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