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.

Comments

Meh. It's actually quite easy to trick you.

[darthsilun]

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.)

Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

Because picking colors and circles in a few fractions of a second is the same as deciding to rob a bank.

A non-issue

[Archtech]

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.

Re:Bullshit conclusion

[Jamu]

Choice is a conscious process, otherwise you're not making the decision (or not aware of the "illusion"). If you're not conscious, there's no way to prove consciousness exists. To prove someone doesn't have free will you'd have to explain that all the processes involved don't involve consciousness. Which is difficult at the moment as we can't explain consciousness.

Re:"Free will" confuses the issue

[tomhath]

Subjects were given a very quick preview of the color before they had to pick one. The experiment looks more like subliminal advertising; I suppose the subjects thought they were guessing when in fact they had been tricked into selecting the correct answer without realizing their choice had been biased (hence what they thought was a free will choice wasn't). Not exactly groundbreaking science.

Re:Bullshit conclusion

[Sique]

I often compare the inherent error in the "free will is an illusion" conclusion with a normal decision by committee or an election. We often have a pretty good idea of the result of an election before the actual election happens, but we don't see it as a problem of the free will of the electorate. They still can vote how they want. We often have an idea how a judge will rule in court way before the judge actually presents the ruling, but we wouldn't conclude that the judge doesn't have a free will. We also know that often something is decided early on, but it takes some time until the decision is communicated to the outside just because we want to check, look for possible errors or wait for a result not in yet (and which could flip the decision).

So yes, we often have pretty good predictors of the outcome of a decision, and it often takes some time for a decision to finalize much later than the predictors already show the outcome, but that doesn't mean the decision wasn't free. And yes, if we don't wait for the decision to finalize, but take the preliminary result for the final result, we could speed up the process considerably.

Easier to prove conclusion wrong

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:free will IS bullshit

[As_I_Please]

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.

The physical implementation of an abstract concept does not negate the abstract concept. Otherwise, there's no such thing as computation, just voltages and currents pulsing through printed circuit boards, signifying nothing.

Frankly free will does not exists and such study confirm it : our choice are dictated by our memory, education, past, and perception.

If our choices were not dictated by such things, they would be random. What else could we base our choices on?

In any case, the experiment in the TFA does not address free will, but an implementation detail of a mind. It's interesting, but not philosophically significant.