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I don't think this paper is related to free will, or if they even claimed it is. It's just sensational title. The choice is completely non-consequential, it's

I don't think this paper is related to free will, or if they even claimed it is. It's just sensational title. The choice is completely non-consequential, it's picking between 2 patterns. The brain choose based on it's initial biases. It's like when you are turning off your brain watching youtube videos, it's likely that you will open another video after that instead of going back to your work because there is a strong pre-existing brain activity related to whatever you're watching. What I'm saying is it isn't like some directive from the subconscious that you cannot go against, it's more like one room is filled with sweets and the other is filled with nothing. The choice is still taken at the moment.

nabla9 8y ago
This is just one of the many studies. You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h... > The choice is still taken at the moment. There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  "Time between when a decision was made and the awareness of it" != "Not having free will" Given that we have to make decisions all the time it's natural an unconscious heuristic could exist, but that, again, doesn't mean "not having free will".
  - nabla9 8y ago
    The feeling of being in control and acting on your free will on the spot is demonstrably not connected to actual decision making will. The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless. If you think that "free will" is becoming aware of your decisions just when you make them, consider the fact that the human perception of "Now" spreads over 3 seconds or more. The ordering of two events can swap up to 5-7 seconds in some cases (ever feel that you are thinking about somebody and then they call you). There is some evidence that your brain does stuff parallel and out of order and then marshals them into stream of consciousnesses where causality of internal processes seems right.
    - eitland 8y ago
      > The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless. Yet the idea of free will is so empowering that I choose to go with it even when it would make sense short term to deny it. Seriously, even if it wasn't true and somebody here starts to believe it - even if that thought weren't a real decision but just a response to my persuasion skills - even then it would probably make a positive impact on their life. Is everything in my life a product of my own decicions? No. I've been dealt a good hand. But after I learned to decide for myself it became better. FWIW I've also no idea who would downvote you, your position seems reasonable even if we disagree strongly. If anyone think what you say is wrong I'd urge them to pst evidence instead of just downvoting.
      - laughingman2 8y ago
        http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/tim-lott-zen-free-will/ http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/tim-lott-zen-fre...
      - nabla9 8y ago
        “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills” – Schopenhauer. For we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity.
- justanotherjoe 8y ago
  the fact that it's 7 seconds... that kind of proves that it isn't a directive. A directive should be executed immediately. That would make more sense to me, anyway.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    Our brain is a massively parallelized computer that runs the entire body yet has a cache of ~7 items and runs on 20 watts of power. I would expect a degree of latency in its more complicated operations.
    - anticensor 8y ago
      The brain runs on 120 watts, not 20. In addition, working memory has a capacity of ~7 toplevel item groups, not items.
      - tomatotomato37 8y ago
        I concede the ambiguous 7 item thing, but where are you getting 120 watts from? The only figures I get from my googling say the entire human body only uses 100 watts on average, with 20% of that used by the brain.
        anticensor 8y ago
