that first test.
So we can't know if it exists and the difference between it existing and it not existing is imperceptible. So it truly does not matter.
And if that information makes turns you into a callous asshole who thinks the lack of free will absolves them of any blame, that's what was going to happen. Because there are those who will not think that and hold you accountable still because they believe in free will or believe that even still, we shouldn't be dicks to others.
It aimed to be a thesis on the topic that anyone could verify by interrogating their own experience. As opposed to most approaches that appeal to either religion or scientific studies.
The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, cannot even know).
This explains why the "will I/won’t I drop the pen” test of free will is a perfect example of why free will is both real and irrelevant. Of course you have a perfectly free opportunity to either drop or not drop the pen; the choice has (for most of us) almost no bearing on our actual desires.
This aligns well with some of my thoughts on free will. That though I cannot control what I desire as long as I am not constrained by outside forces I am acting of my own will.
This of course is compatibilism[0] which I nearly instantaneously gravitated towards conceptually during my philosophy minor some moons ago, though I don't entirely agree with it. I would add that free will is the ability to act in accordance with one's desires AND choose how to act within a limited possibility space presented by previous determined circumstance towards those desires.
I disagree with your prioritizing comment though, a simple test here is do I put off video games to work on my own projects, the answer is yes, even though I in the immediacy maybe more intensely desire to play video games. Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit.
> a simple test here is do I put off video games to work on my own projects, the answer is yes, even though I in the immediacy maybe more intensely desire to play video games
I’m not sure how this contradicts my prioritizing comment. When you do put off video games, you are not changing the order of your desires, you are revealing how they are already ordered.
>Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit.
That's basically living with ADHD - so about 2% to 7% of all people have a lot less free will than the rest.
I'm a physicalist, there's nothing in my view that says biological disorders can't affect the effectiveness of the software, free will must in my view be an effect provided by our bodies and a disorder can surely remove it.
Just as sure as if you were lobotomized, you'd lose free will.
Edit: Plus upon re reading this and not just giving a two second flippant response, you did not clearly read my reply (which I ironically did not then read yours correctly either). I was talking about the ability to prioritize desires, not free will itself on the part you quoted.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue with you - just trying to share an observation from my own life.
The experience of the inner monologue in my brain not being able to control what the rest of my body is doing when not on meds sure does feel like a crippled down version of free will
> The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, cannot even know).
Schopenhauer:
> Man can do what he wills; but he cannot will what he wills.
Right; the argument is more that free will is beside the point; anyone can interrogate their own experience and verify that it is their desires over which they have no control, so it makes no difference whether you have “free will” or not. (I agree that “free will” probably evaporates at the biological level)
> I have a hard time taking any argument for free will too seriously without a suggestion for a mechanism that would make it possible.
Well obviously there is no known mechanism at this point. As far as we know all matter obeys the laws of physics and our brain is no exception. Even if you want to suppose quantum effects are present in the brain (unlikely), that would at most impart some degree of randomness.
The real nail in the coffin for any potential new scientific discovery that could cause free will is that this would have to entail some localized overriding of the currently known laws of nature to work - your motor neurons, or their inputs/etc, not being driven by chemistry but rather by this new "force" overriding chemistry.
The problem of course is that no-one has ever observed the laws of chemistry not being observed, not even once, in our brain or elsewhere, which seems a major problem given that "free will" is subjectively happening non-stop.
So, while it's not inconceivable that some new force/whatever might be discovered that controls matter in ways we've not seen, the real problem is that in this case there is no problem to solve! It's not like postulated "dark matter" invented to solve a problem with gravity ... in the case of brain/body function there is no mystery to solve, and no need for new physics - our brain/body appears to operate entirely under the control of the currently known laws of nature, which doesn't leave anything for undiscovered physics (or dualistic "souls") to control!
I have a hard time taking arguments against it seriously since they all rest on aspects created entirely by your brain.
Your arm moving a split second before you decide to move it just means you, and your will, are more complex than we expected. All arguments against free will rely on describing the brain as a mathematical and statistical model that predicts the universe.
Yet mathematical and statistical models are a feature of the brain and the actual topology of its mechanisms isn’t even close to understood.
