5 ms·

Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain (2008) [pdf]

dopu 10y ago
Supplementary information and methods for the paper can be found here [0]. A more condensed version of the methods (in presentation form) can be found here [1]. [0]: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1.pdf http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1... [1]: https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/Unconscious%20determinants%20of%20free%20decisions.pdf https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/...
ihaveahadron 10y ago
This is because 99% of who were are goes on in the subconscious. That doesn't make the subconscious not "us", its every bit as much us as our conscious. They are just two separate parts of who we are. Your subconscious mind constantly decides what information it's going to send to your conscious, while your unconscious mind is always aware of what's going on in the conscious mind. Source: I have a conscious and unconscious mind.
joe_the_user 10y ago
I've heard of this phenomena from "The User Illusion"[1], so it was known of (in less detail) years before 2008. And the thing about it is, the idea that a person reaches a decision unconsciously several moments before they consciously "feel" they "make the decision" is threatening to the idea of "free will" But what exactly is being threatened? Does a person expect their decision to reached without any physical precursors? Do they expect one magic addition of pros and cons to be registered at the moment they subjectively experience "a decision"? I'm using hyperbole not to discount the importance of this phenomena but to highlight how you have a "highly value experience" that is simultaneously extremely vague. Psychologists would do well to study why people value such experiences. [1] The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Tor Nørretranders, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion
hacker42 10y ago
I liked this interview with Judea Pearl on free will: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sg7Oq4suH_E https://youtube.com/watch?v=sg7Oq4suH_E The summary is basically that to our best knowledge there is no free will because decisions are caused by neural activities which in turn are caused by sensory input and noise (but unlikely by quantum noise). However, humans have evolved a strong sense of agency because that's simply an efficient way to reason about machines that produce actions in response to the entirety of their sensory input (especially regarding parent child relationships and mutual behavior correction). This neuroarchitectural bias is essentially an illusion of free will that is so firmly wired into our brains that we cannot escape it. It is also the reason why the idea of a God comes so intuitively to many of us: an invisible actor which can be used to explain inexplicable chains of causation and can serve as a very effective metaphor for behavioral error correction (as a proxy for actual social repercussions, and hence relieved from all the complicated and hence fallible power relations to actual social error correction instances).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 10y ago
  For some frankly ridiculous definition of free will, yes. I think definitions of free will that this assumes - impossible to predict from pre-existing conditions - is synonymous with random choices. But random choices don't seem to be very free. Where is the agency? I am the pre-existing condition that (largely) determines my choices. That's what makes my decisions mine and not just 'free' decisions devoid of context, responsibility or attribution. So if my decisions are made by me and are not coerced or biased by limited access to information, then they are mine and they are free and I will happily accept responsibility for them. But magically occurring decisions free of conditions and not influenced in any way by my actual mental state or faculties are simply not my decisions.
  - taneq 10y ago
    A construct that can react in only one way to any given set of inputs (including its internal state, etc.) intuitively doesn't have 'free will'. A construct that can react in multiple ways to a single given set of inputs, but does so by combining them with some internal inputs which are non-deterministic but generally random in nature, also intuitively doesn't have 'free will'. What you need to really satisfy the intuitive concept of 'free will' is some analytical agency, external to our physical reality, which affects the outcome in some purposeful way. So, basically, a 'soul'. Of course, to move past the 'intuitive' sense we're gonna need to actually rigorously define 'free will', which is something that is curiously lacking in virtually all discussions of this kind of stuff.
cronjobber 10y ago
I find it easy to replicate this for myself. I cannot stop me from sort-of imagining the movement before the "decision". After a few repetitions, it became apparent why this may be so. It's the instructions. I'm to move the finger "immediately". My brain prepares the movement because it wants to do it "immediately" after "deciding". Here's a more relaxed setup. Alternate between looking at two fingers at a relaxed pace. At any moment, decide to move the finger you're currently looking at after silently counting to five. Introspectively, I find no imagined movement before the decision with this task.
Hondor 10y ago
Common experience tells us we make decisions without consciously thinking about them all the time. When you do something a bit silly and someone asks "why did you do that?", you try to make up reasons when really you didn't know why you did it. It was some subconscious process.
mettamage 10y ago
For me, taking a meditation retreat in total silence showed me a lot about how thoughts just spontaneously jump up in my mind. Normally, I don't notice it that often. And in normal situations I tend to act on a lot -- but not all -- of those thoughts which then invokes a thought train which may or may not invoke an action.
- Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
  If you will keep meditating and will discover more about your mind, you will find that almost none of the thoughts that pop into our minds are random. They are all processes that have quite specific purposes. A lot of it comes from suppressed feelings, past trauma, beliefs about what you "have to do", or how you "supposed to feel", etc.
