“In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them: brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision”.
When I look at the blocky images on the monitors [of said experiments], showing the brain patterns occurring as people make decisions, my first thoughts are; what would that look like at full resolution? Would it be the same thing et al?
There is a side of the mind which does pertain to those simplistic images on the screen, and I think areas of philosophy [N] and kinds of philosophers, who like to go with their natural instinctive mind. The consciousness also probably doesn’t directly experience much beyond what the monitors show, so its easy to corroborate the simplistic version of the mind, with ‘who we are’ and other general sentiments of personhood.
Lets imagine that at some point in time the instruments will be a few thousand times more powerful than those we have presently. As you increase the focus and resolution of the image from those blocky simplistic ones we currently have, you would see an increasingly three dimensional, organic and fluidic shapes. They would increase in amounts of shapes, as if like 3D fractals, and would contain equally complex shapes and networks within them. So lets imagine our computer model made all 3D and layers semi-transparent, and also showed electromagnetic, and blood/chemical flows equally as semi-transparent. We would see connections between zones [what currently are those blocky colours on our screens] coming from multiple areas, and a vast complex of activity between 90bil neurons and their connectors etc.
I think that image would be nothing short of sublime, and until we can see at that resolution, we cannot objectively know that the subconscious makes all the choices.
The brain is on autopilot, the conscious actor simply goes with the autopilot 70 percent of the time, and doesn’t override it, so that study doesn’t prove anything about the overrides. In short, chuck the study, it hasn’t proven anything.
I agree. there is an aspect of us which is like the ‘inner robot’, but most the time we just roll with it. mostly this just shows that the body/brain is just an instrument, and we may as well just use it rather than fight it. we are not going to get 100% free will even if you physically changed e.g. your memories, because even if you changed all information, you still want it to function as an effective instrument, for showing us the world. really causality and that side of brain function is on our side, its just the bigoted ego which expects complete free will.
Sure, however, atheists and scientists act like they have the answer. What I am asking is if they can know that, - given the resolution of detection and projection.
we know that the whole thing changes and we don’t just repeat ourselves [even if there’s a tendency to do that], I have heard scientists saying that analogously the brain is like one computer, then in the next moment another. there is too much change for anything to constrain the whole, ergo we mathematically neither have nor don’t have free will. nethier party is in command and both are, mostly that just means the whole thing rolls along nicely.
In the meantime that science wrestles with the issue, people still have to live their lives practically, and they need knowledge about free will for that.
In the USA intelligent design theory was outlawed in public shcools by a judge. Now some may argue the finer points of the scientific merit of this theory, but the big point is that it is the only big theory which acknowledges that free will is a reality. The theory says that organisms are chosen to be the way they are, the parameters in the universe are chosen, and by extension it also says people choose.
So how come the judge first forbids students to be taught that free will is real, and then in court the judge holds people accountable for the choices they make?
Everybody knows that morality is about making choices, and still they refuse to have it be taught in school. This is really the mystery of the corruption of mankind. It is the point at which anything like communism, nazism, or Islamic terrorism becomes to be sort of expected. Why wouldn’t people go out and kill whatever, if they are not taught about how making a choice works. Yes sure they would, why not? If society doesn’t even know how making a choice works, and morality is about choices, then one would expect all sorts of societal catastrophy.
The issue of freewill research that I find fault with is that it relies on a report from the sentient being, which itself needs a few micro seconds to be created and reported. Thus it does not seem clear to me that the measurement is free of a bias that might throw off accuracy which, if your argument is measured in miliseconds, throws everything into question.
The second issue, but really the same issue, is the accuracy in the reporter about what is he/she feeling and when. Anyone that has ever sat through an audiogram knows that sometimes we can think that we are hearing those faint three beeps when in fact the machine has not. In that second you have to figure out whether to press the button. Freewill is about self-determination, and I believe that it exists because inputs are not always from outside stimuli but from our own thoughts, conditioned by many different things without a clear cause/effect relation. We end up having to decide what we have seen, what we think we have seen after the input itself is long gone. We are fallible and thus make up the stuff in many different ways depending on time and mood. Most people know this and dwell on this, on what they could’ve “KNOWN” and didn’t. I don’t think that if we rewound the tape that the same movie would play out, but what would play would still be the director’s interpretation of an ambiguous script.
People should be held accountable for their actions even if will is not free. I consider it a radical attempt to affect will and determine a preferred outcome by causality. You don’t want the rock to continue smashing you, even if the rock thrown was by a natural event.
I mean, technically there is no fault in general because we cant control it. But, we should definitely prevent negative outcomes. People have this idea that since the will is not free, we should abandon all efforts in incriminating murderers and the like. I feel this is extremely detrimental to society. Yeah sure people have no blame, but we don’t want things like these to continue to happen.
there was not supposed to be an argument using the lack of free will. that’s not the point, the point is that we are nowhere near knowing if we have it or not. I agree though, that with it or without it one has to continue as before. otherwise we are affecting outcomes even though it wouldn’t be ‘us’ doing it.
I might be wrong on this, but I am pretty sure that the free will debate can be settled without the use of expert techniques of mapping the brain. By exhausting all possibilities and seeing the logical inconsistencies it can be settled with what we know.
If you believe in pure causality there is definitely no free will.
If you believe in random then there is no free will, its just random.
That is of course depending on what concept you are referring to when you say free will, people can act according to their caused or random motivation so in that sense Compatibilists are safe.
So, the question of free will is not if its free or not. The question is about if will is caused or random, and I think its caused, but I’m not sure yet.
I’d say ‘partially caused’… A denumerable amount of particles moving in and out of superposition, in a probabilistic universe which >physically< stretches to infinity, is probably not a causal one at root [consider the abstractions]. That and the generally quantum relativistic state, would mean that mathematically there can be no universal operations at a 1:1 basis.
There would be an amount of random and or correlating, rather than one or the other.
I think the whole thing is a lot more sophisticated than we are currently perceiving, and it is a perception block, because if you ask any physicist how the whole quantum thing works, they will say they don’t know.