But the brain is, at most, incidental to any of this. The starting point has to be causality violation, no? If all observed actions are either direct or no-hidden-variable-random consequences of previous states, what room is there for free will?
Citation needed. What we call the universe is our brains model of reality it isn’t divine law. It’s more objective than intuition, to be sure, but until we have to do science with completely unrelated minds we’re stuck formalizing our own brains.
I was thinking about the spontaneous appearance of particle anti-particle pairs in a vacuum. Can you say conditions x, y, and z are responsible for those particles appearing at that instant and there's no other way it could have gone?
Particle/anti-particle pairs don't really "pop into existence" in any meaningful sense, so probably not the best example of randomness.
We do see unpredictable effects (randomness) quite often, though. Bell's theorem provides some constrains on their source.
But for one to exercise free will (selection of one of multiple future states from a given present state) to, say, not eat the last oreo by biasing quantum randomness to invoke a whole chain of high-gain non-linear effects (maybe have a sodium ion change it's momentum slightly to cause a neuron to trigger to... etc etc... to send different actuation commands to the muscles to pick up the cookie) would require not just a mechanism for this free-will biasing but also retrocausality to let something in the system "know" that this was the place in its orbital where the electron had to interact in order to choose to leave the cookie until tomorrow. The use of a high-gain effect chain means that the initial instance of free will is smaller, and therefore more likely that we've just not noticed it so far, but it makes it harder to put together a meaningful story for how these free will instances reflect a "choice" instead of just a statistical divergence.
As fas as I know there is no known mechanism for why consciousness exists. Do you have a similar view towards arguments in favor of the existence of consciousness? What about the laws of physics? There’s no known mechanism for how they came about. People studied gravity well before they came up with plausible theories for its existence and how exactly it operates (at a large enough scale).
I think you would have to have similar arguments for consciousness as well?
Certainly I don't think there's much argument that the laws of physics are a moderately good fit for observed phenomenon. They came about by generations of physicists refining previous models.
I would consider the question of why mathematical models that fit observed phenomenon exist at all to be an open question.
My point is that before the refined physics theories we have today people had to poke around in the dark, so to speak. I don’t think it’s valid to critique the argument you responded to on the grounds you mentioned. What you require before you will consider something, if adopted by everyone, would impede progress.
But without some level of mechanism, arguments for free will and arguments for God end up looking very similar. They both have massive explanatory power, are consistent with many people's claimed subjective experience, and are unfalsifiable.
Why did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? God did it; it was the causal result of initial conditions; the asteroid or some other party acted non-causally (free will). Of these, I've seen the most evidence for the existence of initial conditions, Boltzmann brains notwithstanding.
Nothing "real" exists exactly the way we perceive it. The world we experience is one where the amount of detail has been compressed by an extreme factor. We don't perceive the quantum fields of the surfaces we touch, we don't perceive individual photons hitting our eyes. The "real" world contains so much information that our brains have no way to process it in detail.
Instead, our brains will create a model of the world that is optimized for utility (in a Darwinian sense). In fact, this happens at different levels. Some centers of the brain (those that regulate basic functions as well as sensory input) will have access to different information to what reaches our consciousness.
A "purple" flower doesn't emit "purple" photons, but rather a combination of photons that our sensory system aggregate to "purple". Another mix of the same types of photons, but at different relative number may look "brown", "gray", "white", etc. In other words, all such qualia are some kind of illusion, or maybe more accurately, aggregated information.
The same is true for most categories of concepts. Physical objects, surfaces, fluids, living objects, etc. Including what we think of as "agents".
"Agents", whether they are the tiger we imagine in the forest, another human or indeed ourselves, and whether real or imagined, are also way too complex for us to comprehend in detail.
What we're interested in (or rather, what has Darwinian utility) when dealing with "Agents", as opposed to non-"Agents", is that "Agents" tend to respond to stimuli in more sophisticated ways than non-"Agents". If we look big and scary, a wolf may decide not to eat us or a robber from robbing us, but it will not stop a house fire from burning us.
As a consequence, there are actions we may take to improve the odds that the "agent" types around us behave in ways that are beneficial to us. Just like we're not able to comprehend something as simple as "real" photons behind the color "purple", our brain is not able to calculate EXACTLY what we can do to reach that goal, however.
