"Free Will" Belief/Disbelief Poll

[ib.me.ub]

Very interesting. Perhaps coincidense, but I came across this little piece by accidently clicking on the wrong link. It does make sense after all, perhaps because of the way it is explained. Short and precise.

Wired Science News for Your Neurons

Is Free Will an Illusion?

Choices.

Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it.

If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid?

Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand;
seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.

Link: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/0...e-will-an/

After reading more about this subject, I have now learnt that 'free will' as defined in the dictionary, is in part, false.

"free will" being a brain function, and hence physically determined and not free at all!

This makes sense with the current definition of free will.

free will
 –noun
1.
free and independent choice; voluntary decision: You took on the responsibility of your own free will.
2.
Philosophy . the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.

As described in part two, free will is false.

This leads into greater questions though, which I have thought about. This phenomenon of the sub-concious, and the 7 second delay, could be one of the resons for the belief in god/gods/devine beings.

Could it be possible that people are confusing the sub-conscious with god!