        Human body consumes 100W at rest, ~300W at sedentary work, ~1kW at full power. Full power figures are based on appropriation of longitudinal draft ratings.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  The parent's point was that it shouldn't be surprising that inconsequential decisions arise long before we have conscious awareness of it. But that has no relevance to the question of free will, i.e. the capacity to deliberate on decisions. A more relevant test would be to test when explicitly moral decisions are made in relation to our conscious awareness of the decision.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. (...) There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition. Of course it's our own volition. Do you see anybody else there telling the person what to do? Is there some "eternal soul" that should have been informed to make the final decision? The misleading dichotomy here is that the conscious urge is something different from the "choice from the brain up". Whereas the conscious urge is just a later manifestation of the "brain up" process. It's just a nicer UI output we give ourselves of the choice process. It's still our brains, that is us (there's no third party involved), that makes the decision, based on our past experience, knowledge, preferences, memories, etc as wired in our brains. Whether we do it at the conscious layer or we do it at the lower level and then project it at the conscious layer doesn't make it any less of "our own volition". To me it's like saying "the computer didn't make this picture, because the picture was already created in the memory as a structure before it was send to the screen".
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Especially if you start to work at your inner self and tune your reactions to be who you really want to be, it gets deep and very much in tune to what you are saying IMHO.
  - Barrin92 8y ago
    >Do you see anybody else there telling the person what to do? Is there some "eternal soul" that should have been informed to make the final decision? Obviously not, but commonly when people refer to so called 'free will', they don't just mean to imply that you, as a physical entity carry out things by your own volition, it is taken to mean that you consciously deliberate on your choices and have some insight into your own decision making. These experiments suggests that the actual decision making happens at a much more secluded, black box like level. Free will, in a meaningful sense, is taken to mean 'rational control', not just 'that guy over there acts in some way because his brain commands him to', because that's true almost by definition if you exclude religious explanations.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  > asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. Still completely inconsequential choice. Nothing is going to change in lives of these people based on this choice. This is not a "free will"-type of choice people usually think about. I think this all started with Sam Harris using this argument in his crusade against free will, and some people just picked it up without giving it a second thought. The argument is that if the choice is unconsequential (like thinking of a random city or pushing one of equally meaningless buttons), Sam sees that as somehow being the "most free of a choice you could think of". But it is the complete opposite to how the real world and real life works! I would argue that choosing which school to go to, which career to pursue, which food to eat, which person to spend time with - those are real choices, that's where the free will is used. In choices which have consequences. Choices that matter. Choices that require using the consciousness, not appropriating its gargantual power as being a glorified random number generator. Not in a choice that requires no effort, and can be forgotten the moment it is made, because it will have no consequences whatsoever. Good luck making those real choices being predictable by a computer. When a computer can predict what career I am going to choose or who am going to hire (given real viable choices) - then we can come back and talk about free will. Of course at that point, by definition, we have Strong AI which can predict almost anything and the world will be completely different, beyond our wildest imaginations because we can't see it behind the veil of technological singularity. These experiments say nothing about free will. (Of course the papers themselves don't pretend to either, just the sensationalist journalists weakly versed in popular philosophy.)
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  I’ve been sitting with an Advaita teacher for a few years. One of the teaching’s pointers is to observe one’s choices. I’ve been doing this for at least 3 years and have not yet encountered a choice made out of “free will”, and not by desires, basic needs, thoughts, trauma, conditioning etc. My conclusion is that in the West, “free will” is an un-investigated label for any combination of the above. This teacher often speaks of a sense he calls “the false sense of authorship” which claims the responsibility of our actions, thoughts and words.
sagartewari01 8y ago
Yes, it's basically a demonstration of brain activity monitoring technology.