Instead we (most of us) seem to have a simplified framework more or less built in to find something approximate to optimal ways to modify the environment in ways that affect the behavior of the "agents" around us. "Free will" or "consciousness" or not perfect representations of the ways the brains of "agents" work. But the concepts are simple enough that our brains can reason about them (at some level), while predictive enough to have significant utility and also to be hard to "hack" for an agent that may have conflicting interests.
Roughly speaking, the utility of the concept "free will" is that it allows us to communicate to others a set of behaviors that are likely to be met with retribution, while mostly limiting such threats to situations where the threat itself is likely to prevent the unwanted behavior from happening in the first place.
Actually having to dish out punishment is usually not high utility behavior. It can be both costly and expensive. Having to do it, can mean one (or more) out of three things:
1) The punishment isn't harsh enough
2) The adversary does not see the threat as credible. A thief may think they will not be caught, or a state leader thinks the ally of a country will not help defend them.
3) The adversary is not able to understand the threat, or in some other way incapable of taking the threat into account when acting.
In the case of the last one, one can have a rule that punishes people from killing other people, for instance. If the punishment is severe enough, and the likelihood of getting caught is close to 100%, most people will stop killing each other. However, SOME people will not be able to take the information into account for some reason or another. It could be that they go into a rage that make them ignore any kind of upcoming punishment, there may be some kind of mental disease, they may not have enough intelligence to understand the threat, or avoiding killing them could require some skill they do not possess (maybe they were not able to tell the gun was real, and indeed loaded).
If we were able to isolate all cases that fall under type 3, we might call those cases acts should not be punished, in other words, they did not have the "free will" to avoid them.
But the distinction may be hard to identify. Making too many exceptions will often both increase the number of people who do not see a threat of punishment as credible AND also increase the number of people that would be able to understand what the rule was.
So, basically:
- "Free will" is a simplification of the kind of process that causes threat of punishment to prevent us to do some set of actions that will be met by retribution. If legal systems (or similar informal retribution threats) are set up properly, those who actually have "free will" about the type of action, will really be punished for it.
- Those who DO get punished will very often NOT have "free will", in the sense that they are unresponsive to stimuli about that type of action. When people DO end up in prison (and assuming that punishment is strict enough and the police is able to catch most criminals), will be those NOT responsive to the threat of punishment, for some reason or another.
- This may still provide close to optimal utility for the set of people who decide what to punish. The cost of punishing those who are for some reason not able to avoid doing the "crime" is lower to that group than the benefit gained by the threat causing many others to NOT commit the "crime", when they otherwise would have.
- Indeed, since we are not capable of a fully detailed analysis of the "real" things happening inside the brains of "agents", we have no choice but using a simplified model. Some concept like "Free Will" is probably needed to lay out consequences of actions. Also some people have more of an ability to understand the details and limitations of such models, so simpler models have the advantage that it is easier to communicate. (To children, people with limited cognitive abilities or immigrants with poor cultural understanding.)
At this point, I could start writing about how empathy comes into this, how empathy is modulated by a feeling of kinship or shard identity as well as a perception of being threatened by someone, but that would make this post quite long :)
While my decisions seem to be handled via unconscious processes ahead of my conscious brain taking credit for them, I feel like what's often glossed over is what the effect is after that point. Presumably whether the conscious brain takes credit for an action of the physical body is feedback to those unconscious processes. When my consciousness notices my body doing things it doesn't take credit for (like, say, mindlessly putting the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge), this should serve as a signal to the physical system that it failed to predict a decision the conscious brain would have made, had it the ability to do so.
So sure, maybe all my decisions are on rails, and I experience the illusion of having made them. But there's no reason to dismiss that illusion as immaterial. It can be thought of as a sanity check. A sort of after-the-fact free will for future unconscious processes to consider. Which in practice, feels exactly like the free will of having made the decision in the first place.
This article, and some of these comments, come from a pretty naive place in terms of attention control. Most of the examples experienced by the author have very little even to do with will.
There are people who spend their entire lives directing their attention internally. Instead of experiencing your own relatively unexplored subjective experience and then extrapolating it, what if you consulted the experts?
