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Study Suggests Free Will Is An Illusion (iflscience.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IFLScience: A new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has attempted to define and investigate the subject of free will. By asking participants to anticipate when they thought a specific color of circle would appear before them, something determined completely by chance, the researchers found that their predictions were more accurate when they had only a fraction of a second to guess than when they had more time. The participants subconsciously perceived the color change as it happened prior to making their mental choice, even though they always thought they made their prediction before the change occurred. They were getting the answers right because they already knew the answer. "Our minds may be rewriting history," Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. The implication here is that when it comes to very short time scales, even before we think we've made a conscious choice, our mind has already subconsciously decided for us, and free will is more of an illusion than we think.
on a subscription model.
The conclusion is bullshit. Free will isn't an illusion and life isn't a game that plays us. (Anyone catch the reference there?)
On short time scales, reaction time is probably faster if the brain does some processing in advance. The decision is already made so the mental processing need not be done instantly and, instead, can just be acted upon almost right away.
At longer time scales, though, there probably is free will. There's no clear advantage to intelligence if free will doesn't exist to make use of it.
Maybe at short time scales, free will doesn't really exist. Instincts and reflexes take over, though these can be conditioned. At longer time scales, though, free will surely does exist. The brain has more than one way of processing information and deciding on a course of action.
I suggest reading "Sleight of Mind." Magicians have known for millennia how to force certain outcomes.
(I have no connection to book or the authors, other than having read the book. It's a bit pretentious at times, but otherwise rather insightful.)
Of course free will is an illusion as Dennett explained 20 years ago. But illusions exist! Just like anything virtual.
I remember reading/hearing about similar studies years back in a philosophy course. To me this isn't exactly surprising. I mean put simply, if I tell someone to "name an animal" they cannot control which animals pop into their head. Their mind/subconscious goes through their memory quickly and picks up certain animals, with the more common ones probably coming up first. Say the person thinks of dogs, cats and horses first. He/she now then has to choose which to say out loud. Whether or not that choice is 'free' is something these kinds of studies look in to, but I don't find it shocking that unconscious factors (which animal he likes most, or which he thinks I like most, thinks is most expected/unexpected as an answer, etc...) probably end up affecting the final choice quite much as well.
So even under the best possible scenario for free will, it's only free in the sense of 'we're free to make choices based on the alternatives we happen to think of', but we do not get to choose what we happen to think about most often. No matter what way you look at it 'classical' free will has been dead for a long time, as for that to be true human beings would have to be free from the influences of our surroundings (both environment and other people) and we already know that's not true. Look at cold reading: people can be guided by suggestions even when these suggestions are not framed as such, but are merely words/phrases/gestures which are meant to bring about certain responses and behaviors in an individual. A skilled cold reader will have his audience believing that he in fact was reading the person's mind, when in fact what he's doing is reading small hints and tips from expressions and mannerisms which are for the most part involuntary.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I swear I already read about this study years ago.
But right now I can't find the source.
(This is not a meta-post joke. I really remember the "few milliseconds before illusion of prediction" topic being studied.)
Because picking colors and circles in a few fractions of a second is the same as deciding to rob a bank.
...because every decision we make is determined by our genetics and our environment. All of our decisions are pre-determined by these two factors and free will is just an illusion.
If you run a computer program a thousand times with the same inputs you'll get the same outputs every time. Likewise, if you made a thousand copies of the universe and ran the same situation a thousand times our actions in every universe would be the same. This means we have the same level of free will as a simple computer program. We're just running the program defined in our genetics and environment and all of our decisions are pre-determined by these factors. We only think we're making decisions and choosing our own path.
Or people feel less guilty about lying if they hadn't fully decided on their prediction yet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Disprove the Null Hypothesis by proving it was actually the mechanism they think causing the predictions to be more accurate, and not something else.
Alternate hypothesis 1) Quantum entanglement of the random generator influenced correct responses, and the accuracy went up given a shorter temporal duration because there was less entropy breaking down the entanglement.
Alternate hypothesis 2) The study has proven psychic premonitions work better the closer the event is to happening.
I'm not saying you have to disprove all the alternate hypotheses, but disprove at least one otherwise we're not doing science!
The paper (or at least its abstract) doesn't seem to mention "free will". This seems to be a term introduced by reports of the paper. The paper itself seems to refer to choices that are made consciously as opposed to those that aren't (and are therefore made subconsciously). I think the term "free will" confuses the issue, because it's used in different ways.
In practical usage it more or less refers to choices that are made without being controlled by an outside agent (e.g. not choices made under duress), and in philosophical usage it more or less refers to "choices" that are made without any cause (although I don't think this idea makes sense).
Free will is not predicting the future! What does it mater if the choice is conscious or not? This test might at best show that decisions can be _influenced_ by external factors.
The journal article is paywalled, so I'm relying on the linked articles for my information.
Why not have the participants enter their choice BEFORE the circle is displayed and then and automatically record whether or not their response was correct? It would keep participants honest. I think a more reasonable interpretation than "we are seeing the future because we have no free will" is that the participants simply did not have time to solidify a guess in their minds and were simply lying (even if they were doing it subconsciously) about their guess.
