siddster notes an account up at Wired of research indicating that brain scanners can see your decisions before you make them. "In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them... Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will... The experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions... Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday April 13 2008, @11:07PM (#23059294)
When you model human behavior in terms of deterministic principles (i.e. the laws of physics and the metaphysical assumptions that underlie them), you shouldn't be surprised to find no room for the expression of free will.
If your first premise is "not A" then any subsequent premise which affirms "A" will be seen as the logical contradiction that it is.
So long as reduction is king, we shouldn't expect to find "free will" lurking among the emergent phenomena either...wherever it emerges it will just again be reduced to deterministic expressions, and hence seem to be deterministic (and hence profoundly unfree).
Our analysis of the brain doesn't disprove free will anymore than the English language disproves that nouns have tenses. Nor, by the same token, does any mystical tradition prove it.
The key is in how you model it, and whether or not your model is useful. That is all.
I think the definition is very simple. If the universe is entirely predictable, then there cannot be free will. If truly random events can occur, then "free will" is possible, though not necessary.
That is a little nieve, what if you are a dualist and believe every 'soul' gets a say in the initial conditions of the universe, enough that it affects what decisions they make while they are bound to thier mortal coil?
Besides unpredictability doesn't imply free will. Random events do not seem to me to offer any more opertunity for free will than non-random ones, that is if I cant influence either. What is necessary for free will is the ability to change events. If the universe always follows some prescribed rule over which I have no say, and I cant pick the initial conditions of the universe, then I have no free will.
I always hated the cog-sci cultists (Dennet, mostly) attacking free will, as if it was his personal calling to do so. I think the very discussion is rather dumb.
If freewill isn't real, it doesn't matter, we subjectively must still act as if it is true. If free will is real, we must still act as if it is true. We must, too, in any case, also treat others as if they have free will (as it is the basis of law, society, and most human empathy and ethics). The idea of free will, if not it-itself, is built into our head, and all of our actions.
I think the freewill/not-freewill debate is just like the "God doesn't exist" debate, trite, and the grounds for amateur philosophers. It makes a good argument, but not much truth value. For one it isn't falsifiable.
In the current result (which isn't new), we could claim that the act of free-will happens with a seven second lag, or that certain potential centers are activated before the act of choosing a branch. Etc... I think, also, there is a large cultural element to the debate, the current trends in cultural interpretation is towards removing all individual culpability and responsibility (as we can see in the rise of psychotropic drug prescriptions, and "Twinkie" defenses).
As a philosophy buff, lets leave it to religion. It doesn't add to any argument.
No ofcourse not. I don't know why this isn't general knowledge, but something like will can only be 2 things:
- Completely determined process, action -> reaction. - Completely random process, governed by random quantum effects.
Our brain ofcourse is somewhere in between. I don't know how you define free will, but it can not be different from these 2 things. If it were.. Then there would somehow be a reaction without an action, but it would NOT be random! This is obviously impossible.
Everybody should know there is no such thing as free will. One of the most interesting corollaries is the responsibility paradox: - You have no free will. - Thus you are not responsible for your actions; All your actions are the result of the total sum of your past, surroundings and genes. - You could do whatever you like, because you are not responsible.
People say, "If I can not control what I do, I'm not responsible, so I can do anything." They forget that 'they' are part of the action-reaction process. There is a part where you are conscious of the choices you make. What this simply means is that you know you choose. But how you make that choice is determined but all kinds of factors you do not control. "Will I eat this?" -yes, because it looks tasty (instinctive) -no, because it will make me fat (logic, cultural knowledge) -etc.. Your choice process is then thinking of and weighing the factors, but again these weights are not controlled by anything like free will. It's controlled by randomness, (neural) logic and cultural influences.
The "I can do anything" phrase is simply a loopback to the choice process, however as you consider the consequenses of this new factor, you realize you are bound by external factors in everything you do.
Ah, but if it's deterministic but unpredictable, then where does that leave us? If the universe is entirely set on it's course, from Event One, and given identical starting conditions would end the same way, why does this matter if we can't predict the pattern? I mean, you need something more complex to analyse a system, which means it's quite possible that we'll never be able to model the universe accurately, even if it was entirely deterministic.
Actually the lag can vary. In another one of Benjamin Libet's experiments (not mentioned in the article) he stimulated different areas of the human brain (he had a neursurgeon friend that he worked with during surgeries) and asked the subject to press a button when he perceived the stimulus.
It turned out that no one pressed the button until 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. So, there appeared to be at least a 500ms lag between stimulation and conscious acknowledgement of the stimulus.
Here's the funny bit: a 500ms lag time to perception is incompatible with a whole bunch of human activities. Take tennis for example; if there's a 500ms lag between watching the ball getting hit and actually perceiving it as getting hit the ball has already flown past you. (assuming a ball hit at 200km/h=55 meters/sec)
This is decision making through trained thought processes. We hit the ball with some expectation of where the opponent will return the ball, or at least most professional tennis players do. Given that we have already predicted the likely return path of the ball, reacting to visual signals based on the other players body actions gives us quite a large lead time in terms of milliseconds in that process. By the time the other players racket hits the ball we are already headed toward the most likely direction of the return of the ball. You will see in pro games where a player totally fucks up that process and just lets the ball go. It is the high tension precision of play/guess/play/guess that makes sports the exciting thing that brings fans. The ability to mentally guess based on available knowledge where to be and when is what amazes us, though to the players it's as much reaction as it is a trained instinctual movement.