Others can definitely stabilize their attention to the point where they avoid responding to the stimulus of a moving trash can.
Even if free will isn't a binary of "have it or don't have it", the extent to which we live lives of our own choosing seems very limited. There are some who have the resources to make big changes in their lives, but for most of humanity, the opportunities for change are quite limited.
Our laws and economic systems are structured as if we all have complete autonomy. What if we don't?
“Moreover, the deterministic perspective allows for compassion towards others. And this applies to anyone — those who are criminals, members of the opposite political party, the guy who cut you off on the highway on-ramp, and anyone less fortunate than you. Because these humans did not choose their parents, did not choose the society they were born into, and did not create the cells in their body, they cannot be to blame for their actions — they have merely been dealt some unfortunate life playing cards. In a certain sense, awareness of the deterministic model can be an antidote to the arrogance and hatred that are rampant in modern society.”
Even if universe is deterministic, humans are still Turing complete, which means the end result of our thoughts is not known in advance, even if pre-determined. The only way to guess our behavior exactly is by letting it unravel.
I like to use the fact that you can't actually touch anything as an analogy for my thoughts on free will. Atoms repel each other and so when you place your finger on something, it can never really make contact. Likewise, we can't really decide anything; our decisions are just a product of our brain and environment. But I think it's silly to say we can't touch things or decide things. The repulsion by the atomic forces is what we really mean when we say "touch", and the way our brains respond to the environment is what we mean by "decide". The words still have meaning even though we have a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind them.
I also like to point out that although we may not have free will, we still are not fully predictable as the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic.
It goes over my head, but those with a better understanding of quantum mechanics should check out the Free Will Theorem lectures by John Conway for interesting thoughts on the subject.
I get the feeling that a lot of people, like the author, think philosophy is easy, but in my opinion, it is damn hard. And one can't go on talking about something that they don't even define.
I think the problem with the whole free will argument is that it seems like one would be 'free' to choose otherwise even if say your temperament/preferences/values/etc would exclude such counter-actions. It seems like one isn't so 'free' from those conditions anymore than a person is 'free' from the influence of gravity.
This doesn't mean we're solely on auto-pilot. People do change with circumstances over time but it's not on the drop of the hat that they change 'at-will.' That part seems to be the contention, in my opinion.
And as for being aware of every choice you make, that just seems like a pointless distinction. I've often made decisions that weren't just based on what I was aware of at a given moment but probably due to past information still lingering in my mind even if I wasn't directly aware of it. This just means we're a multi-layered being that isn't free of causality which is different from perfect determinism/causality (as in all cause and effect chains can only occur as the given sequence and no deviation from said sequences are possible).
I find it hard to argue about these claims. Might be because of a complete lack of definitions in the article, and most articles that deal with free will.
> Every decision we make can be reduced back not to our agency as individuals, but instead simply to a set of neurons firing
Why not? I thought that pile of firing neurons IS an individual.
> in the brief moments before you become aware of what you will do next, your brain has already decided your next step
I'm pretty sure "me" and "my brain" are the same person. I am observing my own thoughts ("consciousness"). I guess it takes a while to close this feedback loop, but it's still "me" on both sides of it, right?
> Neuroscience has confirmed there is no physical place where the “self” exists in the brain.
I'm pretty sure the place is "inside my skull". Too large, or what? Would "inside left prefrontal lobe" be more acceptable, if that was the case? Or would the question just shift to "But where in the prefrontal lobe?"
> Intellectual determinism dismisses free will as theology because for us to be truly the way we experience ourselves, we must possess non-physical minds — or something like souls. A soul, like Hinduism’s atman, or a Godhead linking individual consciousness to a higher source conscious, could account for free will, but there’s no place for that in the contemporary materialistic model…
I've never understood how a higher plane or soul or whatever would get you to free will. It seems to me that the fundamental disproof of free will is the existence of cause and effect: if you trace through the causal chain of your actions, at some point you find some cause that wasn't you (in the limit case, the big bang). If it turns out the root cause of your actions is a soul or whatever, how is that "you"? How is that free will? And then also, what causes your soul?
Basically, if there is no free will, there is no point in debating, because it is already determined what you will believe in a way that has no relationship to logic.