nabla9 8y ago

This is just one of the many studies. You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h... > The choice is still taken at the moment. There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition.

raverbashing 8y ago
"Time between when a decision was made and the awareness of it" != "Not having free will" Given that we have to make decisions all the time it's natural an unconscious heuristic could exist, but that, again, doesn't mean "not having free will".
- nabla9 8y ago
  The feeling of being in control and acting on your free will on the spot is demonstrably not connected to actual decision making will. The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless. If you think that "free will" is becoming aware of your decisions just when you make them, consider the fact that the human perception of "Now" spreads over 3 seconds or more. The ordering of two events can swap up to 5-7 seconds in some cases (ever feel that you are thinking about somebody and then they call you). There is some evidence that your brain does stuff parallel and out of order and then marshals them into stream of consciousnesses where causality of internal processes seems right.
  - eitland 8y ago
    > The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless. Yet the idea of free will is so empowering that I choose to go with it even when it would make sense short term to deny it. Seriously, even if it wasn't true and somebody here starts to believe it - even if that thought weren't a real decision but just a response to my persuasion skills - even then it would probably make a positive impact on their life. Is everything in my life a product of my own decicions? No. I've been dealt a good hand. But after I learned to decide for myself it became better. FWIW I've also no idea who would downvote you, your position seems reasonable even if we disagree strongly. If anyone think what you say is wrong I'd urge them to pst evidence instead of just downvoting.
    - laughingman2 8y ago
      http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/tim-lott-zen-free-will/ http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/tim-lott-zen-fre...
    - nabla9 8y ago
      “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills” – Schopenhauer. For we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity.
justanotherjoe 8y ago
the fact that it's 7 seconds... that kind of proves that it isn't a directive. A directive should be executed immediately. That would make more sense to me, anyway.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Our brain is a massively parallelized computer that runs the entire body yet has a cache of ~7 items and runs on 20 watts of power. I would expect a degree of latency in its more complicated operations.
  - anticensor 8y ago
    The brain runs on 120 watts, not 20. In addition, working memory has a capacity of ~7 toplevel item groups, not items.
    - tomatotomato37 8y ago
      I concede the ambiguous 7 item thing, but where are you getting 120 watts from? The only figures I get from my googling say the entire human body only uses 100 watts on average, with 20% of that used by the brain.
      - anticensor 8y ago
        Human body consumes 100W at rest, ~300W at sedentary work, ~1kW at full power. Full power figures are based on appropriation of longitudinal draft ratings.
hackinthebochs 8y ago
The parent's point was that it shouldn't be surprising that inconsequential decisions arise long before we have conscious awareness of it. But that has no relevance to the question of free will, i.e. the capacity to deliberate on decisions. A more relevant test would be to test when explicitly moral decisions are made in relation to our conscious awareness of the decision.
coldtea 8y ago
>You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. (...) There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition. Of course it's our own volition. Do you see anybody else there telling the person what to do? Is there some "eternal soul" that should have been informed to make the final decision? The misleading dichotomy here is that the conscious urge is something different from the "choice from the brain up". Whereas the conscious urge is just a later manifestation of the "brain up" process. It's just a nicer UI output we give ourselves of the choice process. It's still our brains, that is us (there's no third party involved), that makes the decision, based on our past experience, knowledge, preferences, memories, etc as wired in our brains. Whether we do it at the conscious layer or we do it at the lower level and then project it at the conscious layer doesn't make it any less of "our own volition". To me it's like saying "the computer didn't make this picture, because the picture was already created in the memory as a structure before it was send to the screen".
- jacobush 8y ago
  Especially if you start to work at your inner self and tune your reactions to be who you really want to be, it gets deep and very much in tune to what you are saying IMHO.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  >Do you see anybody else there telling the person what to do? Is there some "eternal soul" that should have been informed to make the final decision? Obviously not, but commonly when people refer to so called 'free will', they don't just mean to imply that you, as a physical entity carry out things by your own volition, it is taken to mean that you consciously deliberate on your choices and have some insight into your own decision making. These experiments suggests that the actual decision making happens at a much more secluded, black box like level. Free will, in a meaningful sense, is taken to mean 'rational control', not just 'that guy over there acts in some way because his brain commands him to', because that's true almost by definition if you exclude religious explanations.
Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
> asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. Still completely inconsequential choice. Nothing is going to change in lives of these people based on this choice. This is not a "free will"-type of choice people usually think about. I think this all started with Sam Harris using this argument in his crusade against free will, and some people just picked it up without giving it a second thought. The argument is that if the choice is unconsequential (like thinking of a random city or pushing one of equally meaningless buttons), Sam sees that as somehow being the "most free of a choice you could think of". But it is the complete opposite to how the real world and real life works! I would argue that choosing which school to go to, which career to pursue, which food to eat, which person to spend time with - those are real choices, that's where the free will is used. In choices which have consequences. Choices that matter. Choices that require using the consciousness, not appropriating its gargantual power as being a glorified random number generator. Not in a choice that requires no effort, and can be forgotten the moment it is made, because it will have no consequences whatsoever. Good luck making those real choices being predictable by a computer. When a computer can predict what career I am going to choose or who am going to hire (given real viable choices) - then we can come back and talk about free will. Of course at that point, by definition, we have Strong AI which can predict almost anything and the world will be completely different, beyond our wildest imaginations because we can't see it behind the veil of technological singularity. These experiments say nothing about free will. (Of course the papers themselves don't pretend to either, just the sensationalist journalists weakly versed in popular philosophy.)
andrei_says_ 8y ago
I’ve been sitting with an Advaita teacher for a few years. One of the teaching’s pointers is to observe one’s choices. I’ve been doing this for at least 3 years and have not yet encountered a choice made out of “free will”, and not by desires, basic needs, thoughts, trauma, conditioning etc. My conclusion is that in the West, “free will” is an un-investigated label for any combination of the above. This teacher often speaks of a sense he calls “the false sense of authorship” which claims the responsibility of our actions, thoughts and words.

sagartewari01 8y ago

Yes, it's basically a demonstration of brain activity monitoring technology.