Our primitive mind designed for a world where we are constantly under attack or will need to attack others, is the product of 500 millions years of evolution. Our higher brain functionally only 2 or 3 million years. So yes in term of making quick decision our primitive brain kicks in. We use it while driving, and every day living. That is why magicians are able to pull off their tricks on us. They get the primitive brain distracted on something else while they do something else. The higher human brain is much slower however it will try to process more information. Such as the question to the volunteers of this study if they want to do it or not. There is no immediate danger there is no pressure of instant response they can stand back and think about it. Factor in what rewards would they get, what are the risks, what trade offs from the action will occur. That is free will. However if someone tried to get volunteers and is a natural sales man would apply pressure on them to make a decision far more quickly. Because they will avoid them trying to think about it, they will keep their minds occupied with idle chit-chat, and implying the positive images of what will happen.
The study shows our primitive mind makes a lot of decisions for us. But nothing about free will.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
William Shakespeare
I feel ashamed to think of all the years when I went on believing there was some distinction between predestination and free will. In fact, I'm now sure it's just a matter - once again - of us being fooled by our own language.
Imagine the universe from a God's eye point of view. Think of it as a four-dimensional space, with one dimension being time. (Physics suggests there are probably a lot more dimensions, but this simple model is sufficient). Now when (apologies for the meaningless use of "when", as time is a dimension within the universe) God creates the universe, it is complete: it contains, in His mind, everything that will ever happen. (Please note that this mental experiment does not depend at all on the existance of God). What does this do to free will? Well, it obviously destroys it completely. Imagine the Mississippi River, which notoriously meanders and turns back on itself for hundreds of miles. It creates curves, which become oxbow lakes, and then disappear again. Do you think the river has free will? Or could all of its elaborate changes be predicted, with enough knowledge of the physics and the initial conditions? Yet maybe if you were the river, you might like to think you had free will.
There is no contradiction here. We feel as if we have free will, yet our actions are mostly quite predictable. Ask yourself, "who is it that has free will?" Isn't it a rather old-fashioned picture that comes to mind, of a little person or imp sitting inside your head, choosing and making decisions for you? But even introspection shows (as David Hume testified) that there is no such little imp of identity. Our actions arise from the state of the whole organism from moment to moment. And if there seems to be an element of freedom, of indeterminacy, to them that may be because so very much of our thinking is unconscious.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Geddy Lee is going to be very disappointed!
Dis boy 'ere is wrong. On the quantum level we have a random stuff happening. Perhaps we don't know what the underlying cause is, but for now it's random.
And since everything is quantum mechanics by definition (Go down enough and you will, every single time, find quantum mechanics)
Thus, the universe will not repeat itself exactly, even if you reset it with identical starting position.
As far as we currently know, it's pointless to base a world view on a belief about a thing without first ascertaining that the thing actually is. God comes to mind.
But my argument doesn't prove free will, so perhaps the world is non-deterministic AND we have no free will?
FTFA: "The .. participants were asked to predict which one would randomly turn red, make a mental note of this, then wait. After one of the circles took on a crimson hue, the participants had to record via keystroke whether they had predicted correctly, incorrectly, or didn’t have time to complete their choice."
The participants are thus themselves responsible for being honest about their choice? So what's to say that the participants just didn't say "sure, I was right" when they failed? And especially when they have too little time to decide whether they were right or wrong, it's easy to just take the positive approach.
This strikes me not so much about studying "free will" than our inability to operate on extremely small timescales.
Second of all, I would be very reticent to accept into general principle the idea that there is no free will.)
If free will exists but we assert it does not, we surrender it of our own volition: if there is hope, but we do not keep hope, then from our own decision, there is no longer hope.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
It's just not counter-causal ghost-in-the-machine type free will. Which is good, because that type of free will makes no sense what so ever.
If your choices are based on something other than your genetics, environment and experience, what would that "other" thing be, and how would it at all be meaningful?
That we use post-hoc rationalization to determine why we make the choices we make is starting to become painfully obvious with neural network research. We don't know why a neural network make the choices it makes either. It appears through the sum of it's parts. We just have to learn to live with it.
I find it puzzling that Christians in particular seem to be irritated by the idea of a lack of free will.
Isn't it conflictive to believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful deity while at the same believing in freedom of choice?
More than once I've seen a religious person irritated when the notion of determinism came up in a discussion.
What is the connection there?
The study shows that our brain decides before this is reflected in the conscious mind. However, the subconscious process are part of the thought process. This does not mean that this process cannot be influenced and manipulated. Of course it can, but that is not an argument against free will. The biggest problem with the concluding sentence of the abstract is that they use the term free will, which has many different definition that are not compatible. If you think free will is the objective and self-motivated choice of a human than there is no free will, as we are not able to make objective decisions on a general basis. Some decisions we perform are based on habits, even bad habits (where we know they are bad, but still do them). Therefore, there is no free will.
Alternatively, you could say that will is by definition subjective and does not need to be logical and thought through. In that case habits are not a problem and you freely decide between presented options based on your likes. Furthermore, there is no objective way to determine whether eating too much chocolate is an objective choice, as it depends on how important health is for you compared to good taste.
On a side note: Free will was invented to be able to define a rules which prohibit the suppression of the personal will by a third party. In that context free will does not need to be unaffected by previous events and unbiased.