In addition, without free will a lot of what we consider human rights are meaningless. For example, freedom of speech, freedom of religion are useless in a deterministic world.
Morality itself is pointless in a world without free will.
Kind of like Pascal's wager, if you are wrong about there being free will when there isn't, it doesn't change anything. If you are wrong about there not being free will when there is, it is a big problem.
> Basically, if there is no free will, there is no point in debating, because it is already determined what you will believe in a way that has no relationship to logic.
I don’t understand this. There are plenty of tasks with deterministic outcomes that are no less worth doing. Sorting a big list of numbers is deterministic, yet it’s often worth doing. There are many tasks which are deterministic but have results which cannot be “predicted” any faster than by simply performing the task.
I think of it this way: if our current understanding of physics is correct, then there is no room for free will. Everything is subatomic particles acting according to known laws. Cause and effect rules all. If, on the other hand, free will exists, then our understanding of the physical world is completely wrong. In which case all the arguments against souls, gods, demons, precognition, the afterlife, magic, and everything else weird and spooky goes out the window.
> Basically, if there is no free will, there is no point in debating
But if there is no free will, you should not even try to stop someone from debating if there is a free will, because they have no choice but to debate it.
Of course I realize that if there is no free will you have no choice but to try to stop people from debating if there is a free will.
OK, I'm going to choose to stop going down this rabbit hole now.
The other part of it is that without free will, you don't have the choice on what you decide is moral, etc.
Human rights might be cosmically meaningless, but there would still be those who act as if they do have meaning. And they would have no choice in the matter.
A world without free will looks exactly like the world with free will. And that's why it's pointless.
Nietzsche argues that the idea of free will is a remainder of the Abrahamic faiths, who use it to justify certain theological points.
The point on the latency between the body and conscious mind is certainly crucial to any discussion on free will.
I tend to 'believe' that free will and fate are not mutually exclusive - they seem to weave together into something more closely resembling 'destiny'. Perhaps our sciences will get to the bottom of it, but for now, 'destiny' is my working model.
> Scientific studies have shown that decisions are registered in the brain’s motor cortex milliseconds before a person decides to move, suggesting that in the brief moments before you become aware of what you will do next, your brain has already decided your next step.
This is probably one of the most important yet overlooked findings in all of science. Free will as it's normally conceived is an illusion. The conscious mind is along for the ride, not in charge. The feeling of being in charge is an illusion. (It's pretty easy to reveal this to yourself: just try to change one major habit. Or try to think of a single thought (like a red triangle or pink elephant) for more than a few moments.)
Anyway from there the question is raised, "if there is no free will, what do you do with this information?" It should be immediately obvious this is a foolish question: we just said there's no free will so you don't do anything with the information, because you don't do anything at all.
> The conscious mind is along for the ride, not in charge.
If you look at extremely simple choices, you may be able to say this. But these generally aren't the sorts of decisions we walk about when we talk about free will. Perhaps an analogy to business can help make the distinction. A CEO is only going to be informed after the fact, if at all, of the minor details of how a business operates. But the CEO is setting much broader directions and is indirectly regulating those who make the minor decisions.
Or more logically pedantically, you could simply say that the existence of some choices that happen before conscious awareness of them doesn't mean all choices happen that way.
I can focus on a red triangle for as long as I would like. I can also change any of my major habits that I would like (and I have done so recently).
I don't think that study shows that we don't control our own actions. Certainly 99%+ of our actions on a daily basis are instinctual/unconscious, but my unconscious is something that I consciously shape and develop over time. Nobody has perfect agency in a particular moment; your immediate choices are the outcome of the agency you exercised over the past months and years. You still have the free will to change, it just takes time.
Am I an outlier? I think probably most people could focus on a red triangle for 10 minutes or something, if they wanted to, to "prove" that they had free will.
Changing major habits is much harder, I would agree, but it's just something you have to work at & study. Nobody will change if they aren't motivated to do so. I don't think that really is a free will issue.
> (It's pretty easy to reveal this to yourself: just try to change one major habit. Or try to think of a single thought (like a red triangle or pink elephant) for more than a few moments.)
