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

free will IS bullshit

[aepervius]

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.