Free Will And Free Choice

[fromderinside]

So many feathers so little dust Lumpenproletariat​.
.

 

[DBT]

All you've shown is that it can be understood as extra complicated when it's dissected and analyzed into its components. Not that there's anything unreal about it or that our common understanding of it is "wrong" or incorrect or false or delusional. Maybe you can turn up something surprising or shocking about it, but that still doesn't make it unreal, or our belief about it "wrong" or incorrect.

What I've done is show that information processing is mostly unconscious and not driven by conscious will or ''you'' as some sort of driver of the brain. The brain does most of its work unconsciously and represents some of that activity in conscious form.

Consequently, for the given reasons, decision making is not an example of free will, neither is conscious will, which does not run the brain according to the idea of 'free will.'

You just paste your free will label however it may please you, with no regard to the nature of cognition.

More:


A parietal-premotor network for movement intention and motor awareness
''It is commonly assumed that we are conscious of our movements mainly because we can sense ourselves moving as ongoing peripheral information coming from our muscles and retina reaches the brain. Recent evidence, however, suggests that, contrary to common beliefs, conscious intention to move is independent of movement execution per se. We propose that during movement execution it is our initial intentions that we are mainly aware of. Furthermore, the experience of moving as a conscious act is associated with increased activity in a specific brain region: the posterior parietal cortex. We speculate that movement intention and awareness are generated and monitored in this region. We put forward a general framework of the cognitive and neural processes involved in movement intention and motor awareness.''

 

[steve_bank]

Do you choose to get sexually aroused?
Do yiu choose to get angry?
Do you choose to be happy or depressed?

We are all conditioned by genetics , by how our brains are wired, and by both conscious and unconscious conditioning from experience and perceptions. It starts from the day we are born. By all accounts Trump is threresult of conditioning by his father, mostly negative.

Free will implies a ttoaly unbiased decision, I do nor think that is possible.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

fromderinside: If then.

Evidence?

Really?

One an center on one because one is presuming one originates and find 'exceptions' until one realizes one is determined up front.

Assuming this means "one realizes one's choice was determined prior to realizing it" --

Even so, the realization of this earlier determination in some cases does change the final choice. The whole decision-making process -- free will -- includes the later realization, or consciousness of the choice, regardless of an instantaneous earlier brain cell activity also causing the choice. The later consciousness is a necessary part of the decision-making even if it comes an instant after an earlier part.

You are twisting yourself in pretzels trying to make a bad conclusion into something reasonable.

Asking people to guess about the exact time an "urge" begins is folly.

Did I correctly interpret the meaning of "until one realizes one is determined up front"?

He seems to be saying that a truth-seeker trying to understand later what caused his previous choice comes to a realization of it, or figures out what caused his choice, and it dawns on him that his choice was determined or caused by something which happened PRIOR to his awareness at that time that he was making the choice.

In other words, yesterday he made a choice, and he knew it at the time, but he now realizes that this choice yesterday had been already determined by something (brain cell activity) which happened even earlier than his awareness yesterday that he was making a choice, so even when he realized then that he was making a choice, the selection had already been made earlier than he realized, or prior to the point when he realized it. Is this the "pretzels"?

There are 3 events: 1) the original brain-cell activity determining what the choice would be, 2) the action resulting from the selection made by the brain cells plus his awareness of this, and 3) his later reflection on it and realization that the brain-cell activity came first, prior to his awareness of it.

Isn't it reasonable to suggest that both events 1 and 2 are the "choice" made, or the "free choice" or "conscious free will" choice that he later reflects on? And even event 3, the reflection a day later, could also change the outcome by overruling the choice made yesterday, in a case where one's mind changes.

There's nothing wrong with asking exactly at what point the "choice" took place. It doesn't have to be at one instant, or micro-second moment in time, though maybe it is in some cases. But if the final decision or action taken is affected by later reflection, then isn't it reasonable to say that this later reflection was also a part of the decision that was made?