  - mettamage 10y ago
    What kind of meditation do you do? When I do Vipassana I can't be fully aware of my thought processes since I'm focusing on 'feeling my body' in a non-judgmental way. I've been most aware of my thought processes in between breaks in meditation retreats.
    - Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
      This is obviously an area too big to adequately address in a HN comment, but just the broad strokes: Spontaneous thoughts that you were referring too, can basically (simplifying) be seen as the mind's way to avoid certain feelings that it has labeled as "bad". For example there can be some situation which you translate into feeling "alone" (only an example), and that feeling is labeled as "bad". Every time such situation will happen, that feeling will start to manifest in your system, but the brain will usually very quickly start to think some thoughts in order to distract you from such feeling. For the brain it sounds like a good idea, because there will be less of that "bad" feeling in your conscioussness, while you think. Now of course, in general, it's not a very good solution, because it only masks a problem. The problem itself is that you don't fully accept and understand all your feelings, and instead are labeling some of them as bad. Additionally to this, if you don't accept the feelings, but instead try to mask them with thoughts - that just makes them grow, because the feelings are not being let out of the system and start living their own lives. What happens during meditation is that you force out all of the thoughts, so that feelings that exist in you become much more clear. You can finally switch your attention to the feelings that have been craving it. Then you become more aligned with them, understand them better and they stop being problematic. Each time you stop meditating - it's just so much more easier to notice that certain thoughts come from feelings, as opposed to "just randomly initiate". So it's not really about being aware of the thought process during the meditation, it's more about using the experience gained from meditation, as a reference point, in order to notice deviations from it and how they are experienced.
privong 10y ago
This research uses fMRI, but recently some bugs were found[0] which have called into question a lot of the result. This includes, I think, many of the results regarding free will. Is there an expert here who can comment on the accuracy of this 2008 study, given the more recent news about bugs in fMRI software? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269
conjectures 10y ago
Really interested in this topic, not sure about this paper: - Downplays how inaccurate the classifiers are (55-60% accuracy according to the figures). - No table of actual left / right frequency pushing frequency. So we can't compare this to the empirical rate of chance (they assume 50% - I would bet £100 that it's not 50%). - Exclusion policy of people who don't push buttons the right way was inadequately justified, particularly given the above. - Vague explanation of their statistical methods, even in the supplementary material. In particular I can imagine several ways to interpret what they said about the ANOVA - it shouldn't be up to me to guess what they did, the paper should tell me. - No use of hold-out data sets.
JohnLeTigre 10y ago
People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to our will without any form of constraint or predisposition. If this was the case, freedom would not exist since our whole life experiences predisposes us to unconsciously exercise our freedom of will in certain ways. Here is an amusing example: I'm 12 and I want to try using a big person's hammer for the first time. My annoying little brother is beside me (as always... sigh). In mid-air, as I swing the hammer towards the nail, he yells (right in my ear): "You're going to hammer in that nail and because I knew this before it happenned, you didn't decide to hammer it on your own". In this example, the lack of causality is evident and the amount of LBAF is enormous (LBAF: Little Brother Annoyance Factor) The parallel can be made with the mind. It's not because we become cognitively aware of our choices fractions of seconds after some brain activity that seem to be decisional that we didn't "will" it, for all we know, this activity is the gist of willing. Furthermore, there is no indication that our cognitive experiences do not mold our subconscious behaviours, so much that this subconscious activity naturally corresponds to our actual will. Clearly, it is not sufficient to break a misconceived definition of will in order to claim that freedom of will does not exist, with the argument used, one would also need to prove that this subconscious brain activity is incoherent with our conscious activity.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to our will without any form of constraint or predisposition. The problem I have with statements like that is that such statements tend not to provide an alternative meaning for freedom that most people would accept. It seems better to say that most people comprehend freedom in a fashion that's some combination of incoherent, self-contradictory and trivial. IE, it's better to say people comprehend freedom as you say but such a comprehension doesn't make sense if you look at it logically. One thing you might say is that the concept of free and unfree choice makes sense in informal human concept of control and blame - those who freely choose things we don't like get blamed for it, saying people should be free is saying their behavior should be regulated by informal, unconscious interactions rather than formal, rules-based systems.
  - 10y ago

dopu 10y ago

Supplementary information and methods for the paper can be found here [0]. A more condensed version of the methods (in presentation form) can be found here [1]. [0]: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1.pdf http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1... [1]: https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/Unconscious%20determinants%20of%20free%20decisions.pdf https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/...

