Determinism.....

[amw79]

So when you say the subconscious decides before the conscious do you mean it decides while we are still thinking 'maybe I should do this or maybe that', or do you mean it decides just before us, meaning it chooses the act just before we decide that is the best action to take?

It means that even if we think we are making the decision to pick up the ball, our subconscious mind has already made the decision, a few nanoseconds before we think we have. I forget the research paper that convinced me (it was quite recently though), but the experiments involved watching people's brains react as they make decisions.

Dan Dennett covered some of these experiments in 'Freedom Evolves'. Roughly speaking it involved people hitting a button when a quickly moving hand on a clock hit a certain point on the clock face, while also mentally noting when (on the clock face) they actively 'decided' to hit the button.

The results of brain activity monitoring concluded that a decision was made in the brain, fractions of a second before the subject subsequently repoted making the decision, which in turn was fractions of a second before the button was hit.

Obviously this type of thing isn't conclusive, as it relies on the subjects accurate reporting, post-experiment.

Adrian, if you're thinking of a different, more recent paper on this, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction to this paper.