As a world-renowned mathematician, Professor Marcus Du Sautoy is well aware of bombshell ideas that have devastating conceptual power such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or Russell's Paradox. These ideas, of course, are not merely mathematical curiosities: they have powerful philosophical implications about the nature of universals, logic and the limits of thought and cognition.All his mathematico/philosophical training, however, could not prepare him for the existential confrontation with one of the deepest philosophical questions regarding what it is to be human: free will. Challenging abstract concepts are one thing... lived experience, as one might expect, is a bit more visceral :)
The problem is not simply that free will is most likely an illusion. Today's technological advances in neuroimaging and brain scanning present a modern-day version of LaPlace's demon: other people may know what choice you are going to make before you yourself are aware your own 'choice'...
And here is a bit more from Susan Greenfield on these types of experiments:
Haynes' interpretation didn't quite convince me (I don't assume mind-brain identity, even though I am a physicalist), but you get the point anyway...
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Intriguing. But the more I think about it though, the less I think it indicates anything about "free will" as a concept, but certainly about our *awareness* of our own decision-making process. There are several possibilities.
ReplyDeleteIt's very possible, using a bit of imagination, that "free will" is embedded much more deeply that we suspect. That deliberate, "conscious" decisions are actually made in a place beyond our mental "field of vision". That's purely speculation but an intriguing idea.
Secondly, what we are seeing here could be the "latter stage" of a decision-making process we really know nothing about. One experiment doesn't tell an entire story. There may be another "level" or process, beyond the one being tested, which has the "final say". The "executive" process. There's nothing to say this one detected correlation is it. Certainly not in the info in this video. Is it 100% reliable over 1000's of repetitions, or is there a margin of error? It doesn't say.
Having said that, there are *lots* of things the brain decides for us, automatically. Being afraid is the obvious one. Or the increase in dopamine when the brain detects the sign of a desirable outcome (Pavlov's dog, the chimps & dopamine experiment, etc.) There the brain is generating what we consciously call "expectation". Emotional responses are generally generated before we can "decide" to have them, if we can decide at all. No surprise there. But does that affect our idea of free will?
The second video seems less relevant, as all it indicates is "preparation for movement" before movement takes place. This could be a natural action of the brain preparing for quick or reflexive movement, or simply a stress signal. It was way too vague.
"Free will", as an idea, is I think something of a cultural phenomena. We "think about thinking" a lot, and have gone out of our way to develop ideas about "personality" and "identity". These ideas may just be, figuratively speaking, all in our heads.
Just think about it.. emotionally, we all need to feel "in control". It's how we survive best as a species. In order to cooperate, you need to know who "you" are as separate from "they", and know you can "change things" around you.
So to better effect those behaviours, it's reasonable to assume areas of the brain evolved to support those ideas: Self and control.
Just my brain's 2c. :)
There is a logical flaw in the concept of simple, conscious, free will because if you are to consciously decide to "will" something to happen this conscious decision cannot just pop into your mind. If it just popped into mind the decision itself would be non-conscious. To make a conscious decision you must consciously decide that you are going to consciously decide that you are going to consciously decide that..... and so on ad infinitum. The only alternative to this infinite regress is to accept that what we believe to be conscious decisions are usually just things that pop into mind - we are conscious of having made a decision but did not make the decision consciously.
ReplyDeleteThe experiments on the "Readiness Potential" that you describe here confirm this logical analysis: we cannot know that we have consciously made a decision until after it has occurred.
(See Conscious free will and empiricism