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Perhaps I'm missing the point here but why does this say anything about free will? Of course you can't make split second conscious decisions. But you've still m

Perhaps I'm missing the point here but why does this say anything about free will? Of course you can't make split second conscious decisions. But you've still made a conscious decision to prime your subconscious facilities to act in a certain way. The consciousness is super slow. It doesn't make sense to have it "do" anything. But it's good for making executive decisions. The CEO doesn't make the product.

crooked-v 8y ago
That's pretty much my line of thought. If I decide to bicycle somewhere, I'm certainly not consciously thinking through most of the act of actually cycling, but I have no doubt that the "uuugh, this is going to suck but I need the exercise" decision happened on a conscious level.
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azernik 8y ago
It meshes with certain other results, for example on timing of predictions (http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindless-robot-with-no-free-will http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindles...), and most interestingly on split-brain patients (http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabulate-stories-which-builds-a-meaningful-narrative-for-our-life http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabul...). In the latter case, split-brain people would make choices based on information only available to their right brain, then when asked to explain them would unconsciously invent an explanation for that choice which was based only on information from their left brain. I'm not sure philosophically whether our inability to understand our decisions undermines our free will, but it certainly undermines any ability to consciously prime ourselves to make certain decisions - hard to have that feedback loop when you don't even know what decision you made!
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Is saying it "meshes with specific other results" just a signal of cognitive bias? I personally would confidently guess there are unconscious faculties in the mind, but I dont see how this experiment is remarkable in proving this, see here(1). Is it not an equally likely conclusion that the brain takes a few hundreds of a second to develop a conscious decision? Actually, the inverse of that is what would be remarkable. 1-https://goo.gl/images/MkT2PQ https://goo.gl/images/MkT2PQ
  - azernik 8y ago
    The issue isn't whether a decision is unconscious or conscious. It's that we often think that we've made a conscious decision when the decision process we narrate for ourselves and others is provably impossible. I should have phrased the original as "it is a relatively weak example of this specific set of experimental results".

crooked-v 8y ago

That's pretty much my line of thought. If I decide to bicycle somewhere, I'm certainly not consciously thinking through most of the act of actually cycling, but I have no doubt that the "uuugh, this is going to suck but I need the exercise" decision happened on a conscious level.

deleted 8y ago

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azernik 8y ago

It meshes with certain other results, for example on timing of predictions (http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindless-robot-with-no-free-will http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindles...), and most interestingly on split-brain patients (http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabulate-stories-which-builds-a-meaningful-narrative-for-our-life http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabul...). In the latter case, split-brain people would make choices based on information only available to their right brain, then when asked to explain them would unconsciously invent an explanation for that choice which was based only on information from their left brain. I'm not sure philosophically whether our inability to understand our decisions undermines our free will, but it certainly undermines any ability to consciously prime ourselves to make certain decisions - hard to have that feedback loop when you don't even know what decision you made!

wallace_f 8y ago
Is saying it "meshes with specific other results" just a signal of cognitive bias? I personally would confidently guess there are unconscious faculties in the mind, but I dont see how this experiment is remarkable in proving this, see here(1). Is it not an equally likely conclusion that the brain takes a few hundreds of a second to develop a conscious decision? Actually, the inverse of that is what would be remarkable. 1-https://goo.gl/images/MkT2PQ https://goo.gl/images/MkT2PQ
- azernik 8y ago
  The issue isn't whether a decision is unconscious or conscious. It's that we often think that we've made a conscious decision when the decision process we narrate for ourselves and others is provably impossible. I should have phrased the original as "it is a relatively weak example of this specific set of experimental results".