I write code, and some of it relies on the predictable processes of other code. That is how things work. We all use the best information we have to make decisions of free will. What was painful decision making process becomes trained reactive processes after time and practice. Some people seem to have a 'knack' for some things... they usually become professionals. This happens in every walk of life. Sales people are different than engineers and both are different from sports players. Each has a set of decision making processes that are honed to a certain group of tasks. There is a reason that sports players don't generally retire to become insurance sales people.
Free will is the ability to use available information to arrive at good outcomes of any decision. This, at it's most basic, is seen in survival situations. This, survival situations, is what I like to call failure-mode analysis. It works for code, it works for anything. Break it down to failure mode and see what happens, how each component reacts. In sports we see failure mode use repeatedly. Tennis is basically run that way the entire match. Each mistake is a failure. Each failure leads to one of two outcomes: further failure or success. This is survival mode.
In that mode, we have to use free will as simply repeating what we have done before leads to failure. We have to learn and use free will to assert that learning to gain success... unless you simply wish to surrender, and that is free will also.
I choose not to replace main bearing seals on my car's engine... I surrender. If I had to, I could learn how and do it, but I CHOOSE not to.
In most cases in life where there seems to be no free will, we simply have chosen to surrender or not learn what is needed to complete the task or defeat the puzzle.
500ms is a long time in some respects, yet it is a very short time. It has been scientifically proven that when adrenaline is pumping, our body clocks (sense of time) is sped up. That is, 500ms under physical duress seems like it was 3-4 seconds, giving our brains time to react faster than what we normally perceive.
The measurements of 500ms are common in vehicle safety parlance. Seldom does anyone speak of that 1/2 second lag under duress. In sports, it's all under duress. Predictive analysis of the current events gives us the ability to see and react faster than the 500ms being discussed.
I'm reading a great book that addresses this. Julian Jaynes' book entitled, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind works through a lot of examples to prove that nearly all human activities are done in the absence of conscious thought. The general theory he puts forth in the book is that human consciousness only happened 3,000-3,500 years ago. He suggests that before this change (over a great deal of time, not instantly) humans had split minds where one half would communicate it's type of information to the other half via auditory and visual hallucinations. To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time.
Furthering what you are saying, there are some interesting experiments referenced in steven pinkers book "The blank slate", which are done on patients that had the connections between the two brain hemispheres removed (due to crippling epilepsy) - they instruct one side of the brain to do something (ie go out of the room) and then ask the other side of the brain why they did it. The other side never says "I don't know" it always makes up a reason, and the patients can get quite heated insisting that they had a reason. This would suggest that consciousness is a story telling device to explain our actions rather than the source of our decision making.
The general theory he puts forth in the book is that human consciousness only happened 3,000-3,500 years ago. He suggests that before this change (over a great deal of time, not instantly) humans had split minds where one half would communicate it's type of information to the other half via auditory and visual hallucinations.
Well, that's one theory which is absolutely impossible to prove either way. It is, after all, impossible for anyone to prove that they have subjective consciousness, rather than being puppets being guided by hallucinations - which, I presume, would still originate from a consciousness of sorts, but whatever.
Then again, it might be easy to disprove: if it happened so recently, long after the current main groups of humanity split from each other, there should still be plenty of people in this split-mind state today. So make predictions about the difference between us and them, and go find them.
To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time.
Of course, it could simply be that writing at that time was mainly used for bookkeeping, not to mention philosophy hadn't yet developed to the point of making this a problem... And besides, as far as I can tell, my dog has free will, and stubborn one at that.
Anyway, this theory is very likely rubbish, because plenty of old kingdoms - such as ancient Egypt - already existed far before 3000 years ago, and it's hard to imagine how merely following hallucinations without conscious forethought could build and upkeep large and complex societies; for that matter, it is hard to imagine just how the heck such a double-mind could develop. Getting sudden hallucinations while you're hunting woolly mammoths is not a good thing.
First, I want to compliment the GP of this thread. He hit the nail on the head -- seven second lag between a decision and realizing you've made a decision is very different from not having free will. I can very easily imagine people subconsciously (or even consciously) knowing what their decision will be well before they "decide". I find personally that most of my "decision making" is trying to understand why I feel a particular choice is correct, not deciding which choice is correct.
Secondarily, to comment on the parent. I teach karate, and in fighting matches I have observed this in quite a bit of detail. If you try to decide what to do, you are invariably ~100ms too slow in reacting (varies from person to person and experience level).
One of the most critical elements of training is to move intellectual responses into the automatic response regime, which gradually reduces the reaction time while simultaneously freeing conscious brain-power for higher level guidance. For example, at a low level, your body is handling blocking and striking without your conscious intervention while at a high level, you're observing the rhythm of the fight and observing your opponent's posture and techniques.
Then, you set up a "trigger" in your reactions so that as soon as a particular opening appears again, you immediately capitalize. Usually you do this by repeating a motion many, many times, but it eventually happens. That capitalization definitely happens in under 100ms (I can punch about 6 times in one second, and in order to break the rhythm you need to get at least a factor of four faster than that).