Finally, you may say that the will of a person can be manipulated against the interests of that person. Is that the case such manipulation must be prohibited. However, that would require most advertisements to be changed or suppressed. Same applies to political statements and TV presents of politicians etc.
I remember seeing something a long time ago about a test concerning throwing basketballs. Usual guys, as well as trained basketball players, were asked to free throw from different positions/distances. Their performances were recorded.
Then, the same thing, with a twist - a fraction of a second before throwing (before the ball leaving the player's hands) the lights were turned off, and the throw continued in total darkness.
Surprise - the rates of success improved markedly.
Could this be something related to the thing discussed above ?
People have free will in the senses that a train has got free will but still has to go where the tracks are laid down.
You can even have indeterminacy with completely deterministic components. The weather is fundamentally unpredictable, even if you leave quantum mechanics out of the picture. A nonlinear equation with three components can go on creating apparently 'new' information forever, with no repetition.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think there are more than one cognitive bias (google "list of cognitive biases", wikipedia) that could have an effect in these type of tests. "Free will", however, is "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion."
Free will is just an illusion? That is what they WANT you to think.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Subject is wrong: If you make a definition of something everybody knows what is, and based on that definition comes to the conclusion it doesn't exist. It means your definition is wrong. Free will means choice, it doesn't mean random or unpredictable.
But on an another topic: The actual story. Yes we are often make up explaination after the fact, and by often I mean most of the time. The human brain is a parallel machine, most of it is just guessing what the rest is doing and usually after it has done it.
"Pipe down you two or I come back there and change your opinions manually." - Leela
I am sure similar incidents happens to everyone. Packing all the kids into the station wagon and driving half way across the country to a great secret backwoods camping nook that you last visited when you 8 years old, and then to be thoroughly disappointed by the actual campsite ...
I read that we never remember the actual details at all, but we only the feelings triggered by the sights and sounds.
git push -f origin HEAD:master seems to be on by default in our brain. History is constantly being rewritten.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Free will is a prerequisite for knowledge. If we don't have free will, then we can't choose our beliefs based on what's true, but are predestined to believe whatever we believe. Therefore any argument against free will is invalid because it means: "I'm not saying free will doesn't exist because it's true, I'm saying it because I have to."
Free will is axiomatic in that it is a prerequisite for knowledge. There can be no claim to valid knowledge unless free will exists.
At most it suggests that the visual processing center filters information presented to the conscious mind, which we already knew. This is a study of phenomenology, not free will.
don't tell Rush.
Of course there is no free will. Your brain is made out of chemicals those chemicals follow specific laws. This means that it is would be possible to simulate your brain if you had a big enough computer. So if you can simulate your brain and can predict what your decision would be then you don't have any free will.
Or, perhaps our brains are capable of learning things, based on prior decisions and outcomes, and can make rapid decisions based on external stimuli without input from the conscious mind.
If only there were a word to describe this process, where the brain reacts to external stimuli automatically and involuntarily.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some Duran Duran to listen to.
Automatons can have illusions!
If it does, how does this affect criminal trials?
From the abstract... Here, we explore the possibility that choices can seem to occur before they are actually made...The experience of choice is susceptible to “postdictive” influence and that people may systematically overestimate the role that consciousness plays in their chosen behavior.
Free will is too heavy a term for what's at play here. These methods of study simply show that our freedom of choice does not mean that we choose at random. And that's been studied and experimented with, debated by philosophers throughout human history, and has popped up even on Slashdot. As my first source clearly says, "One of the worst ways to generate 'random' numbers is to ask somebody to write down some numbers 'at random'. It won't work...The human mind is built for patterns; it doesn't like boring repititions." Just because we have the freedom to choose, a.k.a. "free will," does not guarantee our choices is random.
This experiment just shows that, when we aren't given enough time for the "consciousness circuitry" within our minds to make its choice, other circuitry in our minds take over and make for some interesting results. Maybe, instead of debating whether or not free will exists, we should instead attempt to analyze what cranial pathways are taking over. I'd be very interested to know what portions of the mind take over when it's forced to make split-second decisions, then measure whether or not these decisions are more accurate, or in what ways, compared to the "I've had time to think about it, and I've concluded..." choices.
some scientists will say / "conclude" anything, anything at all under the sun, to avoid concluding that things like clairvoyance and telepathy exist.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It is fairly well accepted belief that the Universe is deterministic, but only from the Universe's standpoint. No observer inside the Universe can perfectly predict anything because that would require knowing all information within the Universe, which is impossible from inside the Universe.
It seems that the conclusion is related to the Libet experiments.
In this experiments, participants are asked to mark the time they decide to take an simple action (like pushing a button) then perform said action. Using ECG, he discovered that the motor cortex "prepared" the movement about 300ms before the recorded time of the decision.
It implied that the decision wasn't conscious, suggesting that free will is an illusion.
Needless to say, this conclusion is controversial.
Many solutions perform better in hardware than software. Try carrying a full coffee cup while looking at it, then try w/o looking.
The brain and body are good at doing things that keep you alive, like seeing and balancing.
