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Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will (extremetech.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we've cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision -- how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act. The team devised a novel way to track a participant's focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger's-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times. In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. Participants' frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
Can we use it on people who do First Post?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
doh!
Somebody didn't get the memo about fMRI studies; fMRI right now is only about half a step away from being pseudo-science. What with sofware bugs rendering thousands of studies meaningless, and widespread methodological errors leading to voodoo correlations, any claim of a discovery based on fMRI right now should be taken with a bucket-sized pinch of salt.
The reason why free will is the province of philosophers (and theologians) is because it has nothing to do with neuroscience. What they're talking about in the summary is conscious thought, not free will. Free will is the ability to influence your environment by your own volition, independent from the inexorable march of time or destiny or god's plan. Consciousness is your ability to think about how you're influencing your environment as you do it.
Nah, they've just found the part of the brain that the aliens use to control our every waking decision!
A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
To Slashdot editors: can we please stop with the unrelated crap?
Awesome... now we know the exact areas of the brain to manipulate so that our corporate overlords can control us better.
I'm betting the next gen VR headsets will have electrodes to stimulate those areas properly for future mind control -- especially during election seasons. lol.
I'm kidding.... at least... I think I'm kidding. Oh, dear god, they might actually go there with this tech.
Now, if we could only prove that free will actually exists, we would have something.
They really didn't show anything particularly new in the article. No important new information on brain function was gleaned. The interesting part was the involvement of the basal ganglia, which often get ignored when talking about higher brain functions. And you're right, it does not seem to have much of anything to do with free will. Just deciding to look at the left or right screen isn't free will, it is small-d decision making. Deciding to cut class and go fishing... that's free will.
Since everything we do is driven by our brain, free will, if it exists, must have something to do with neuroscience.
Apparently the study was performed on a dead salmon to confirm the results. fMRI is pseudoscience.
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Just because there is activity in my pants when I see pictures of naked women does not mean my pants control my sex drive.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Agreed. I'm convinced that many people who discuss "free will" -- and particularly those who strongly object to the idea of determinism on the microscopic level (ignoring random quantum mechanical fluctuations) as destroying "free will" -- haven't always thought about what they really mean by terms.
From my perspective (and some philosophers would agree with this, particularly so-called "compatibilists"), trying to apply a concept like "free will" to microscopic behavior is an exercise in futility. It's like trying to define macroscopic "beauty" or a concept like "truth" or even a concept like a "chair" only in terms of atoms. You couldn't do it. Our human macroscopic concepts simply don't exist with that sort of granularity -- even if you tried to define what constitutes a "chair" compared with "not a chair" on the level of arrangements of individual molecules, you'd never get two humans to agree to that sort of level of precision.
It's a similar problem when we come to an idea of a "free choice." What do we really mean when we say, "I freely chose X instead of Y"? Usually in discussions of free will, we're talking about deliberate choices, not just random choices made with no reason. And that means we have reasons for choosing X over Y. We might enumerate them -- I had 5 reasons in favor of X but 3 in favor of Y, so I chose X. When we say, "But I could have freely chosen Y instead," we generally mean something about our reasoning would change -- maybe some of those reasons in favor of X would be undermined by something we read recently or something a friend said discounting those reasons. Or it could be something more subtle, like changes in our body chemistry -- maybe we had an extra cup of coffee which changed the mood and made Y seem more desirable, or maybe we had a headache and that shifted our priorities... or whatever.
But when we say "I could have freely chosen Y over X" in the context of a discussion about "free will," we generally do NOT mean, "If EVERYTHING in the universe had been exactly the same, including all of my subjective ratings and beliefs of the reasons for and against X and Y, along with all of my body chemistry and feelings... and every single atom EXACTLY in the same position, I COULD HAVE made a different choice."
We don't generally mean that, because that would be making a different choice for no reason, and "free will" is not about random choices, it's about having an ability to make a deliberate choice based on reasons. If all the reasons are the exact same (and every atom in the same place), why would it support "free will" to believe that a different choice would make sense? That's not conscious "free will" -- that's randomness or anarchy.
"Free will" is a macroscopic human concept -- an emergent phenomenon -- which has little to do with how deterministic (or not) the microscopic universe is. And whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot, there are always these fervent believers that "free will" has to exist in some way that the universe is not deterministic -- but where exactly does that "free will" happen? Quantum mechanics effects "bubbling up" to microscopic consequences can't be a reason, because that's based on randomness -- and proponents of "free will" usually insist that the alterations in decisions must be deliberative not based on random chance.
