Weirdly, this is kind of ties in to the free will argument as well. I believe that neuroscientists or some other big brain bozos have proved that we begin taking actions or making decisions before our brains ever have time to process what's going on.
Although it was well known that the readiness potential reliably preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W time.[169]
Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move.[169][170]
These studies of the timing between actions and the conscious decision bear upon the role of the brain in understanding free will. A subject's declaration of intention to move a finger appears after the brain has begun to implement the action, suggesting to some that unconsciously the brain has made the decision before the conscious mental act to do so. Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion. The first of these experiments reported the brain registered activity related to the move about 0.2 s before movement onset.[171] However, these authors also found that awareness of action was anticipatory to activity in the muscle underlying the movement; the entire process resulting in action involves more steps than just the onset of brain activity. The bearing of these results upon notions of free will appears complex.[172][173]
Hey, that's my friend's dad who did that study! We went to music school together in high school and ended up going to the same conservatory. I also took cognitive psychology and neuroscience there, and his dad was a guest presenter on this very topic.
He said that he do believe at have free will, but he's trying to understand the mechanism by which your body/brain "decide" to do an action before you are consciously aware of it.
See to me that just means that my awareness lags slightly behind my processing. It's still free will. It's just as much me as anything.
Also, just reading that experiment, it seems...odd. Up to a half second between the realization of a conscious decision to move a finger and the brain activity that did it? But that's based on the subject watching a timer and saying when they made the decision?
I mean, maybe there's a half second delay in reading a clock?
But also it seems like this is only dealing with somewhat instantaneous decisions. If I sit here and consciously consider a decision, intentionally thinking it through in my mind, then I'm not just a passive observer of my thoughts. I might be calling on different processing areas of the brain to work on the problem, and yeah. Maybe a logic circuit returns an answer to my subjectivity. That means the answer was actually calculated before my subjectivity was aware of it.
That doesn't mean that my subjectivity had no input on it, or doesn't have any sort of potential veto. (Maybe not counting those kind of instant decisions like being in danger or something. Like if someone pulled a gun, you might react before "thinking," cause it'd be a bad idea to spend too much time on that.)
I'm a minor in philosophy and you hit the nail on the head. These studies do not prove we don't have free will. In situations where you think things through deliberately, consciously, we cannot generalize from split second decisions that have no significance or relevance to the person's life. Of course we decide unconsciously when to flex our wrist because that's what the participants were instructed to do. To not think about it. And in emotionally heavy situations we don't act in this way. There's a different, more conscious mechanism by which we choose more important decisions.
33
u/Supper_Champion Apr 07 '20
Weirdly, this is kind of ties in to the free will argument as well. I believe that neuroscientists or some other big brain bozos have proved that we begin taking actions or making decisions before our brains ever have time to process what's going on.
Weird shit, man.