I have often heard the concept of free will come up in the context of religion. For example: does one chose or is God choosing and imposing his will on the individual.
The concept of free will also comes up in secular areas as well.
I do not see how this experiment deals with free will at all.
Nothing to see here folks.
The mind naturally has many systems and sub-components. This makes the mind is a complex multidimensional system, and it is easy to detect automatic decision making mechanisms.
The fact of automated response systems does not disprove freewill, no more than the fact of automated computer mechanisms (and bots, etc) disproves the existence of users on the internet (and elsewhere)
Of course, some day, the internet will be filled with AI Bots spamming each other for the fun and profit, and it will be bots and turtles all the way down. An actual user will become a rare thing indeed.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you are so sure it exists, just prove it
It's hard to prove that free will exists but easy to show that the conclusions of this study are not proven. All they have shown is that the brain can subconsciously process information and provide it to the conscious mind. The very fact that when given longer the people got more answers wrong proves that the conscious mind can choose to ignore that information and hence free will can still exist in that choice.
The high speed reaction results suggest that we can program our low level, high speed firmware to return the result we are looking for which makes sense from a survival perspective because you don't need to have higher level reasoning and choice take place when a predator jumps out of a bush at you. So, if free will does exist, all they have shown is that we can use it to pre-program our brains to react to certain situations in a predetermined way. However the choice to do that was still potentially a free one and although some of these reactions may have been pre-programmed at birth there is nothing to say that they cannot be changed later.
The small sample and reliance on the HONESTY of the participant makes the test utterly useless. Timestamp on display and recording of subject input would have eliminated this but that was NOT the goal of this unscientific 'experiment'. NOT WORTH READING, nor publishing.
is if a machine that can predict my actions is invented, I could always incorporate that machine into my decision making process, restoring my "free will" ("oh, I was about to decide that? On second thought, maybe not").
Consequently, free will seems to be more of an emergent property of being able to continuously and flexibly augment and use tools for our thought processes than some kind of "magic stuff" that makes our decisions appear truly mystical and random.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
A split second before you did
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
I think the conclusion to take from this is that everyone is slightly psychic.
They receive visions of the future and act on within those small time scales before the chaos of our thoughts intercedes and makes them doubt their instinctual response to future visions.
Free Willy doubly so.
And no references to The Matrix: Reloaded.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
It has been known for some time now that the conscious and sub-conscious mind interact in ways often imperceptible to the conscious mind. However that doesn't make good click bait so the conclusion "no free will" was used instead. All done.
At least these "studies" are now using words appropriate to the level of science being done: "Suggests".
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Ever been in an accident? Of course our brains re-write history and try and make sense of the sense impressions given to them. Of course on a second by second basis the process is messy and we are not necessarily the best reporters of what is going on in our heads. On the shortest time scales, there is little to no free will, as there is literally no time to think.
By the way, free will is about the ability to make choices. Conscious versus subconscious is about how the choices are made.
Define properly free will. And soon after you will detect that you have got a problem. Some of the definition of free will is actually the capacity of choice... But if that choice is already done by the time you consciously think about it, due to your past shaping your preference, then there is no such a thing as free will, but rather an electrochemical process weighing the choice and the largest or smallest weight being preponderant. Frankly free will does not exists and such study confirm it : our choice are dictated by our memory, education, past, and perception. There is no magic "free will daemon" dictating they today he will make a different choice, if the same situation was shown set up.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
nothing new, move along
... but if somebody did a scientific study, which has a conclusion, then I'm convinced I don't exist ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
They should rename the page "I fucking love pseudoscience."
90% of the shit they post is pseudo-scientific meta-garbage that has no basis in fact or reality, and this is certainly no exception. They're like the dumping ground for rejected papers.
Newsflash, there are mental as well as physical reflexes, and your brain can process data and make decisions all on its own without input from you. That is not the same thing as saying there is no free will. Come on, what kind of ludicrous conclusion is that based on the (re)discovery that mental reflexes exist (which has been known for a long time)?
So, in homage:
1) Re-invent the wheel and leap to a wild-ass conclusion ...
2) Get IFLS to post your rejected paper
3)
4) Profit!
Please don't post stuff without an open link.
The provided link includes a somewhat misleading summary and points to a subscription required scientific journal article.
I'd bet that the post is only interesting until one reads TFA and figures out what was actually done instead of what the summary implys.
The Study doesn't suggest free will doesn't exist, not by a longshot. However, a researcher with knowledge of the study leapt to an unreasonable conclusion not based on data from the study, and used it to attract thousands of "likes" on a facebook page dedicated to pseudoscience.
The study itself suggests what has been known for decades, and that is that there are cognitive as well as motor reflexes, and that more often than not those involuntary cognitive reflexes make computations more accurately than voluntary cognitive thought, where judgment and bias get in the way.
The brain possesses the capability to react to external stimuli and make survival judgments much faster than we can stop and think about them.
One personal anecdote comes from when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail through New Jersey, and while moving along at a good clip, I suddenly found myself running full speed in the opposite direction. I had approached a rattlesnake without realizing it, and the thing started rattling. Before I could even think about it, my brain turned my body around and made it run away. It is correct to say that was not a "free will" decision. It was a cognitive reflex that led to my survival.
