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

our mind is now operating

[turkeydance]

on a subscription model.

Re:our mind is now operating

[Sad Loser]

I decided not to post anything interesting or relevant.

Bullshit conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bullshit conclusion

[Maritz]

The problem is how to define 'free will'. You're certainly free to choose your choice... I think anyone who suggests that the output is completely divorced from the input is a bit of a wacko. At the same time, I think our available degrees of freedom are so large that you might as well just take it that we have a good approximation of free will. Makes the question almost boring to be honest. Who cares if we have true philosophical free will? Isn't that the same as arguing that the future does not depend on the past, in the context of humanity but in no other context?

Re: Bullshit conclusion

[nmb3000]

If free will is not an illusion, then where does it come from? Why do humans have it, but not chimps? Why do chimps have it, but not rabbits?

I've never thought this was a very interesting question to ask. It seems reasonable to assume that free will could be an emergent condition that arises out of the physical complexity and number of connections in the brain. This isn't so different from other traits such as language, self-awareness, empathy, etc. As to whether say, chimps or dolphins exhibit it I don't know, but I'd expect that once you start moving towards rodents the likelihood (or maybe level of, if it's not binary) of free will diminishes. Most would probably reason that insects and bacteria are completely hardwired to behave via instinct.

Other posters have mentioned that actions requiring an immediate response may be more derived from instinct rather than conscious thought and consideration, and that seems to make sense. Perhaps once a physical brain has evolved to a certain level of complexity, it can start running advanced software whereas before that it's limited to the ROM burned into the circuitry, but when there's not time available it falls back to the real-time hardware :)

If every physical mechanism in the universe is probabilistic and fuzzy, where does free will come from?

Oddly enough, the existence of quantum mechanics seems to make free will more likely, rather than less. In a fully Newtonian universe, you could argue that by knowing the position and vector of every atom you might predict the future, which sounds a lot like fate, where all future action is based on the past. However, the apparent fuzziness of our reality seems to leave the door open to much more complex probabilistic, entangled, and parallel behaviors.

Or we're all just brains in a jar plugged into the Matrix.

"Free will" confuses the issue

[james_gnz]

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).

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.