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Thread: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

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    Default The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    https://www.braindecoder.com/the-fru..._medium=social

    This article has been copied and pasted in full below.


    "Imagine sitting in a chair, flexing your wrist at random. As far as you know, you decide to flex your wrist, and then you flex it. Decide, flex. Decide, flex.
    But what if you found out that while you're sitting peacefully, not planning your next movement, your brain is ahead of the game? What if, in fact, our decisions are made in our subconscious before our conscious mind ever becomes aware of them?

    Those are ideas raised by studies stretching back into the 1980s — studies that have led many in the neuroscience community to argue that free will is nothing but an illusion. Our actions, according to this line of thought, are determined mostly subconsciously. When we become conscious of our intentions, we can usually give a reasonable explanation for our choices, but that's all retrospective. There is no "ghost in the machine" swooping in to make decisions against our brain activity — how could there be, when we are the sum of our brain activity?

    But don't sound the death knell for free will just yet. Despite tantalizing evidence that our brains are doing much more than we're aware of, free will may still exist. It just hasn't been proven yet.

    Goodbye, free will?

    The idea that we might need to prove something as self-evident as free will probably seems odd. As humans, we feel with certainty that we're making conscious choices about our day-to-day lives.

    In fact, though, we can conduct a wide array of activities without consciousness at all.

    "Most of what our brains do is unconscious," said Thalia Wheatley, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth University. "I'm not conscious about every word I'm about to say … I'm not conscious of the fact that I'm pacing around my kitchen right now and my feet aren't tripping."

    But these are the activities we do with a brain on autopilot. What about the things we intentionally attend to and decisions we make explicitly? A series of experiments carried out in the 1980s by psychologist Benjamin Libet suggest that even our "conscious" choices may not be so conscious, after all. Libet asked subjects to watch a clock face with a spinning dial, and to occasionally, and randomly, flex a wrist (later experiments were also done with pushing a button and other similarly simple actions).

    The participants were then told to gauge, as best they could, where the dial on the clock was pointing when they made the decision to move. All of this was done while the researchers monitored the electrical activity of the participants' brains with electroencephalography (EEG).

    Typically, Libet found, people reported making the decision to move about 200 milliseconds before they actually did. Surprisingly, though, the electrical activity in the motor areas of the brain began ramping up about 550 milliseconds before the movement — some 350 milliseconds prior to the conscious decision to move.


    "It was seen as like the brain version of determinism," said John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. "The brain prepares a decision for you, then when it comes to you making up your mind consciously, the dice have already been cast."

    Predicting the future

    In 2008, Haynes and his colleagues published a study that pushed back the throw of the dice even further. In this study, participants had their brains scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they were given a choice between pushing a button with their left hand or a button with their right hand. The researchers wanted to know what sort of brain activity might be going on in areas beyond just the motor-planning regions studied in Libet's work.

    The researchers found that two regions became more active (as measured by an uptick in blood flow to those areas) before a person became conscious of their button-pushing choice. One was Brodmann area 10, which is at the very front of the prefrontal cortex, behind the forehead, and is generally used in executive control. The other active region was part of the parietal cortex, in the upper middle region of the brain. The parietal cortex is involved with sensory integration.
    Most striking of all, though, was when those regions became active: at least 7 seconds prior to making a conscious choice to move — a gap 20 times larger than the previously measured 350 milliseconds in the motor-planning regions. What's more, fMRI imaging includes a slight time delay, so that means the activity could have started as much as 10 seconds before the conscious decision point.

    The researchers could even predict the choice of button the person would make with about 60 percent accuracy based on the brain activity alone — hardly a crystal ball, but better than pure chance.

    The free will debates

    These experiments don't bode well for free will, but don't go robbing a liquor store and blaming your subconscious just yet.

    The implications of these studies are hotly contested. Many, like neuroscientist Sam Harris, believe that our choices are entirely opaque to us, driven by the complex interaction of our genes and environment, and thus out of our control. "You can do what you decide to do, but you cannot decide what you will decide to do," Harris writes in his book, "Free Will" (Free Press, 2012).

    Wheatley, too, doubts that true free will could exist, given what we know about the brain.

    "You are your neurons," she said. "There's nothing else up there. When you really think about the brain, the physical system, it becomes very difficult to think about where choice comes in, where free will comes in."

    Even consciousness, Wheatley notes, doesn't guarantee free will. You can be conscious of a choice, but could you have truly made another decision, given the brain activity that led to that choice?

    Others are not so convinced. No experiment done so far rules out free will, argues Alfred Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University and author of "Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will" (Oxford University Press, 2014).

    There are two ways to think about free will, Mele said. One is that if a person is sane, rational and uncoerced, and they can make a decision, then they have free will. This is the definition on which our court system is based.

    "It's clear that most people, some of the time, do make such decisions, so they would have free will, according to this conception of it," Mele said.

    The free will most neuroscientists are discussing is a bit more nuanced. The idea is that, given everything leading up to a conscious choice — external influences, brain activity, prior experiences — people can still make a different choice.

    "It could all be shaped, and probabilities could be influenced by the environment and so on, but when you make your decision, there are different possible ways you could go," Mele said.

    Even when measuring very trivial decisions with the most accurate technology (electrodes actually inserted into the brain, as part of treatment for severe epilepsy), researchers can only predict decisions based on brain activity about 80 percent of the time. It could be that the equipment isn't good enough to yield perfect predictions, Mele said. Or it could be that there is a certain amount of randomness present in the brain – randomness that represents free will.