Something like this is not a suggestion that free will is an illusion. It is only a suggestion that our brains are capable of doing complex tasks involuntarily based on external stimuli. Congratulations to the study authors for coming up with an experiment to demonstrate it. But, that's just about all they did that was new.
Just try holding your breath for ten minutes, and you'll realize that your supposed free will doesn't even have full control over your voluntary muscles.
We are always free to change our minds. Whether we do or not is up to us, everything is a conscious choice, and that butden of responsibility scares a lot of people. We live in a society of learned helplessness. I really hate junk science like this. Useless.
After years of trying to read various papers, articles, take a class in philosophy, I still don't grasp what free will is. The best I have come up with is a term that people use to assert individual responsibility and accomplishments, such that they can justify taking pride in what they do and demonize actions of people they hate.
The only thing about the study that suggests that freewill is an illusion, is that despite the data suporting the opposite the published conclusion is that one has no free will, as if the author were fated to come to such a conclusion.
The data appears to show that when given time for the conscious mind to interfere, the choices made were indeed different than the automatic responses.
If the universe is non-deterministic, then upon what basis can we ultimately have confidence that we have no free will?
I would argue that "free will" is actually just a phrase to describe the appearance of free will anyways, but only when there is no provable evidence that anyone, either the person making the choice or anyone or anything else, has the ability to be able to tell the difference between the outcome of their so-called free-willed choice and an otherwise predetermined outcome.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This study only "suggests" that decisions that we make are also influenced by subconscious processes, in this case, an early subliminal (=non-consciously detected) perception. It's not something novel, though. For example, it is common knowledge that obstacle avoidance is strongly dependent on brain structures that do not require visual perception.
of the article.
They were not testing free will, they were testing our ability to cheat faster than our mind was capable of realizing we were cheating.
Free will itself is a complex, philosophical-religious concept that is not easily subject to testing, any more than god is subject to testing.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No free will? That's not quite what this result means. It means no *conscious* free will. The part of our mind that is really in the driver's seat is not the part we think of as our conscious, aware mind. A lot of the processing and decision making happens behind the scenes. The thing is, that subconscious part of your mind is still *you*, and it's been informing your behaviour and decisions your entire life. You are as free to make your choices as you always were, it's just that the decision making process isn't what you might have thought it was.
The fact that our brains can sometimes hide or disguise influences on our choices has nothing to do with free will.
Indeed, we've long known that factors we don't think are influencing our choices can indeed do so. For example, subconscious racism or classic experiments showing that people asked to choose between identical items will select the one on the right (and they make up reasons it's better). This experiment no more implicates free will than these well known facts.
The issue of free will has been explored at length in philosophy and doing a neat experiment doesn't give you special warrant to ignore these points. If one was familiar with the old doctrine of compatibilism (yes you can have free will and determinism because what determines your actions is your brain state which is you) it would be immediate that so long as you view the brain process which responds to the visual image as a part of the individual making the choice free will isn't called into question at all.
Yes, it's interesting that our choices can be realized in such a counter-intuitive way but don't try and over sell the result by claiming philosophical implications you haven't seriously thought through (or bothered to read the existing literature about)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
This study would prove something. As it stands it does not in any way honestly address free will or prove that we have or don't have free will. Even withing the bounds of circle guessing I don't buy into such a leap of faith that the accuracy of circle guessing correlates well with free will.. even just free will of circle guessing. Their data is there, it is real, but it doesn't prove anything. Like all data, it supports one or more conclusions when applied to that conclusion, but I don't think the data they have on it's own would lead most people or scientists to the conclusion they've presented. I think they've made a grand leap in their assumptions without data the back it up and most likely for the sake of drawing attention and getting funding, but of course that's just a grand assumption in itself. In any case the data doesn't prove their assumption to any degree that validates the headline's sensational claims. It's not Slashdot worthy.
Exercising the right not to walk...
So the "expiriment" in free will is to guess the color on the back of the card? Didn't they do that in Ghostbusters? Isn't that ESP? Free will would be telling Mr. PHD to piss off not guess colors.
If you have free will you don't need to worry about it, and if you don't there's nothing you can do about it.
Book: The Illusion Of Conscious Will by D. Wegner In this book they place people in FMRI scanners and ask them to touch their fingers together at some random time. The results suggest that the decision area of the brain (neo-cortex) gets involved quite late in the process. Worse than that, there research to suggest that there is a region of the brain whose job is to construct some narrative so that it seems like we actually made the decision. (Some patients have lost this area due to stroke, and they can produce strange results in testing).
A pulitzer prize winning non-fiction book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid gave a pretty convincing defense of exactly this. At best, this might be some experimental support of a long standing theory. "Free will" is merely a narrative that you create after the fact, since it's mathematically impossible to for any logical system to examine itself accurately. It's not that we don't know why we decide things... it's that we can't know why we decide things because that would violate Godel's incompleteness theorem.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
People react slightly ahead of events when tested. Random pictures flashed on a screen while they're monitored show we react before the image is shown.
So the free will test is probably flawed based on some quantum time thing I don't have time to look up (gotta go to a meeting and predict what will happen there).
