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Confounding the issue: evidence that some reactions happen before the actor is consciously aware that there is a decision to be made (let alone actually making

Confounding the issue: evidence that some reactions happen before the actor is consciously aware that there is a decision to be made (let alone actually making a choice and deliberately initiating a response). It goes beyond recoiling your hand from a hot stove before you're aware of the pain. Tests w/ next-gen helicopter gunship HUD trigger controls showed pilots opening fire microseconds _before_ their neural pathways for "friend/foe" recognition were leveraged. Need to dig up my sources... but the TLDR: a lot of neuroscience brings "free will" into question. Maybe consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and free will a story we tell ourselves, and "decisions" mere post-hoc rationalizations for actions we take before any awareness? Fascinating stuff.

coredog64 10y ago
Isn't this all based on those fMRI scans that were discredited? http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-study-brain-activity-may-be-exaggerating-results/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-st...
- mcguire 10y ago
  Have you heard more about this? The article you link to does not specifically mention the studies in question: ""This calls into question the validity of countless published fMRI studies based on parametric clusterwise inference." It's not clear how many of those there are, but they're likely to be a notable fraction of the total number of studies that use fMRI, which the authors estimate at 40,000."
PJDK 10y ago
If the HUD statement is true does that mean the pilots shoot indiscriminately at friends and foes and the firing system is therefore useless?
- hx87 10y ago
  It means that the pilots shoot at foes and avoid shooting at friends before they are aware that they are doing so.
mcguire 10y ago
Long answer to a short post: Assuming those studies are correct,... Someone please correct me if I mangle the results in question; I know they've shown up here on HN before. The ones I recall involve a participant in an fMRI machine watching a screen. The instructions are, when something occurs on the screen, decide whether or not to push a button, push the button (or don't) and then report when the conscious decision was made. The studies determined that with the assistance of the fMRI, they could predict the button push before the conscious decision: 1. Screen flash. 2. fMRI prediction. 3. Conscious decision. 4. Button push. The usual interpretation is that consciousness and free will are illusions; the decision is made without conscious participation. But I think there's a problem with that interpretation: specifically that its alternative is a strawman: dualism. My argument: How, exactly, do you expect a conscious decision to be made before the neural machinery goes through whatever convolutions are necessary to make that decision? Here's my alternative interpretation of the experiment: 1. Screen flash. 2. "Conscious" decision (although the awareness of the decision, as a conscious event itself, does not bubble up until later). 3. fMRI prediction. 4. Awareness (and reporting) of conscious decision. 5. Button push. Consciousness and free will are not epiphenomena, but the event in the movie in your head has to appear after actual decision. The fMRI prediction is simply seeing the mechanism in progress.

coredog64 10y ago

Isn't this all based on those fMRI scans that were discredited? http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-study-brain-activity-may-be-exaggerating-results/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-st...

mcguire 10y ago
Have you heard more about this? The article you link to does not specifically mention the studies in question: ""This calls into question the validity of countless published fMRI studies based on parametric clusterwise inference." It's not clear how many of those there are, but they're likely to be a notable fraction of the total number of studies that use fMRI, which the authors estimate at 40,000."

PJDK 10y ago

If the HUD statement is true does that mean the pilots shoot indiscriminately at friends and foes and the firing system is therefore useless?

hx87 10y ago
It means that the pilots shoot at foes and avoid shooting at friends before they are aware that they are doing so.

mcguire 10y ago

Long answer to a short post: Assuming those studies are correct,... Someone please correct me if I mangle the results in question; I know they've shown up here on HN before. The ones I recall involve a participant in an fMRI machine watching a screen. The instructions are, when something occurs on the screen, decide whether or not to push a button, push the button (or don't) and then report when the conscious decision was made. The studies determined that with the assistance of the fMRI, they could predict the button push before the conscious decision: 1. Screen flash. 2. fMRI prediction. 3. Conscious decision. 4. Button push. The usual interpretation is that consciousness and free will are illusions; the decision is made without conscious participation. But I think there's a problem with that interpretation: specifically that its alternative is a strawman: dualism. My argument: How, exactly, do you expect a conscious decision to be made before the neural machinery goes through whatever convolutions are necessary to make that decision? Here's my alternative interpretation of the experiment: 1. Screen flash. 2. "Conscious" decision (although the awareness of the decision, as a conscious event itself, does not bubble up until later). 3. fMRI prediction. 4. Awareness (and reporting) of conscious decision. 5. Button push. Consciousness and free will are not epiphenomena, but the event in the movie in your head has to appear after actual decision. The fMRI prediction is simply seeing the mechanism in progress.