Human Intelligence is an Illusion

[The__Chameleon]

Imagine a master painter creating a masterpiece one brush stroke at a time. Each movement of his hand meticulously chosen to create the desired effect. Yet, what if each of those motions was chosen for him before he was consciously aware of the choice and only took credit for it upon the moment of that awareness? Experiments by Libet, Soon, Fried, Haynes and others suggest exactly that.

No they don't.

Experiments suggest that our brains decide what we're going to do it before we're conscious of it.

This is very different.

Are you conscious of all the visual processing going on in your brain to determine that what you are looking at is an apple regardless of whether someone moves it up, down, sideways, further away, throws it, partially hides it or shines a blue light on it?

Moravec's paradox tells us that the majority of intelligence is devoted to these kind of tasks that we take for granted. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.

If decisions are made in the brain before we are conscious of having made them, then "we" didn't make them, our brains did this unconsciously, just like processing visual information to identify an object. If we (our conscious self) can't take credit for having made a given choice, then we attribute this choice to an unconscious process. Unconscious processes are natural processes since a vital component of intelligence (as many would define it) is conscious choice. Without it there is no distinction from any autonomic response in the body.


Would you consider instincts to be natural or intelligent? What I propose is that humans possess highly evolved instincts masquerading as free will. These instincts (or the parts of the brain associated with them) react to and process input automatically rather than in response to a conscious choice. Our conscious awareness of these natural responses gives us the impression that our conscious mind initiated them when in fact this impression is false.