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/01/04/132622672/could-it-be-spooky-experiments-that-see-the-future
Who Made Them Make you Post this
Seriously? THIS is not what we talk about when speaking of 'free will'. It's obvious that our subconscious reacts to stimuli long before our 'conscious mind' does, otherwise we'd have ended up extinct from the lions, tigers and all other manner of natural predator & disaster that would take our lives. I trust this was at best an M.Sc. thesis project otherwise this paper is shyte!
This book already documented the effect.
Dis boy 'ere is wrong. On the quantum level we have a random stuff happening.
god of the gaps
Preprint please not being subscribed this free will wants to see what up.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Anyone who has ever provided computer support for a large, heterogeneous population of users on a large, homogeneous flock of systems and programs knows deep in their scarred and hate-blackened hearts that users have free will. Many is the day a user's request will have me scratching my head and asking either "Why would you want to do that?" or "How on Earth did you ever get it to do that?" or more often both. You don't get screw-ups like I've seen unless the idiots involved have free will.
It looks to me like the problem lies in the test. Subject were given a single-step, non-branching choice matrix and asked to make snap choices or given time to make the same choices. People are extremely good at seeing patterns and signals and knowing when things change. We call it intuition but it's just our big brains constantly processing our surroundings so we can react in time to save our lives (and our brains). Give the subjects a twenty-step branching matrix with, say a hundred thousand possible outcome-paths, then give them a task to complete by following the paths - building a robot or flying a rocket to Pluto. Afterwards examine the paths. Putting aside certain tendencies of gestalt-thinking inherent in human-designed problems* the answer will certainly point towards free will.
*People tend to think alike, which is the reason you can usually guess the answer to someone's riddle or guess their passwords.
I don't know how they can conclude from this crap experiment that free will is an illusion.
So taking the logical conclusion of the "study"
All these slashdot comments were randomly generated, and nobody had a choice in the matter.
Including this one. I had no choice but to post this. And no choice in how to word it.
The "Time Travel" proves free will in my rationalization. The person taking the test wants to be right (as most people do when we take tests). They WANT to be right so much that they consciously or unconsciously cheat and say they got the answer right even though they "guessed" after the fact. Isn't your wants affecting your actions pretty much the definition of free will?
There is really no such thing as random events. There is only interactions with outcomes that we aren't able to comprehend and predict yet. Just because we likely can't ever reach a point that we can know every single bit of information in a system and so predict the output doesn't mean it isn't strictly deterministic. It is simply more comfortable for us to believe we are special and have free will than to accept the alternative.
Predictability and determinism are not the same thing. Predictability implies determinism, but determinism does not imply predictability.
... in the sense that the idea of your persona can decide things. A personality is an idea of who you think you are, and ideas can not decide things. YOU can decide things, but an idea is a product of the mind and can not decide for itself. The mind is not all of reality.
It is a well accepted belief that the Universe is random. I don't think there is any evidence either way. In fact the "well accepted belief" you presented seems to imply that it will be "impossible" to gather evidence "from inside the universe" to test it. Scientific claims must be falsifiable. This claim is philosophical at best, and simply wishful thinking at worst.
So, this experiment shows that there are special cases when the human mind can be tricked into making choices that are not "free". How to you jump to the generalization that there is not "free will" at all from that? If you see a horse swimming, do you write an article that horses are in fact fish?
If we didn't have free will when our neurons were deterministically following the laws of physics, I don't see how giving the neurons random quantum dice to base their behavior on helps the case for free will.
all these ideas to keep us compliant are a lie ;)
Slashdot is an illusion as well.
"Do not try and bend free will, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth..."
"What truth?"
"There is no free will."
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't particularly... but I was always under the impression that the strongest case for lack of free will rests on the notion that the universe is deterministic. While the universe may not actually be deterministic, any lack of determinism cannot possibly help the case for trying to disprove the existence of free will.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This study is the latest in a long line of studies which show that we have poor insight into the causes of our choices. We think we know why we have decided the way we have, but experiment after experiment has shown that this is often not entirely true. This study is showing that even events which occur _after_ the moment when we think we have decided can influence our decisions without our being aware of this fact.
Our explanations of why we have decided the way we have are stories that we construct. Whether these stories are constructed before or after the decision is made, they are still stories that do not fully account for the actual causes of the choices.
Our sense of free will is grounded in the idea that we know why we make the choices we do. This experiment contributes to a large body of literature which demonstrates that this is simply not true.
It's free will all the way down. They chose to participate, they chose to cooperate rather than making random animal noises or always picking the same circle. They chose to accept the answer from their subconscious processing rather than ignore it. The subconscious chose not to say fish.
The study just showed that we are not fully aware of subconscious processes (but that's a tautology). If anything, the study supports free will by showing that we can choose not to listen to the subconscious.
There are other weirder interpretations as well but Occam suggests we not go there.
We experience free will, in the sense that we experience deliberation leading to deliberate choices. However much lag there is between expressing our opinion and forming it is no more relevant than pointing out that our computers render a scene in memory before displaying it on the screen.
Given that the universe can't store it's own entire past history due to Shannon's law + entropy, the idea that we are purely shackled to the universe's initial conditions is also right out.
This isn't hiding in the unknown, but resting on things known. So your objection is immaterial.