I don't have the ability to visualize at all (I have aphantasia), so I can't comment about visualizing triangles. I have and do change habits in small ways almost daily, and have made some big changes when necessary.
I think there is a misconception that free will involves immediate results with one simple thought that's more akin to magic than anything else. "I now no longer crave ice cream!", "Poof!", done. I think my aphantasia has helped me realize how much of our brains are not directly controllable. When a lot of people work through a problem consciously, I'm usually starting to do that then "fading away", coming back only later with or without a solution (sort of like highway hypnosis). Maybe everyone does this, but I don't hear it talked about that often, and people around me have found it strange when I do this around them. Must not be completely uncommon I guess because the phrase "lost in thought" is pretty common.
I think of our brains as housing more than just the conscious "me", it also involves other portions of the brain that aren't directly accessible. Thus we try to affect other areas of the brain in different ways. Sometimes a simple command works, other times we have to trick or cajole or excite another portion of us to do it for us, sometimes many many times (such as when instilling a new habit or changing an old one). If this cajoling, intimidating, engaging, or influencing isn't exerting free will, I don't know what is.
...unless the other parts of our brains are showing us unreliable information in order to get us to make the changes they want us to make, which I hope isn't true. But that's a fight for control which would imply free will anyway, I guess.
> Anyway from there the question is raised, "if there is no free will, what do you do with this information?" It should be immediately obvious this is a foolish question: we just said there's no free will so you don't do anything with the information, because you don't do anything at all.
That's not to say that you (meaning your brain/body) might behave differently in the future as a result of deducing or being exposed to this idea, but nothing you can do about that.
Evolution may have selected to strengthen the illusion of free will (although the illusion itself is just due our innate association of actions with actors), since I'd imagine believing you have no control over your actions would be pretty deadly!
To be precise, the study demonstrated that the decision is registered before the person is able to report having decided. In other words, the oversight of consciousness is simply delayed. This seems perfectly reasonable: the brain is mechanical, there are limits on "bandwidth" and simultaneity.
> Or try to think of a single thought (like a red triangle or pink elephant) for more than a few moments.
This is something that people can and have trained themselves on. It's far from impossible, even if it's not a simple skill.
> To be precise, the study demonstrated that the decision is registered before the person is able to report having decided. In other words, the oversight of consciousness is simply delayed. This seems perfectly reasonable: the brain is mechanical, there are limits on "bandwidth" and simultaneity.
Good point, and I appreciate the clarification. It still seems to suggest (to me) that the "locus" (if there is one) of decision making is in the unconscious portion of the mind, no?
> This is something that people can and have trained themselves on. It's far from impossible, even if it's not a simple skill.
This is what I was hoping to talk about: the idea that we (might) start out as "meat robots" but we have the capacity to develop free will and become "real people" (whatever that might mean.)
Interesting angle, that free will has a quantity. I can certainly see an argument that a more intelligent being has more freedom -- because it has more options available -- so perhaps also more free will.
So by that logic, if there is free will I should be able to fly if I want to? We're still bound by the laws of reality, including our own brain chemistry. Our wills have to work in the confines of the reality they try to manipulate.
I don't even know what the concept is supposed to mean. Is there an experiment we can do to test to see if the universe has free will, like we can for other physical properties? If not, then we're arguing about an undecidable, like Zeus' shoe size.
Free will is limited. For instance did you choose your parents? Did you get to choose where you would be born? So right from birth you don't have much free will. But make the best of what you got
I always find the conclusion to this being that it shows we don't have free will to be missing a key point; it only means that if we are expecting our 'consciousness' to exist outside of our physical reality.
Our consciousness and our free will and everything that is us IS our brain and body and biochemistry. Of COURSE our brain waves show up before we are aware of them, because our brain waves ARE our awareness. It is not coming before our awareness, it IS our awareness.
I feel like the conclusion people make is along the lines of, "Hah! See, you aren't in control of your actions, your brain is!" That is us! Yes, our decisions are influenced by the physical world because we are part of the physical world. This is the same as the example of Charles Whitman. Yes, his actions were at least partially caused by his brain tumor, because his brain tumor was part of him. It changed who he was, but that is still him. Your brain is a physical thing, that doesn't make it not you.