ihaveahadron 10y ago

This is because 99% of who were are goes on in the subconscious. That doesn't make the subconscious not "us", its every bit as much us as our conscious. They are just two separate parts of who we are. Your subconscious mind constantly decides what information it's going to send to your conscious, while your unconscious mind is always aware of what's going on in the conscious mind. Source: I have a conscious and unconscious mind.

joe_the_user 10y ago

I've heard of this phenomena from "The User Illusion"[1], so it was known of (in less detail) years before 2008. And the thing about it is, the idea that a person reaches a decision unconsciously several moments before they consciously "feel" they "make the decision" is threatening to the idea of "free will" But what exactly is being threatened? Does a person expect their decision to reached without any physical precursors? Do they expect one magic addition of pros and cons to be registered at the moment they subjectively experience "a decision"? I'm using hyperbole not to discount the importance of this phenomena but to highlight how you have a "highly value experience" that is simultaneously extremely vague. Psychologists would do well to study why people value such experiences. [1] The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Tor Nørretranders, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion

hacker42 10y ago

I liked this interview with Judea Pearl on free will: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sg7Oq4suH_E https://youtube.com/watch?v=sg7Oq4suH_E The summary is basically that to our best knowledge there is no free will because decisions are caused by neural activities which in turn are caused by sensory input and noise (but unlikely by quantum noise). However, humans have evolved a strong sense of agency because that's simply an efficient way to reason about machines that produce actions in response to the entirety of their sensory input (especially regarding parent child relationships and mutual behavior correction). This neuroarchitectural bias is essentially an illusion of free will that is so firmly wired into our brains that we cannot escape it. It is also the reason why the idea of a God comes so intuitively to many of us: an invisible actor which can be used to explain inexplicable chains of causation and can serve as a very effective metaphor for behavioral error correction (as a proxy for actual social repercussions, and hence relieved from all the complicated and hence fallible power relations to actual social error correction instances).

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
simonh 10y ago
For some frankly ridiculous definition of free will, yes. I think definitions of free will that this assumes - impossible to predict from pre-existing conditions - is synonymous with random choices. But random choices don't seem to be very free. Where is the agency? I am the pre-existing condition that (largely) determines my choices. That's what makes my decisions mine and not just 'free' decisions devoid of context, responsibility or attribution. So if my decisions are made by me and are not coerced or biased by limited access to information, then they are mine and they are free and I will happily accept responsibility for them. But magically occurring decisions free of conditions and not influenced in any way by my actual mental state or faculties are simply not my decisions.
- taneq 10y ago
  A construct that can react in only one way to any given set of inputs (including its internal state, etc.) intuitively doesn't have 'free will'. A construct that can react in multiple ways to a single given set of inputs, but does so by combining them with some internal inputs which are non-deterministic but generally random in nature, also intuitively doesn't have 'free will'. What you need to really satisfy the intuitive concept of 'free will' is some analytical agency, external to our physical reality, which affects the outcome in some purposeful way. So, basically, a 'soul'. Of course, to move past the 'intuitive' sense we're gonna need to actually rigorously define 'free will', which is something that is curiously lacking in virtually all discussions of this kind of stuff.

cronjobber 10y ago

I find it easy to replicate this for myself. I cannot stop me from sort-of imagining the movement before the "decision". After a few repetitions, it became apparent why this may be so. It's the instructions. I'm to move the finger "immediately". My brain prepares the movement because it wants to do it "immediately" after "deciding". Here's a more relaxed setup. Alternate between looking at two fingers at a relaxed pace. At any moment, decide to move the finger you're currently looking at after silently counting to five. Introspectively, I find no imagined movement before the decision with this task.

Hondor 10y ago

Common experience tells us we make decisions without consciously thinking about them all the time. When you do something a bit silly and someone asks "why did you do that?", you try to make up reasons when really you didn't know why you did it. It was some subconscious process.

mettamage 10y ago

For me, taking a meditation retreat in total silence showed me a lot about how thoughts just spontaneously jump up in my mind. Normally, I don't notice it that often. And in normal situations I tend to act on a lot -- but not all -- of those thoughts which then invokes a thought train which may or may not invoke an action.

Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
If you will keep meditating and will discover more about your mind, you will find that almost none of the thoughts that pop into our minds are random. They are all processes that have quite specific purposes. A lot of it comes from suppressed feelings, past trauma, beliefs about what you "have to do", or how you "supposed to feel", etc.
- mettamage 10y ago
  What kind of meditation do you do? When I do Vipassana I can't be fully aware of my thought processes since I'm focusing on 'feeling my body' in a non-judgmental way. I've been most aware of my thought processes in between breaks in meditation retreats.
  - Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
    This is obviously an area too big to adequately address in a HN comment, but just the broad strokes: Spontaneous thoughts that you were referring too, can basically (simplifying) be seen as the mind's way to avoid certain feelings that it has labeled as "bad". For example there can be some situation which you translate into feeling "alone" (only an example), and that feeling is labeled as "bad". Every time such situation will happen, that feeling will start to manifest in your system, but the brain will usually very quickly start to think some thoughts in order to distract you from such feeling. For the brain it sounds like a good idea, because there will be less of that "bad" feeling in your conscioussness, while you think. Now of course, in general, it's not a very good solution, because it only masks a problem. The problem itself is that you don't fully accept and understand all your feelings, and instead are labeling some of them as bad. Additionally to this, if you don't accept the feelings, but instead try to mask them with thoughts - that just makes them grow, because the feelings are not being let out of the system and start living their own lives. What happens during meditation is that you force out all of the thoughts, so that feelings that exist in you become much more clear. You can finally switch your attention to the feelings that have been craving it. Then you become more aligned with them, understand them better and they stop being problematic. Each time you stop meditating - it's just so much more easier to notice that certain thoughts come from feelings, as opposed to "just randomly initiate". So it's not really about being aware of the thought process during the meditation, it's more about using the experience gained from meditation, as a reference point, in order to notice deviations from it and how they are experienced.

privong 10y ago

This research uses fMRI, but recently some bugs were found[0] which have called into question a lot of the result. This includes, I think, many of the results regarding free will. Is there an expert here who can comment on the accuracy of this 2008 study, given the more recent news about bugs in fMRI software? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269

conjectures 10y ago

Really interested in this topic, not sure about this paper: - Downplays how inaccurate the classifiers are (55-60% accuracy according to the figures). - No table of actual left / right frequency pushing frequency. So we can't compare this to the empirical rate of chance (they assume 50% - I would bet £100 that it's not 50%). - Exclusion policy of people who don't push buttons the right way was inadequately justified, particularly given the above. - Vague explanation of their statistical methods, even in the supplementary material. In particular I can imagine several ways to interpret what they said about the ANOVA - it shouldn't be up to me to guess what they did, the paper should tell me. - No use of hold-out data sets.

JohnLeTigre 10y ago

People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to our will without any form of constraint or predisposition. If this was the case, freedom would not exist since our whole life experiences predisposes us to unconsciously exercise our freedom of will in certain ways. Here is an amusing example: I'm 12 and I want to try using a big person's hammer for the first time. My annoying little brother is beside me (as always... sigh). In mid-air, as I swing the hammer towards the nail, he yells (right in my ear): "You're going to hammer in that nail and because I knew this before it happenned, you didn't decide to hammer it on your own". In this example, the lack of causality is evident and the amount of LBAF is enormous (LBAF: Little Brother Annoyance Factor) The parallel can be made with the mind. It's not because we become cognitively aware of our choices fractions of seconds after some brain activity that seem to be decisional that we didn't "will" it, for all we know, this activity is the gist of willing. Furthermore, there is no indication that our cognitive experiences do not mold our subconscious behaviours, so much that this subconscious activity naturally corresponds to our actual will. Clearly, it is not sufficient to break a misconceived definition of will in order to claim that freedom of will does not exist, with the argument used, one would also need to prove that this subconscious brain activity is incoherent with our conscious activity.

joe_the_user 10y ago
People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to our will without any form of constraint or predisposition. The problem I have with statements like that is that such statements tend not to provide an alternative meaning for freedom that most people would accept. It seems better to say that most people comprehend freedom in a fashion that's some combination of incoherent, self-contradictory and trivial. IE, it's better to say people comprehend freedom as you say but such a comprehension doesn't make sense if you look at it logically. One thing you might say is that the concept of free and unfree choice makes sense in informal human concept of control and blame - those who freely choose things we don't like get blamed for it, saying people should be free is saying their behavior should be regulated by informal, unconscious interactions rather than formal, rules-based systems.
- 10y ago