    It's clear that a decision process begins in the brain far before we're aware of it, Haynes said. But what isn't as clear is whether that process can be stopped, and thus it isn't clear that these experiments rule out free will.

    "Can you interfere with this process at any point in time? What are your chances of stopping this process?" Haynes asked. He and his colleagues are in the process of submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed paper on just this subject.

    "All I can say is that the data we have at the moment suggests that people can control this process all the way right until the end," Haynes said.

    Why free will matters

    Free will or not, we are built to assume agency over our actions. It's not surprising to feel a need to solve the mystery of whether something that feels so intertwined with our being is actually real. But all of this free will debate also matters because it turns out people behave very differently when they think they're not accountable for their behavior.


    In 2008, psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler published a study in the journal Psychological Science in which they asked people to take a math test on a computer. Because of a computer glitch, the participants were told, the answers to the questions would appear onscreen unless they quickly pressed the space bar before each question. Prior to the test, some of the participants read articles telling them that science had disproven free will.

    Those participants, primed to disbelieve free will, were more likely to cheat by not pressing the space bar. Similar studies showed other bad behavior. A 2009 study by Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister found that when people were told they had no free will, they became more aggressive towards others, giving them spicy hot sauce even after being told they disliked spicy food.

    On the other hand, the belief that there is no free will can also make people less punitive and less likely to seek vengeance, according to a 2014 article published in the journal Psychological Science.

    "When you confront people and say, 'Oh, you don't have free will,' they can act badly," Wheatley said. But that's not the whole story, she said. "They can also become more compassionate."

    The next step for neuroscience, Wheatley said, should be to investigate ever-more complicated decisions. The criticism of work like Libet's and Haynes' tends along the lines of "so what?" she said, because the choices are so primitive. Haynes' recent work, she said, has been delving into more complex choices.

    "These decisions are still no 'where to go to college' or 'who to marry,' but they're getting more interesting," she said."

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    Very interesting article.Thanks for posting.
    When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations,
    the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic ~
    Dresden James.

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    My ego made it too difficult for me to come to terms that I do not have freewill to choose what to do. I finally come to term with it when I realize that I have the freewill how to feel about doing it.
    I was shape by my experiences which I dont have control over. Whatever decision I made and will make will depend on my personality on how the universe molded me and the experience that I encountered and will encounter. Where is the freewill. If there is one illusion that stands out its the illusion of freewill.
    Its just to difficult to accept that I have accomplish nothing on my own. Seems that all the problem of men boils down to Ego. Even to the point of denying what is so obvious.

    " We are like corks toss about by the waves" Nikola Tesla
    Last edited by Bubu; 17th October 2015 at 03:19.

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    But when you put into account that we are more then just our brains then what does the argument become?

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    if we had free will everyone would be happy

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    Ah, now thinking about "Free Will" I remembered this Video, which, while not providing any Definitive Answers to what so-called "Free Will" is, does highlight (from a Scientific POV) *how* our Subconscious is certainly playing its part !

    It's hosted at LiveLeak and shows part of a BBC video called "The Secret You" on this very Subject matter : Brain Scans Can Reveal Your Decisions 7 Seconds Before You “Decide”

    Quote : In a kind of spooky experiment, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences reveal that our decisions are made seconds before we become aware of them.

    My current "working hypothesis" is that our "Sense of Self" is itself a Subconscious Projection hence my interest in Meditation and methods of Self-Enquiry !
    Last edited by Clear Light; 17th October 2015 at 12:48. Reason: Added "Working Hypothesis"

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    This is classic for sure. Two things have come full circle for me as I've lived. The free will debate and Truth as relative versus truth as universal and consistently knowable. The longer I have lived the more I've gone through this "stuff", healing and inner work with outer influences the more I see life as deterministic. This seems more defensible in lieu of a planetary shift in consciousness if one is on the narrower path seeking connection to that which brings us growth and real meaning here.

    The second is not the subject of this thread, but I make no bones about there being absolute truth despite the rest of the world defending relativism it seems.

    In the article it states;

    " There is no "ghost in the machine" swooping in to make decisions against our brain activity — how could there be, when we are the sum of our brain activity?"

    This is the first thing I could definitely contend when I look back on life and decisions knowing what I think I know about this mystery reality here on Earth. Oh really there is no ghost in the machine huh? I need only point to the relatively small band our 5 senses cover of the Electromagnetic spectrum and the subject matter of many of the posts here at Avalon.

    The other thing I saw quickly was the 2008 study shows how programmable we are if people will begin cheating that quickly just at the hint that free will may be in question.

    Thanks for posting this article.
    It's time to change this.

    Be cautious of placing oneself in a category it may serve to box you in and not even be correct.

    The quotes alone on peoples signatures are reason enough to be here.

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    Default Re: The Frustrating search for Free Will - Article

    The illusive free will question, I used to think about it a lot. It's easy to come to the concludion that we don't really have it, but I can also see the opposite being true. Though, in most cases, our freewill on earth is never fully explored simply because we have not been aware of our true potential. generation after generation adapts to society’s norms and other illusions of 3D life. Human beings are quick to explore the road laid out for them, but seldom do they venture off the beaten path. After all, the significance of such a quest is kept from us.

    Everything I was taught growing up only served to limit me. My intuition continually told me different but I was taught not to trust that either, to trust only in logic. I shudder to think how much free will I've squandered.
    “a complete understanding of reality lies beyond the capabilities of rational thought."
    ― Gary Zukav

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