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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.
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?
Now, if we could only prove that free will actually exists, we would have something.
so that our corporate overlords can control us better.
You're missing the obvious:
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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