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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

This is just one of the many studies. You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h...

> The choice is still taken at the moment.

There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition.

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>You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. (...) There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition.

Of course it's our own volition.

Do you see anybody else there telling the person what to do? Is there some "eternal soul" that should have been informed to make the final decision?

The misleading dichotomy here is that the conscious urge is something different from the "choice from the brain up".

Whereas the conscious urge is just a later manifestation of the "brain up" process. It's just a nicer UI output we give ourselves of the choice process.

It's still our brains, that is us (there's no third party involved), that makes the decision, based on our past experience, knowledge, preferences, memories, etc as wired in our brains.

Whether we do it at the conscious layer or we do it at the lower level and then project it at the conscious layer doesn't make it any less of "our own volition".

To me it's like saying "the computer didn't make this picture, because the picture was already created in the memory as a structure before it was send to the screen".

>Do you see anybody else there telling the person what to do? Is there some "eternal soul" that should have been informed to make the final decision?

Obviously not, but commonly when people refer to so called 'free will', they don't just mean to imply that you, as a physical entity carry out things by your own volition, it is taken to mean that you consciously deliberate on your choices and have some insight into your own decision making.

These experiments suggests that the actual decision making happens at a much more secluded, black box like level.

Free will, in a meaningful sense, is taken to mean 'rational control', not just 'that guy over there acts in some way because his brain commands him to', because that's true almost by definition if you exclude religious explanations.

I don't see how any of that negates the idea of rational control in the sense that we commonly understand it. The series of physical events in the brain that lead to a decision are not subject to an out of band process that can override the final conclusion; it doesn't seem surprising that there is a delay between the unconscious processes that underpin our rational thoughts and the eventual culmination of a decision, IMO the opposite would actually be the surprising result (i.e. our conscious mind is not a supervenient product of our unconscious brain and supporting biological processes)

>Obviously not, but commonly when people refer to so called 'free will', they don't just mean to imply that you, as a physical entity carry out things by your own volition, it is taken to mean that you consciously deliberate on your choices and have some insight into your own decision making.

Well, it's both: as people we can consciously deliberate on our choices for months, torment ourselves at a very conscious level, express it out to others who couldn't care less, listen to moody EMO music, even write lyrics about our predicaments before we make a choice.

But we can also make some much easier decisions using our pre-conscious processing. And that might involve deliberation too -- it certainly involves prior experiences and stimuli.

That's orthogonal to whether free will exists or not, though, and people saying that such pre-conscious choices it's proof free will doesn't exist are wrong. There's no necessity that free will has to be expressible as conscious deliberation. Just that it comes "freely" from the person. There might be lots of conscious deliberation behind those "non-conscious" decisions too.

Free will might very well not exist, but not for that reason.

We are ourselves, the whole time, sub-conscious or conscious. One's self doesn't resolve to just the "voice 'speaking' in our thoughts".

Especially if you start to work at your inner self and tune your reactions to be who you really want to be, it gets deep and very much in tune to what you are saying IMHO.

"Time between when a decision was made and the awareness of it" != "Not having free will"

Given that we have to make decisions all the time it's natural an unconscious heuristic could exist, but that, again, doesn't mean "not having free will".

The feeling of being in control and acting on your free will on the spot is demonstrably not connected to actual decision making will. The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless.

If you think that "free will" is becoming aware of your decisions just when you make them, consider the fact that the human perception of "Now" spreads over 3 seconds or more. The ordering of two events can swap up to 5-7 seconds in some cases (ever feel that you are thinking about somebody and then they call you).

There is some evidence that your brain does stuff parallel and out of order and then marshals them into stream of consciousnesses where causality of internal processes seems right.

> The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless.

Yet the idea of free will is so empowering that I choose to go with it even when it would make sense short term to deny it.

Seriously, even if it wasn't true and somebody here starts to believe it - even if that thought weren't a real decision but just a response to my persuasion skills - even then it would probably make a positive impact on their life.

Is everything in my life a product of my own decicions? No. I've been dealt a good hand. But after I learned to decide for myself it became better.

FWIW I've also no idea who would downvote you, your position seems reasonable even if we disagree strongly. If anyone think what you say is wrong I'd urge them to pst evidence instead of just downvoting.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/tim-lott-zen-fre...

“A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills” – Schopenhauer.

For we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity.

The parent's point was that it shouldn't be surprising that inconsequential decisions arise long before we have conscious awareness of it. But that has no relevance to the question of free will, i.e. the capacity to deliberate on decisions. A more relevant test would be to test when explicitly moral decisions are made in relation to our conscious awareness of the decision.

I’ve been sitting with an Advaita teacher for a few years. One of the teaching’s pointers is to observe one’s choices.

I’ve been doing this for at least 3 years and have not yet encountered a choice made out of “free will”, and not by desires, basic needs, thoughts, trauma, conditioning etc.

My conclusion is that in the West, “free will” is an un-investigated label for any combination of the above.

This teacher often speaks of a sense he calls “the false sense of authorship” which claims the responsibility of our actions, thoughts and words.

> asked to push a button any time they feel the urge.

Still completely inconsequential choice. Nothing is going to change in lives of these people based on this choice. This is not a "free will"-type of choice people usually think about.

I think this all started with Sam Harris using this argument in his crusade against free will, and some people just picked it up without giving it a second thought.

The argument is that if the choice is unconsequential (like thinking of a random city or pushing one of equally meaningless buttons), Sam sees that as somehow being the "most free of a choice you could think of". But it is the complete opposite to how the real world and real life works!

I would argue that choosing which school to go to, which career to pursue, which food to eat, which person to spend time with - those are real choices, that's where the free will is used. In choices which have consequences. Choices that matter. Choices that require using the consciousness, not appropriating its gargantual power as being a glorified random number generator. Not in a choice that requires no effort, and can be forgotten the moment it is made, because it will have no consequences whatsoever.

Good luck making those real choices being predictable by a computer. When a computer can predict what career I am going to choose or who am going to hire (given real viable choices) - then we can come back and talk about free will. Of course at that point, by definition, we have Strong AI which can predict almost anything and the world will be completely different, beyond our wildest imaginations because we can't see it behind the veil of technological singularity.

These experiments say nothing about free will. (Of course the papers themselves don't pretend to either, just the sensationalist journalists weakly versed in popular philosophy.)

the fact that it's 7 seconds... that kind of proves that it isn't a directive. A directive should be executed immediately. That would make more sense to me, anyway.

Our brain is a massively parallelized computer that runs the entire body yet has a cache of ~7 items and runs on 20 watts of power. I would expect a degree of latency in its more complicated operations.

The brain runs on 120 watts, not 20. In addition, working memory has a capacity of ~7 toplevel item groups, not items.

I concede the ambiguous 7 item thing, but where are you getting 120 watts from? The only figures I get from my googling say the entire human body only uses 100 watts on average, with 20% of that used by the brain.

Human body consumes 100W at rest, ~300W at sedentary work, ~1kW at full power. Full power figures are based on appropriation of longitudinal draft ratings.

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