To see this (maybe), imagine that your opponent does a quick punch. If you notice that he's a bit slow to recover, a good option is to sidestep and punch before his punch is over -- but a punch is over in 200ms, tops. You have to start your punch in at most 50ms after she starts hers (switching genders for the sake of the female karateka in my club). Of course, I might be convinced that this is more a matter of picking up on a rhythm and predicting a punch... but if you do this then you're screwed by a fake, and it wouldn't explain quick responses to the very first attack of a sequence, so I'm fairly sure it's a real reaction time.
p.s. Can you tell I teach at an engineering school? It's always entertaining when the class is completely at a loss to understand a move until I draw a force diagram.
I've chosen not to comment on this story. There's my free will.
Wait, I mean, I'll comment but I'm not leaving an opinion, except for the one that states that I have free will. Hold on. OK. I'm not leaving an opinion as much as statement. Oh, forget it. You're right. I have no free will.
Just because there is a delay in the person being able to be cognizant of making the decision doesn't eliminate the potential that there was free will in making it.
To put this in terms the programmers among us can relate to. This is the difference between generating a result and outputting the result. They aren't necessarily directly tied together.
In programming terms, it's exactly that difference. However, the person thinks their conscious decision is 1 second before the press. Consider that an I/O interrupt request after the output has been generated but before it can be displayed. The conscious mind (the OS in the metaphor) thinks it is making the decision to output something specific, but that decision was made by the subroutine well before the OS got involved. In flow chart terms...
(unconscious decision is made in background processes) -> (person thinks they make a conscious decision using their own Free Will) -> (action occurs which matches the unconscious decision)
Under that model, Free Will is "eliminated" because the final result matches activity that occurs before they consciously deliberate on it and can utilize conscious Free Will. Essentially, Free Will becomes an unconscious process of some sort.
Actually, you do. [utm.edu] Free Will must be a conscious act for it to matter in all the senses that philosophy cares about -- if agency is to exist, it must exist in a conscious form. If some subconscious process is "making" your decisions prior to your "self" (where "self" is your conscious and self-conscious awareness), you don't really have Free Will, since conscious deliberation on possible actions has no effect on the resulting action you take.
If you haven't, I suggest looking into some Philosophy of Self and Philosophy of Mind books and essays, since I certainly don't have the time right now to get into it as deeply as a subject like this deserves.
Minimally, to say that an agent has free will is to say that the agent has the capacity to choose his or her course of action. But animals seem to satisfy this criterion, and we typically think that only persons, and not animals, have free will. Let us then understand free will as the capacity unique to persons that allows them to control their actions.
Unfounded assumptions, artificial distinctions between "animals" and "persons". And we haven't even started discussing free will.
I think the problem here isn't the existence of 'free will' but with out definition and our perception of it. Just because a definition exists it doesn't mean it can't redefined or proclaimed as invalid.
So maybe the title should be 'Brain Study Calls current definition of Free will into question.', but that's not as sensational.
The only reason people believe in free will is that much of religion makes no sense without it.
I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g.
Exodus 9:16 [adaptux.com] and
Romans 9:17ff [adaptux.com].
However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?" [pacherie.free.fr], Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.
Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.
Um, not much of a newsflash. Hell the major monotheistic religions figured this out way back. If God is omniscient, then he knows what I am about to do and everything I will do in my life. If he knows that, than I can't truly have free will. (Even if you try to weasel out that God decides to blind himself to my future, if it is knowable then its pre-ordained.) So unless you are willing to say God isn't omniscient, then there is no free will, kids.
The only chance we have of any free will at all is in quantum weirdness which is not much free will to speak of, and certainly not enough to be palatable to the average American who thinks his success or failure is a product of his own decisions rather than the sum total of a very complicated system that he has little control over and basically just experiences as the phenomena of his mind. We think we are in control, but largely we are along for the ride.
Used to freak me out, and it was hard to swallow since I have that Horatio Algeirs kind of narrative: Grew up on welfare in a house without indoor plumbing and now have a doctorate and am typing this on the toilet I picked (the best... I loves me a good quality toilet) in the house I just remodeled. It would feel very nice to think that I did all of this and deserve this wonderful throne. And to be honest my experience is that I think I have free will in my day to day life. But that's probably because the sum of my experiences also made me, after gaining understand that I don't have free will, accept that I live my life with that illusion and navigate life in such a way that I feel comfortable with the 'moral decisions' I think I make. So I pretend I have free will, and think I make moral choices based on that understanding.
Now I've given myself a headache. No. Wait, I was destined to have this headache as long as that electron spun to the left last Tuesday in Portugal. I'm going to go pretend to decide to take an ibuprofen.
Personally, I don't see how this experiment can even remotely call into question "free will." You see, free will and conscious rationality are very nearly the same. Now, when choosing between using the left or right button, there is little to no information to be considered rationally, or consciously, and so this experiment is only testing a choice that is already devoid of free will. The choice is, in effect, subconsciously decided making it easy to predict.
I am a person who believes very strongly that God gives us agency and that agency is essential to our progression through life.
I also believe that most decisions are made automatically. Our brain acts just like a muscle. We train it and it has reflex like decisions. But there are many times when we exercise a higher consciousness to make decisions.
