Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[Tino]

We appear to have free will do we? How so?

The lack of evidence to the contrary is what convinces me.

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However, as I was saying, chemical reactions in our brain control us and from what I've heard, scientists have actually done brain scans on people, observing the chemical reaction that leads them to make a choice before the choice is actually made. I still think we're slaves to those chemical reactions in our brain, if not for our entire consciousness being those chemical reactions in the first place.

I found the conclusions from those studies to be grossly over-extended. Here's an explanation of it, better than I can write, from this article http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...free-will/

For instance, doesn’t neuroscience show that our brains make decisions before we are conscious of them such that our conscious decisions are bypassed? With these questions, we can move past the debates about whether free will requires souls or indeterminism — debates that neuroscience does not settle — and examine actual neuroscientific evidence. Consider, for instance, research by neuroscientists suggesting that non-conscious processes in our brain cause our actions, while conscious awareness of what we are doing occurs later, too late to influence our behavior. Some interpret this research as showing that consciousness is merely an observer of the output of non-conscious mechanisms. Extending the paradigm developed by Benjamin Libet, John-Dylan Haynes and his collaborators used fMRI research to find patterns of neural activity in people’s brains that correlated with their decision to press either a right or left button up to seven seconds before they were aware of deciding which button to press. Haynes concludes: “How can I call a will ‘mine’ if I don’t even know when it occurred and what it has decided to do?”

However, the existing evidence does not support the conclusion that free will is an illusion. First of all, it does not show that a decision has been made before people are aware of having made it. It simply finds discernible patterns of neural activity that precede decisions. If we assume that conscious decisions have neural correlates, then we should expect to find early signs of those correlates “ramping up” to the moment of consciousness. It would be miraculous if the brain did nothing at all until the moment when people became aware of a decision to move. These experiments all involve quick, repetitive decisions, and people are told not to plan their decisions but just to wait for an urge to come upon them. The early neural activity measured in the experiments likely represents these urges or other preparations for movement that precede conscious awareness.

This is what we should expect with simple decisions. Indeed, we are lucky that conscious thinking plays little or no role in quick or habitual decisions and actions. If we had to consciously consider our every move, we’d be bumbling fools. We’d be like perpetual beginners at tennis, overthinking every stroke. We’d be unable to speak fluently, much less dance or drive. Often we initially attend consciously to what we are doing precisely to reach the point where we act without consciously attending to the component decisions and actions in our complex endeavors. When we type, tango, or talk, we don’t want conscious thinking to precede every move we make, though we do want to be aware of what we’re doing and correct any mistakes we’re making. Conscious attention is relatively slow and effortful. We must use it wisely.