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Brain Study Calls Free Will Into Question
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."
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?
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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)
Yet we play tennis.... Intriguing eh?
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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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.
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.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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 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 and Romans 9:17ff.
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?", 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.