But who would ever accuse Slashdot of having over-sensationalized headlines?
If you actually wanted to answer that question, you'd have to define what "free will" is, in a concrete, scientific way. That means defining what choice is, likely what "you" are, and other things that are essentially undefinable except using other non-concrete definitions you can't nail down.
This experiment raises some interesting questions about the nature of existence, consciousness, and being. I don't think it's going to give us any answers on whether we have "free will" though, whatever that means.
" Brain Study Calls Free Will Into Question"
what utter nonsense. The ability to predict an action by looking at what your brain is doing has nothing to do with whether or not free will exists. From TFA:
In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration.
sounds to me that the decision making is started before people think it is, nothing more, nothing less.
On the lowest physical level there are only individual atoms the link they form with their neighbors, or not, forming molecules and electrodynamic interaction. A level higher we have molecule interacting each other forming protein, and various substance. A level higher we have neuron which discharge their neurotransmitter if they reach a certain level, neuro-transmitter which lead to lower or higher the level of other neurons. Up to now I described only physical process which don't per see have any "free will". Then comes a level higher with even more complexity where neuron form complex path and mass, and that is the brain. Show me an ounce of free will. All I see is a very complex system, which accept information from outside, and using chemical pathway, send output to the outside. There is no reason to imagine that for the same input, at the same state, the system would react otherwise , except if some physical phenomenon change subtely the potential of some neuron : aka brownian motion make more or less neurotransmitter reach their target site. Again a physical phenomenon. I contend that free will is an illusion. I contend that it should be called non-deterministic will. Or chaotic will. Or anything. But we aren't really "free" to chose. All those neuron with their potential and physical reaction do it.
Free will is not a coherent concept. It is rooted in the idea of dualism, that something is "controlling" our body/brain, that is somehow separate from our body/brain. It used to be called a soul, now it is called a mind. The "mind" has free will to somehow control the body. This makes no sense.
The brain is a complex physical system like any other, and is subject to the same rules as any other physical system, like weather. There is no free will. There is only the interaction between our bodies/brains and the environment. Free will is just an illusion caused by the fact that humans are self-aware and that the brain is an extremely complex, dynamical system.
The article is sketchy (to say the least) about the details of this test. Were people told they were going to have to press a button? How long were they told to wait before pressing it? Did they start thinking about pressing it before they were even asked to do it? Was any of the test subjects a Jedi?
Just because you start thinking about making a "random" decision a few seconds in advance, that does not mean you cannot change your mind a fraction of a second before, if something else happens (ex., a sudden external stimulus). In fact, the article points this out:
"Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
I think it's pretty obvious that people can react to external stimuli in less than seven seconds, including stimuli that they had no way of predicting.
Anyway, unless our brains have some sort of mystical particles, they are essentially very complex and highly parallel (but still fundamentally deterministic) electro-chemical computers, with an insane amount of inputs. So this really boils down to consciousness and a concept of present.
What this study shows is that decision-making isn't an instant process (did anyone think it was?), that we are not conscious of the early stages of that process (did anyone think we were?) and that there is a significant subconscious stage to random decisions, possibly because our brain tries to "validate" its decisions before submitting them to the "conscious" mind, and random ones have a low confidence level, making them go through extra sanity checks.
Subconscious: Tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button! Mr. Conscious's P.A.: Did you say something or was that just random noise? Sub.: I said "tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button"! P.A.: Why should I tell him that? Sub.: Because he asked me to make a random decision. P.A.: Not good enough. Mr. Conscious will need assurance that that is the ideal course of action. Please produce the complete paper trail that led you to that decision. Sub.: What paper trail? This is a *random* decision, you idiot. P.A.: I'm afraid you will at least have to find some evidence that hitting the left button will not have any negative effects. If Mr. Conscious simply followed every random advice he got, how would he justify his salary? Sub.: Look, the guy conducting the study hit the button just now and nothing happened to him, right? It's safe. Just hit it. P.A.: Well, alright. The left button, you said? Sub.: Yes! P.A.: I'll transmit that to Mr. Conscious. Sub.: About bloody time, too. Wasted seven seconds of my life.
P.S. - Several studies have shown that top athletes don't have particularly faster reflexes than other people; they just do the "Jedi trick" of starting to react before something happens. How can they react to something that hasn't happened? Experience. Their brain knows what are the 5 or 6 most likely developments, and it starts to plan ahead for all of them. When the times comes to send the decision to the body, the actual action is already buffered. On top of that, frequently we react to indicators rather than to the event itself (ex., in tennis the other player's body position will generally allow you to guess how he's going to serve before he hits the ball; if you wait for the ball to be hit, you won't get to it on time). To put it in computer terms: speculative execution and intelligent branch prediction.
P.P.S. - In Stanislaw Lem's short story "137 seconds" a news-gathering computer develops the ability to predict reality 137 seconds in advance, so this brain scanner still has a long way to go.;-)
If you had read your first quote more carefully the second one would have made more sense. What it's saying is the scanner picked up on unconscious decisions people made. In this case the decision was trivial with no (known) consequences either way so the subjects likely didn't hesitate and just picked one consciously. What this is saying is that they had actually subconsciously decided which one they were going to pick seconds in advance and the scanner was able to see that.