The complaint seems to be that the brain activity showing the decision occurs before we think we have made the decision. But if I re-phrase -- we want to be aware of making the decision, and then see the brain activity. That's clearly backwards. The fact that awareness is a trailing effect is, in fact, not surprising. It doesn't make it any less my decision, and the awareness and checking second thoughts is now consciously my decision.
Neither determinism nor randomness helps free will. It is just more obvious that determinism doesn't help. Not only that, but nothing helps free will, because it's an incoherent concept to begin with.
It like if I want to buy a bike that costs $200, and I only have a $100 bill, I cannot afford the bike. It is obvious that a $100 bill is less than $200. But with a giant pile of pennies, it's not so obvious whether it is more or less than $200. So I exchange my $100 bill at the bank for 10,000 pennies, now I have a giant pile of pennies, so maybe I can afford the bike now.
I feel like the revelation of quantum mechanics basically took all the $100 bills and turned them into pennies, and some people are unreasonably optimistic that this somehow changes the free will equation.
We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.
It's an interesting experiment, with interesting results, that has no connection whatsoever with the subject of "free will" as most normal people understand that term. Pointing at this and then questioning free will is utterly bogus flamebait.
I will argue that "free will" is based on a paradoxical knowledge, and I will argue that so called "free will" is meaningless at best, and wrong at worst.
I think it is important to consider that so called "free will" is based on that you as in individual have a unique brain not being influenced by others or other things outside your brain, THAT is what makes you as an individual "free" really, however you are not in control of your own brain as you notion of self is not able to know the brain as such (how it works), nor able to control it. Therefore any notion of being free of your brain's impulses is wrong, as if some soul or some sense of a master self had or even could control the brain.
Another aspect that probably makes an individual "free", is an individual's capacity for LEARNING. And so, with learning, and making use of learning, even if not being able to control it, would be what makes "free will" meaningful as an idea.
Presumably, it only makes sense to talk about a "free will" when trying to think of there BEING a relationship between the brain and your sense of self, in whatever form.
Lack of determinism helps the case for free will only to the extent that it permits free will to be something that is at least physically possible, where a fully deterministic universe would not permit actual free will to exist at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There's some good points from Sam Harris on this topic, a bit more elaborate than the study.
I find it ironic and funny that somebody would ask me to choose to believe in determinism.
Step one: discover the visual blind spot
Step two: loudly proclaim the integrated visual field doesn't exist
Step three: reload, lather, rinse, repeat
Whether the lack of determinism helps depends on what you replace it with. IF what happens is not deterministic, what are the rules for governing what happens? The only other thing I I know of is randomness, which doesn't help.
You could also say the opposite. Lack of randomness helps the case for free will because free will can't be random, but what do you replace randomness with? It doesn't help if you replace randomness with determinism.
If you know of or can think of a 3rd option other than determinism and randomness, please let me know. I certainly don't have a good enough imagination for that.
As I said, it helps only in the sense that it permits free will to at least be something that *MIGHT* be physically possible, as opposed to determinism, which tosses the entire concept of free will out as something that cannot even exist in this universe. That any alternatives to determinism which might exist may not provide any direct support for free will specifically is immaterial to the point that they simply do not completely preclude it, like determinism does.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This feels like someone has a hypothesis and device an experiment to prove it true.
Even though I don't disagree with the notion that free will is an illusion, I'm agnostic in the matter, I think the experiment doesn't actually prove anything about free will and more about how the brain perceives time nd how easily we fool ourselves into thinking we are cleverer than our shortcoming suggest.
they clearly had no choice in the matter of being incompetent, nor in the choice of embarrassing themselves publicly by publishing it in places where the rest of us had no choice but to read it and see how ridiculous it was.
of course, we had no choice but to read it, whereupon some of us had no choice but to laugh at the stupidity while others had no choice but to gullibly swallow it hook-line-and-sinker.
Go ahead and mod me up or down as you must, for I have no choice but to accept whatever modding you had no choice to provide.
See wmbriggs "Free will cannot be an illusion" or if you prefer, fefermans "GÃdel's incompleteness theorems, free will, and mathematical thought." Briggs is more succinct.
Free will is doing whatever your brain decides, regardless of whether the conscious part of your brain was aware of it as the unconscious part was making the decision. Researchers and philosophers regularly bring this up because it creates controversy, and thus attention to their work. But their premises is always based on redefining "free will" to mean "what you are consciously aware of thinking, and had complete control of the entire thought process." Hell, that definition never applies, and they know it.
I wrote a blog post about this fallacy-based conclusion way back in 2011: http://www.ideationizing.com/2...
The meaning of free will is clear as day when you define it in terms of inter-human relationship: If the interaction is coercive, no free will. If the interaction is voluntary, free will. Even a child understands that, and for good reason -- human beings have evolved to instinctively understand what free will is. Otherwise, how could we possibly know when we have been wronged by others?
The meaning becomes necessarily cloudy when you try to define it as an intra-human phenomenon (within one's own mind). I personally don't even understand the point of doing such a thing, although I wouldn't doubt if it was merely the latest smoke & mirrors attempt at justifying more government and less individual freedom.
Free will has nothing to do with color choices, but whether to make a choice between being good or evil.
