Book notes - Free will
Is there such thing as free will or it’s just an illusion ?
Review
The idea of free will is embedded in everything we care about. What we consider distinctly human depends upon viewing one another as autonomous and capable of free choice.
Yet we are conscious of only of a fraction of the activity in our brain. For example the activities related to our physiology obviously don’t reach in our consciousness as we don’t decide to produce red blood cells or digestive enzymes.
We are aware of our thoughts, feelings but we don’t conjure them. You pick up a cup of water because you are thirsty, but you don’t decide to be thirsty. What if you wanted a cup of beer instead? That might have made you felt guilty, but drinking the cup of water made you satisfied. Did you choose to be satisfied? Could you have had a glass of juice instead, no because that thought did not come to your mind.
Imagine that you used to be fit but now are lazy and overweight. You might be able to tell a story of how life went off track but cannot account for why you let it happen. You decide to start exercising but after six months you get bored and quit. Why did you encounter so many obstacles why are your old habits stronger than you?
A year later some random event like you see a movie or talk to someone and, you find this reservoir of will and things just tick, over the next few months you swap fat for muscle and you’re body is completely transformed. How can you account for your ability to make these efforts today and not a year ago? The emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.
Think about your next decision. Your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a life-time by inherited genes, physical development, interactions with other people, events and ideas, a process over which you had little or no control. Yes, you are free to do what you desire but where did the desires come from?
Recent advancements in MRI and deeper probing into the brain allowed for interesting experiments whose findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions.
An EEG experiment showed that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some hundreds of milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.
Another involving subject pressing a button found that the brain regions contained information about which button subjects would press seconds before the decision was consciously made.
Recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.
The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this decision and believe that you are in the process of making it.
Imagine a future brain imaging device that can detect and interpret all the activity in the brain. The machine produces a log of the mental events, alongside video of your associated behavior. How would you feel to discover that the logged events predate your “conscious” decisions.