I took a research study doing tests like this at UPMC. A lot of it was horrible tests such as:
A green or red square will appear every 15 seconds, along with an arrow that points right or left. If the square is green, you press the mouse button that corresponds with the direction of the arrow (if it points left hit the left button. If it points right, click the right button). If the square is red, you press the button opposite the direction the arrow is pointing.
Now, imagine doing this for an hour or more straight, with wet electrodes attached to your head. After about 10 minutes (at most), you can't help but completely wander off mentally and stop paying attention to what you are doing. Maybe that is the intention. Your goal is to do your best, because this is a "worth while" study after all on how the brain operates. Things start to flash up and you consciously don't pick up what just flashed, so you spend a good part of those 15 seconds trying to dig up any memory of the past 15 seconds. Maybe you had to be there. You don't even want to know the torture of doing these kinds of tests for HOURS inside an MRI machine.
But who says the unconscious decision process isn't an exercise of free will? The big assumption in the article is that free will cannot exist in the subconscious. I think that free will is a property of the whole mind, and all they're doing is demonstrating that they can predict decisions by reading the choices already made within the brain.
Oh, and since this is a binary classification problem (left/right), 50% accuracy means you're not doing any better than guessing - 60% isn't very good in that light.
That's what I was thinking. The news article should read. "People subconsciously think ahead" I'm not sure that this should be a big surprise, and I don't see what it has to do with free will.
Well, really it should read "Sometimes people subconsciously think ahead"
But who says the unconscious decision process isn't an exercise of free will? The big assumption in the article is that free will cannot exist in the subconscious.
If it happens in the subconscious, then it *can't* be free will, it's merely will.
The *free* means you are making a conscious decision.
Except that since I know free will is an illusion, when the kid last night took a swing at me in a drunken stupor, I understood that as no more his decision than my decision was to treat him decently, and make sure he didn't injure himself or others as he metabolized himself to freedom in the morning.
Its more of a Buddhist concept of suffering and the necessity of working to end the suffering of others (or at least think you are doing so) that motivates moral action in people who don't believe in free will. How much better of a world would it be if when someone broke into your car to steal, you saw that person as someone less fortunate than you and felt it was your responsibility to, instead of punishing him, make his life better?
Though lucky for us, people who have the insight to understand a world without free will are also people who are more often endowed with that kind of sentiment.
How much better of a world would it be if when someone broke into your car to steal, you saw that person as someone less fortunate than you and felt it was your responsibility to, instead of punishing him, make his life better?
It makes for a nice platitude, but your question (which is rhetorical) makes a lot of assumptions.
The major assumption is that the thief is indeed less fortunate than the victim by some measure. He may very well be stealing a Honda Civic from a recently divorced single mother living out of a Super 8 motel and working the night shift at Arby's.
Just because he is less fortunate does not automatically grant him the moral right to what I have done for myself. Being less fortunate does not automatically grant him any moral authority whatsoever to commit crimes against any one. Letting is slide does not make his life better, it only makes mine worse. Only him choosing to make his life better of his own accord will truly set him free from the life he now leads. Until he does so, he will be a parasite to those like you that allow yourself to be the willing victim. The only thing I ask of you is that when you are victimized, do not come to me and try to forcefully take away from me what was taken from you, I have no sympathy for any one who finds it proper and good to allow the theft of their property and uses that as moral justification to steal from me in turn.
Women are more easily and more deeply terrified ... generating more
sheer horror than the male of the species.
-- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold", stardate 3615.4
Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Funny)
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Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Interesting)
If your first premise is "not A" then any subsequent premise which affirms "A" will be seen as the logical contradiction that it is.
So long as reduction is king, we shouldn't expect to find "free will" lurking among the emergent phenomena either...wherever it emerges it will just again be reduced to deterministic expressions, and hence seem to be deterministic (and hence profoundly unfree).
Our analysis of the brain doesn't disprove free will anymore than the English language disproves that nouns have tenses. Nor, by the same token, does any mystical tradition prove it.
The key is in how you model it, and whether or not your model is useful. That is all.
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Insightful)
Something that could be tested as present or not in a defined experiment.
If such a definition cannot be found, then questions about "free will" are unscientific and better left to philosophy and religion.
The mystical associations people have regarding the very words surrounding the study of cognition is a great hindrance to meaningful research.
Marvin Minksy has a great deal to say about this.
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides unpredictability doesn't imply free will. Random events do not seem to me to offer any more opertunity for free will than non-random ones, that is if I cant influence either. What is necessary for free will is the ability to change events. If the universe always follows some prescribed rule over which I have no say, and I cant pick the initial conditions of the universe, then I have no free will.
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Insightful)
If the events are truly genuinely RANDOM, then they also aren't influenced by your "will" whatever the hell THAT means.
"free will" requires events to be NOT pre-determined, but also NOT random. It's a tricky one.
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Insightful)
I always hated the cog-sci cultists (Dennet, mostly) attacking free will, as if it was his personal calling to do so. I think the very discussion is rather dumb.
If freewill isn't real, it doesn't matter, we subjectively must still act as if it is true. If free will is real, we must still act as if it is true. We must, too, in any case, also treat others as if they have free will (as it is the basis of law, society, and most human empathy and ethics). The idea of free will, if not it-itself, is built into our head, and all of our actions.