And when one gets down to it, that is the only real choice we ever have to make.
I don't know who still believes in free will anyways. We're not disembodied brains in a vacuum and it's not 1750. We know our "free" choices are constrained by our own previous choices, other's choices, socialization, socioeconomic status, political environment, physical laws, bodily limits, psychological limits, our own expectations and subjective perceptions, etc. Free will is a myth. We have some will, within a cosmos of constraining and limiting factors, and that's good enough. It should lead to some epistemic humility in any case.
Well if one is willing to stretch their imagination to include the possibility of the folk concept of free will in the absence of determinism, maybe it is also possible for one to stretch their imagination to include the possibility of free will within the framework of determinism.
My favorite intellectual on the subject Dan Dennett actually makes the case that any kind of free will worth wanting is not precluded by determinism.
As I said in my example. I don't think the lack of determinism leaves open a possibility for free will to exist, any more than changing your $100 bill to pennies leaves open a possibility that you have $200. It just creates the illusion of that possibility. Despite the illusion that we have an unknown amount of money, we still know it's $100. By the same token, the removal of determinism creates the illusion of the possibility of free will, until you realize that nothing you replace it with (pennies, quarters, nickels, dimes) gives you anything more than determinism ($100 bill) did.
Dan just goes the extra step and says, ok fine so you don't have the kind of free will you thought you did. You don't really want that anyway. Here's a thing with all the good features of free will that is logically coherent, that is not only possible, it is also possible in a deterministic universe.
I personally find this part very interesting, and I do think it is true, but I rarely bother trying to convince other people of it. I think you have to be in a particular mindset to be receptive to that sort of thing.
If it's _my_ mind deciding unconsciously, then it's still me, and I'm still deciding.
Free will doesn't necessarily mean conscious free will.
We already know we have that: We can choose to prefer logic or not. Following a logical chain isn't free, but choosing to follow it certainly is, and that's conscious.
The problem it sounds like is what exactly are we defining as free will and what are we measuring to determine it as such? First of all the science of predicting choice and action of an autonomous individual is Behavioral Science, which is not the determination of whether free will exists. It might make systematic guesses at what choices an individual is likely to make given a set of circumstances in order to predict the individual's choice. Free will is obviously predictable because free will is the antithesis of pure random thought and action. To use a line from a popular role playing gaming system, "a free thinking individual is not as likely to jump off a bridge as they are to cross it" meaning free will is not random thought/action. Saying as much then, what is free will? A choice made by an individual possessing free will can likely be predicted often by analysis. Where individuals make a choice whose consequences put them at risk to their health or well being then would be a good place to look for it. When a choice overrides our sense of self preservation it is then that we are acting based upon other criteria that might actually be counter productive to our existence. How then can our survival instinct and a "biological software program" be determining our choices in such instances? Would that make our emotional feelings like virii? How about some ideologies that beckon us to give up our lives in the name of such ideas? Making a choice that results in detriment to our survival and knowing the likely outcome of such a choice in advance would then equate to either being the results of virii (an idea that damages the biological software of our mind) or free will (making a choice based upon some other criteria that is beyond systematic measure, like emotions). If we assume that emotions are the result of the production of hormones and our body's response to them manifested through behavior and good (or bad) feelings, then really why do people make choices related to our emotions that result in a detriment to our comfort and sometimes our health? Some emotions (like anger and anxiety) result in reactionary behavior (very predictable and lacking free choice) while emotions like happiness result in the most clear thinking and often choices that knowingly may result in detriment to comfort or health. In this experiment it sounds like the measurement was examining our cognitive awareness with regard to the order of the occurrence of events when it comes to evaluating a visual change in a given system by asking for the prediction at different time intervals before the actual change of the system occurred. Then the measurement is one of determining whether we are cognitively aware of the order of events. Do we see the event first by the backward propagation through time of the occurrence resulting from the outcome of the collapse of the wave function or do we make the guess and then see the change? Obviously, our minds and consciousness and free will are intrinsically linked to the quantum nature of the universe as are our senses and cognition. Perhaps for this reason the only artificial intelligence with free will that human beings ever make will be based upon complex quantum computers with a nervous system to match. Our choices as living creatures seems to be connected to the nature of the universe in that way. Certainly Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose have explored this possibility. So if our minds and sense do actually evaluate events backwards in time, does that still mean we lack consciousness or free will. Without letting my living ego interfere too much I'd say that proves that we do have free will. It's that our nervous system, cognition and sensory input is able to act on the backwards propagating outcome of the collapse of the wave function. The event occurs only when we attempt to make measure and its outcome and is rewritten backwards in time when the observation is made. Therefore our mind is able to traverse that nature of the observer dependent phenomenon relating to the collapse of the wave function and remember it ahead of time. Like remembering the future.
They may have found evidence for that our choices are not always deliberate or conscious when we think they are. "Free will" is about something else, usually.
... right after the article about Clinton and Trump being the presumptive nominees? Just to rub it in?
Free will consists of two goal posts, constantly moving.
(In the mean time, I'm wondering who is pushing whom around in my careenium.)
I plan to use my free will to ignore this meaningless horseshit from yet another "social scientist".
In other news:
Studies show that "Social Science" is a contradiction in terms.