There is no FREE WILL?
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Voluntary action and the sense of free will
Hold your arm out in front of you and then, whenever you feel like it - of your own free will - flex your wrist. Do it several times and watch what happens in your own mind. You may feel as though you first consciously decided to move, and then moved. It feels as though the conscious decision caused the action. Trying it for yourself helps with thinking about Libet?s famous experiment on voluntary action (Libet 1985). Libet asked people to do just this, while he systematically measured the timing of three things. 1. The start of the action - using electrodes on the wrist. 2. The start of the readiness potential in motor cortex - using electrodes on the scalp. 3. The decision to move - using a revolving spot on a clock face (subjects had to say where the spot was when they consciously decided to act). The last of these was the most controversial but subsidiary experiments showed that people are able accurately to time external stimuli this way. The assumption is that they could do the same with their own private decisions.
So - which came first? The decision to move, or activity in motor cortex? The answer was more dramatic than anyone expected. The brain activity began about 500 milliseconds, or half a second, before the person was aware of deciding to act. It seems that the conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action; as though consciousness is a mere afterthought. Odd though this might seem, it fits with previous experiments on exposed brains, in which Libet demonstrated that about half a second of continuous activity in sensory cortex is needed for a person to become aware of a sensory stimulus (Libet 1981). This implies the odd conclusion that consciousness lags behind the events of the world. But, Libet argued, once events reach neuronal adequacy (i.e. half a second of activity) they are subjectively referred back to the time of the initial evoked potential. So even though consciousness takes half a second to build up, events still seem to happen in real time.
Reaction to the study was heated, and still goes on. Numerous commentators argued that the voluntary wrist action is not analogous to free actions in real life, that the clock task is flawed (see commentators on Libet 1985), or that the whole idea of there being a time at which consciousness happens is misguided (Dennett 1991). In some ways, though, no one ought to have been surprised. If you expected consciousness to have started the process then you are really a believer in magic - in some kind of force that acts on brain stuff. Very few people would defend such a view and yet they are surprised when shown, in this vivid way, that brain events happen first. Perhaps the reaction reveals how very confused are our ideas about free will, based on our powerful feelings of conscious freedom and control.
These feelings do not necessarily imply real freedom and control. Dan Wegner, of the University of Virginia, has done a series of experiments that induce the feeling of free will (Wegner and Wheatley 1999). In experiments with a modified ouija board, two participants place their fingers on a small board on a computer mouse. While music plays, the mouse roams freely over a table covered with little pictures; when it stops they must stop the mouse on one picture. On some trials the confederate forces the mouse. When the subject is asked how sure she was that she chose the stopping place herself, even on forced trials she is often convinced that she freely willed the choice herself.
In other experiments using tricks with mirrors and screens, subjects watched either their own arms, or someone else?s arms in place of their own. When a taped instruction told them, for example, to touch their nose or wave their hand, and the correct action followed, they reported a powerful sense that they had willed the action themselves - even when it was someone else?s arm. In other words the feeling of acting freely is not a reliable guide to the cause of an action.
Wegner argues that free will is an illusion created in three steps. First we are ignorant about how our brains plan actions and carry them out. Second, we become aware of the results of the planning and call these intentions. Finally the action occurs after the intention and so we leap - erroneously - to the conclusion that ?our? intention caused the action. Not everyone agrees with this interpretation, and there is currently vigorous debate about how neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of free will (Libet, Freeman and Sutherland 1999). Nevertheless, these results should make us question any conclusions we base on our undoubted feelings of conscious control.
-Dr. Susan Blackmore, Psychologist.No Free Will? Therefore we can't do anything for our Salvation?
Free Will an Illusion? Just like some argue World is an Illusion?And yet we seem to exist ?
Regards,
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See also http//www.free-minds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3738
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See also http//www.free-minds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3738
This article is from the point of view of Psychology....
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See also http//www.free-minds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3738
This article is from the point of view of Psychology....
OK.
So, maybe you should have a look at this book
http//www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262232227/103-8438923-4149440?v=glance