I think the freewill/not-freewill debate is just like the "God doesn't exist" debate, trite, and the grounds for amateur philosophers. It makes a good argument, but not much truth value. For one it isn't falsifiable.
In the current result (which isn't new), we could claim that the act of free-will happens with a seven second lag, or that certain potential centers are activated before the act of choosing a branch. Etc... I think, also, there is a large cultural element to the debate, the current trends in cultural interpretation is towards removing all individual culpability and responsibility (as we can see in the rise of psychotropic drug prescriptions, and "Twinkie" defenses).
As a philosophy buff, lets leave it to religion. It doesn't add to any argument.
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:5, Insightful)
- Completely determined process, action -> reaction.
- Completely random process, governed by random quantum effects.
Our brain ofcourse is somewhere in between. I don't know how you define free will, but it can not be different from these 2 things.
If it were..
Then there would somehow be a reaction without an action, but it would NOT be random!
This is obviously impossible.
Everybody should know there is no such thing as free will.
One of the most interesting corollaries is the responsibility paradox:
- You have no free will.
- Thus you are not responsible for your actions; All your actions are the result of the total sum of your past, surroundings and genes.
- You could do whatever you like, because you are not responsible.
People say, "If I can not control what I do, I'm not responsible, so I can do anything."
They forget that 'they' are part of the action-reaction process. There is a part where you are conscious of the choices you make.
What this simply means is that you know you choose. But how you make that choice is determined but all kinds of factors you do not control.
"Will I eat this?"
-yes, because it looks tasty (instinctive)
-no, because it will make me fat (logic, cultural knowledge)
-etc..
Your choice process is then thinking of and weighing the factors, but again these weights are not controlled by anything like free will.
It's controlled by randomness, (neural) logic and cultural influences.
The "I can do anything" phrase is simply a loopback to the choice process, however as you consider the consequenses of this new factor, you realize you are bound by external factors in everything you do.
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Re:Its pretty simple, really (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Interesting)
It turned out that no one pressed the button until 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. So, there appeared to be at least a 500ms lag between stimulation and conscious acknowledgement of the stimulus.
Here's the funny bit: a 500ms lag time to perception is incompatible with a whole bunch of human activities. Take tennis for example; if there's a 500ms lag between watching the ball getting hit and actually perceiving it as getting hit the ball has already flown past you. (assuming a ball hit at 200km/h=55 meters/sec)
Yet we play tennis.... Intriguing eh?
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Insightful)
I write code, and some of it relies on the predictable processes of other code. That is how things work. We all use the best information we have to make decisions of free will. What was painful decision making process becomes trained reactive processes after time and practice. Some people seem to have a 'knack' for some things... they usually become professionals. This happens in every walk of life. Sales people are different than engineers and both are different from sports players. Each has a set of decision making processes that are honed to a certain group of tasks. There is a reason that sports players don't generally retire to become insurance sales people.
Free will is the ability to use available information to arrive at good outcomes of any decision. This, at it's most basic, is seen in survival situations. This, survival situations, is what I like to call failure-mode analysis. It works for code, it works for anything. Break it down to failure mode and see what happens, how each component reacts. In sports we see failure mode use repeatedly. Tennis is basically run that way the entire match. Each mistake is a failure. Each failure leads to one of two outcomes: further failure or success. This is survival mode.
In that mode, we have to use free will as simply repeating what we have done before leads to failure. We have to learn and use free will to assert that learning to gain success... unless you simply wish to surrender, and that is free will also.
I choose not to replace main bearing seals on my car's engine... I surrender. If I had to, I could learn how and do it, but I CHOOSE not to.
In most cases in life where there seems to be no free will, we simply have chosen to surrender or not learn what is needed to complete the task or defeat the puzzle.
500ms is a long time in some respects, yet it is a very short time. It has been scientifically proven that when adrenaline is pumping, our body clocks (sense of time) is sped up. That is, 500ms under physical duress seems like it was 3-4 seconds, giving our brains time to react faster than what we normally perceive.
The measurements of 500ms are common in vehicle safety parlance. Seldom does anyone speak of that 1/2 second lag under duress. In sports, it's all under duress. Predictive analysis of the current events gives us the ability to see and react faster than the 500ms being discussed.
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's one theory which is absolutely impossible to prove either way. It is, after all, impossible for anyone to prove that they have subjective consciousness, rather than being puppets being guided by hallucinations - which, I presume, would still originate from a consciousness of sorts, but whatever.
Then again, it might be easy to disprove: if it happened so recently, long after the current main groups of humanity split from each other, there should still be plenty of people in this split-mind state today. So make predictions about the difference between us and them, and go find them.
Of course, it could simply be that writing at that time was mainly used for bookkeeping, not to mention philosophy hadn't yet developed to the point of making this a problem... And besides, as far as I can tell, my dog has free will, and stubborn one at that.
Anyway, this theory is very likely rubbish, because plenty of old kingdoms - such as ancient Egypt - already existed far before 3000 years ago, and it's hard to imagine how merely following hallucinations without conscious forethought could build and upkeep large and complex societies; for that matter, it is hard to imagine just how the heck such a double-mind could develop. Getting sudden hallucinations while you're hunting woolly mammoths is not a good thing.