So, if everything in the universe down to the atom is precisely the same, and you still want to be able to make a "free choice" that's different, how precisely is that supposed to happen? Does some atom suddenly take a different turn for no apparent reason? It makes little sense in a scientific context, unless you're willing to postulate the existence of a separate "soul" or "consciousness" or whatever that doesn't obey the laws of science as we currently understand th
Since everything we do is driven by our brain, free will, if it exists, must have something to do with neuroscience.
The Conway/Kochen Free Will Theorem says that if free will exists, it derives from the free will possessed by elementary particles. It needn't arise from neuroscience if it's a more fundamental characteristic of the universe.
Note that I'm not claiming that either humans or quarks do or do not have free will, just pointing out that if we do have it, neuroscience isn't the only possible origin. Perhaps what we perceive as our free will is actually the collective free will of the subatomic particles that make up important parts of our brains... though that raises obvious and deep questions about what "free will" even is, since we tend to think of it as being goal-oriented and causal in nature, and it's not clear what kinds of "goals" subatomic particles could even have or how combinations of them could produce what we perceive as free will.
On the other hand, our pattern-matching brains tend to interpret everything in a causal/goal-focused way, to the degree that classical Aristotelian philosophy posited that *all* physical processes were a result of goals (final causes, "teloi", to use Aristotle's word). That is clearly wrong in lots of other cases, maybe this is just another example of our biases misleading us and that the truth is that free will is just how we perceive the macro-level emergent properties that result from quantum randomness. That is the most logical conclusion of the Free Will Theorem, anyway, that free will is nothing more and nothing less than quantum noise, scaled up.
Or not :P
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is incredibly interesting to me. Thank you for the link and details. I have self-defined free will as the ability to control your own brain. Or, another way to put it is, not the ability to affect and change the outside world, but the ability to choose your internal worldview, moods, thoughts, and to change the landscape of your experience, and thereby control the habits, actions, and how existence occurs to self (the experience of experience.) The application of recursion to experience: the self experiencing the self experiencing the self.
There is an amazing amount of automation, habits if you will, that your brain is great at performing without conscious thought (Check this article out for a primer on habits and how they relate to conscious thought: NY Times.) There are also many thoughts that are circulated in the mind that are simply reflexive, a product of a though generating meat-machine (see cognitive behavioral therapy for details.) Gaining control over these reflexive habitual actions and thoughts is what I see as a demonstration of free will. You will continue to have reflexes and habits for life. That's just how your mind/body works. It is the control of these things, the self-administered reconditioning as a result of examination and resolve, that shows the exercise of free will.
Another way to consider this is: What mechanism is responsible for an addict that stops using? In light of the structural and neuro-chemical deficit I and other addicts are operating from, where does that ability to simply stop come from? Definitely not the part of the brain that is already compromised and abnormal. It is responsible for perpetuating addiction. I posit that free will is as inherent to the human mind as recursion is to linguistics, and they are both part and parcel of the same complexity payload that generates both sentience and consciousness in our brains. Through structured self-experience of the self we can gain access to generate wholly new actions and patterns in our own operating medium, specifically the structural and neuro-chemical pathways in our own brains.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
As far as I am concerned, God can be damned. Seems to be a misanthropic fascist anyways.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But what you cannot do is establish a cause and effect relationship between brain activity and anything that is provably like, "free will". Or God. Or "consciousness".
This story is pop science crapola. The same people who would consider themselves "skeptics" when it comes to the basic physics of global warming will swallow neuroscience in one greedy gulp.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think the illusion of free will is simply a misunderstanding of how complex the feedback loops and source information really are.
We like to simplify a choice that involves billions of neuronal inputs over the spatial and time domains as "I chose X over Y, freely."
It's simple-mindedness, and an insult to the complexity of the neural network running our consciousness.
Only if by "free will" you mean "non-determination", which you shouldn't.
If by "free will" you mean, as you should, a certain kind of functionality, an ability to cause your behavior to conform to the patterns you judge that it should conform to, then indeterminism is at most a hindrance and mostly completely inconsequential. Contrast, for example, to a struggling alcoholic who wants to drink, but doesn't want to want to drink and certainly doesn't want that want to drink to cause him to actually drink, but who nevertheless does drink, because their decisions about what they should want and how they should behave are not effective on their actual wants or behavior. That's what lacking free will is. Having free will is the opposite of that: the ability for your wants about [what to want and the efficacy of those wants on your behavior] to be effective. That doesn't require indeterminism, it just requires a decision-making mechanism built to function that way.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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