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Re:Predict the prediction. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I want to compliment the GP of this thread. He hit the nail on the head -- seven second lag between a decision and realizing you've made a decision is very different from not having free will. I can very easily imagine people subconsciously (or even consciously) knowing what their decision will be well before they "decide". I find personally that most of my "decision making" is trying to understand why I feel a particular choice is correct, not deciding which choice is correct.
Secondarily, to comment on the parent. I teach karate, and in fighting matches I have observed this in quite a bit of detail. If you try to decide what to do, you are invariably ~100ms too slow in reacting (varies from person to person and experience level).
One of the most critical elements of training is to move intellectual responses into the automatic response regime, which gradually reduces the reaction time while simultaneously freeing conscious brain-power for higher level guidance. For example, at a low level, your body is handling blocking and striking without your conscious intervention while at a high level, you're observing the rhythm of the fight and observing your opponent's posture and techniques.
Then, you set up a "trigger" in your reactions so that as soon as a particular opening appears again, you immediately capitalize. Usually you do this by repeating a motion many, many times, but it eventually happens. That capitalization definitely happens in under 100ms (I can punch about 6 times in one second, and in order to break the rhythm you need to get at least a factor of four faster than that).
To see this (maybe), imagine that your opponent does a quick punch. If you notice that he's a bit slow to recover, a good option is to sidestep and punch before his punch is over -- but a punch is over in 200ms, tops. You have to start your punch in at most 50ms after she starts hers (switching genders for the sake of the female karateka in my club). Of course, I might be convinced that this is more a matter of picking up on a rhythm and predicting a punch... but if you do this then you're screwed by a fake, and it wouldn't explain quick responses to the very first attack of a sequence, so I'm fairly sure it's a real reaction time.
p.s. Can you tell I teach at an engineering school? It's always entertaining when the class is completely at a loss to understand a move until I draw a force diagram.
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I have free will (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I have free will (Score:5, Funny)
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Will or Wii? (Score:5, Funny)
My "will" is rock solid... my "Wii" challenges me evey day.
How does this eliminate Free Will? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does this eliminate Free Will? (Score:5, Insightful)
(unconscious decision is made in background processes) -> (person thinks they make a conscious decision using their own Free Will) -> (action occurs which matches the unconscious decision)
Under that model, Free Will is "eliminated" because the final result matches activity that occurs before they consciously deliberate on it and can utilize conscious Free Will. Essentially, Free Will becomes an unconscious process of some sort.
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Re:How does this eliminate Free Will? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont have to know i have free will to have free will.
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Re:How does this eliminate Free Will? (Score:5, Informative)
If you haven't, I suggest looking into some Philosophy of Self and Philosophy of Mind books and essays, since I certainly don't have the time right now to get into it as deeply as a subject like this deserves.
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Re:How does this eliminate Free Will? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is opinion. I notice lines such as:
Unfounded assumptions, artificial distinctions between "animals" and "persons". And we haven't even started discussing free will.
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Re:How does this eliminate Free Will? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem here isn't the existence of 'free will' but with out definition and our perception of it. Just because a definition exists it doesn't mean it can't redefined or proclaimed as invalid.
So maybe the title should be 'Brain Study Calls current definition of Free will into question.', but that's not as sensational.
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"Free will" is not part of the Christian faith. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g. Exodus 9:16 [adaptux.com] and Romans 9:17ff [adaptux.com].
However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?" [pacherie.free.fr], Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.
Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.
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Um, not so much of a newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
The only chance we have of any free will at all is in quantum weirdness which is not much free will to speak of, and certainly not enough to be palatable to the average American who thinks his success or failure is a product of his own decisions rather than the sum total of a very complicated system that he has little control over and basically just experiences as the phenomena of his mind. We think we are in control, but largely we are along for the ride.
Used to freak me out, and it was hard to swallow since I have that Horatio Algeirs kind of narrative: Grew up on welfare in a house without indoor plumbing and now have a doctorate and am typing this on the toilet I picked (the best... I loves me a good quality toilet) in the house I just remodeled. It would feel very nice to think that I did all of this and deserve this wonderful throne. And to be honest my experience is that I think I have free will in my day to day life. But that's probably because the sum of my experiences also made me, after gaining understand that I don't have free will, accept that I live my life with that illusion and navigate life in such a way that I feel comfortable with the 'moral decisions' I think I make. So I pretend I have free will, and think I make moral choices based on that understanding.
Now I've given myself a headache. No. Wait, I was destined to have this headache as long as that electron spun to the left last Tuesday in Portugal. I'm going to go pretend to decide to take an ibuprofen.
Re:Um, not so much of a newsflash (Score:5, Funny)
Sincerely,
Mr. Pedantic
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But what if you choose not to decide? (Score:4, Funny)
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path thats clear
I will choose free will!
--oblig.
Rigged (Score:5, Insightful)
Most decisions are automatic (Score:4, Interesting)
+5 Predetermined (Score:5, Funny)
Please define free will. (Score:5, Insightful)
This experiment raises some interesting questions about the nature of existence, consciousness, and being. I don't think it's going to give us any answers on whether we have "free will" though, whatever that means.
Horrible summery (Score:4, Informative)
what utter nonsense. The ability to predict an action by looking at what your brain is doing has nothing to do with whether or not free will exists. From TFA: sounds to me that the decision making is started before people think it is, nothing more, nothing less.
Criminal Court :) (Score:5, Funny)
Judge: I sentence him to life in prison.
High Priced Trial Lawyer: But...
Judge: Don't look at me, I don't have free will either.
WHAT is exactly free will ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Free will is an incoherent concept (Score:4, Insightful)
The brain is a complex physical system like any other, and is subject to the same rules as any other physical system, like weather. There is no free will. There is only the interaction between our bodies/brains and the environment. Free will is just an illusion caused by the fact that humans are self-aware and that the brain is an extremely complex, dynamical system.
What is "free will" anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because you start thinking about making a "random" decision a few seconds in advance, that does not mean you cannot change your mind a fraction of a second before, if something else happens (ex., a sudden external stimulus). In fact, the article points this out:
"Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
I think it's pretty obvious that people can react to external stimuli in less than seven seconds, including stimuli that they had no way of predicting.
Anyway, unless our brains have some sort of mystical particles, they are essentially very complex and highly parallel (but still fundamentally deterministic) electro-chemical computers, with an insane amount of inputs. So this really boils down to consciousness and a concept of present.
What this study shows is that decision-making isn't an instant process (did anyone think it was?), that we are not conscious of the early stages of that process (did anyone think we were?) and that there is a significant subconscious stage to random decisions, possibly because our brain tries to "validate" its decisions before submitting them to the "conscious" mind, and random ones have a low confidence level, making them go through extra sanity checks.
Subconscious: Tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button!
Mr. Conscious's P.A.: Did you say something or was that just random noise?
Sub.: I said "tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button"!
P.A.: Why should I tell him that?
Sub.: Because he asked me to make a random decision.
P.A.: Not good enough. Mr. Conscious will need assurance that that is the ideal course of action. Please produce the complete paper trail that led you to that decision.
Sub.: What paper trail? This is a *random* decision, you idiot.
P.A.: I'm afraid you will at least have to find some evidence that hitting the left button will not have any negative effects. If Mr. Conscious simply followed every random advice he got, how would he justify his salary?
Sub.: Look, the guy conducting the study hit the button just now and nothing happened to him, right? It's safe. Just hit it.
P.A.: Well, alright. The left button, you said?
Sub.: Yes!
P.A.: I'll transmit that to Mr. Conscious.
Sub.: About bloody time, too. Wasted seven seconds of my life.
P.S. - Several studies have shown that top athletes don't have particularly faster reflexes than other people; they just do the "Jedi trick" of starting to react before something happens. How can they react to something that hasn't happened? Experience. Their brain knows what are the 5 or 6 most likely developments, and it starts to plan ahead for all of them. When the times comes to send the decision to the body, the actual action is already buffered. On top of that, frequently we react to indicators rather than to the event itself (ex., in tennis the other player's body position will generally allow you to guess how he's going to serve before he hits the ball; if you wait for the ball to be hit, you won't get to it on time). To put it in computer terms: speculative execution and intelligent branch prediction.
P.P.S. - In Stanislaw Lem's short story "137 seconds" a news-gathering computer develops the ability to predict reality 137 seconds in advance, so this brain scanner still has a long way to go.
Re:7 seconds (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:7 seconds (Score:5, Interesting)
A green or red square will appear every 15 seconds, along with an arrow that points right or left. If the square is green, you press the mouse button that corresponds with the direction of the arrow (if it points left hit the left button. If it points right, click the right button). If the square is red, you press the button opposite the direction the arrow is pointing.
Now, imagine doing this for an hour or more straight, with wet electrodes attached to your head. After about 10 minutes (at most), you can't help but completely wander off mentally and stop paying attention to what you are doing. Maybe that is the intention. Your goal is to do your best, because this is a "worth while" study after all on how the brain operates. Things start to flash up and you consciously don't pick up what just flashed, so you spend a good part of those 15 seconds trying to dig up any memory of the past 15 seconds. Maybe you had to be there. You don't even want to know the torture of doing these kinds of tests for HOURS inside an MRI machine.
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Re:7 seconds (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and since this is a binary classification problem (left/right), 50% accuracy means you're not doing any better than guessing - 60% isn't very good in that light.
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Re:7 seconds (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, really it should read "Sometimes people subconsciously think ahead"
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Re:7 seconds (Score:5, Insightful)
The *free* means you are making a conscious decision.
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Re:Jedoc (Score:5, Insightful)
Its more of a Buddhist concept of suffering and the necessity of working to end the suffering of others (or at least think you are doing so) that motivates moral action in people who don't believe in free will. How much better of a world would it be if when someone broke into your car to steal, you saw that person as someone less fortunate than you and felt it was your responsibility to, instead of punishing him, make his life better?
Though lucky for us, people who have the insight to understand a world without free will are also people who are more often endowed with that kind of sentiment.
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Re:Jedoc (Score:5, Insightful)
The major assumption is that the thief is indeed less fortunate than the victim by some measure. He may very well be stealing a Honda Civic from a recently divorced single mother living out of a Super 8 motel and working the night shift at Arby's.
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Re:Jedoc (Score:5, Insightful)
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Determinism does not invalidate free will. (Score:5, Insightful)
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