Can't it be that in some cases the real "choice" is a much longer drawn-out process, spreading over several seconds or minutes or even hours?

When someone says "I made a decision," don't they sometimes mean they reflected on it for a long time and that the "choice" was spread out over many seconds or minutes or hours?

It will not give you anything objective.

What's subjective about questioning this?

It seems common sense that the above, a process spread over a time period, is sometimes what is meant by a "choice" made by someone. It clearly does not have to be artificially limited to some one micro-second instant flash in the brain cells happening just prior to one precise movement/action of the muscles.

That one microsecond brain-cell spurt is often accompanied by other spurts later which add to the earlier one. Along with some points of consciousness entering into the process and also having some causal impact of their own, even though happening later than the earliest brain cell flash.

Why can't the "choice" be some combination of activities, including brain-cell microsecond flashes (perhaps earlier) along with further inputs contributing to the resulting action?

What's not objective about this as a possible description of what happens when we make choices?

 

[fromderinside]

When someone says "I made a decision," don't they sometimes mean they reflected on it for a long time and that the "choice" was spread out over many seconds or minutes or hours?

It will not give you anything objective.

What's subjective about questioning this?

It seems common sense that ... a process spread over a time period, is sometimes what is meant by a "choice" made by someone. It clearly does not have to be artificially limited to some one micro-second instant flash in the brain cells happening just prior to one precise movement/action of the muscles.

So why are you interpreting that what you read wasn't meant as such. Drag enough dead bodies across the trail and the trail disappears?

Of course not. The so called 'choice' is a determined process which occurs after time t based on conditions existing at time = t. It, the process, is what has been determined.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Basically you just keep repeating the same fallacies over and over.

No, you just keep repeating over and over the same brain-cell - human behavior research and pretending that it refutes something about free will but without saying what is refuted or how anything about "free will" is refuted by any of the research.

You just tack the term 'free will' without regard to where, when, or if it's even appropriate.

By saying this you are implying that in some cases the term "free will" IS appropriate, and yet you have never said when it is appropriate. You can't claim the the term is applied inappropriately (in this or that case) unless you can tell us when it IS appropriate to apply it. You must at least give a hypothetical example of the appropriate use of this term. Can the term "free will" ever be used appropriately in any sentence someone might speak? What's an example? You apparently cannot give one.

When you insist on condemning a word to oblivion, pronouncing that it may never be used because it's always an illusion only, and false, then it's your dogmatism that is the problem, not the term "free will" which you hate and want to stamp out of existence.

I have described the unconscious nature of decision making and its relationship to conscious report/experience of agency, the role of will, etc.....and clearly, for the reasons given but ignored, the cognitive process of decision making is not free will . . .

Yes it is, when it's accompanied by consciousness. You've given no reason why this cannot be what "free will" is.

. . . is not free will and neither is conscious will, . . .

Yes it is. "Free will" means the decision-making plus consciousness, or the "conscious will" or the "conscious free will" -- you've given no reason why this cannot be what is meant by "free will." And this fits ordinary usage of "free will" in common speech.

. . . and neither is conscious will, which emerges as a prompt or urge to act.

But then what IS free will? When can it be said that free will really does happen, or when could this be said if certain things should happen which would constitute free will if such a thing might happen in some particular case? If your only answer is NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS could there ever be such a thing, GOD FORBID! that such a thing could happen! then you need a therapist. A relentless mindless war on a particular word indicates a mental disturbance on your part.

Again:
''I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will!

You are totally ignoring the possibility that free will and determinism are compatible rather than mutually exclusive. If you cannot even entertain this possibility but enslave yourself to the dogma that they are mutually exclusive, then you cannot judge "free will" as not being sensible or "reject it" or say it's contrary to a "mechanistic view" of the world. What you're doing is just raging against a word you hate, and probably against people who make choices you hate and want to breathe fire down upon, and the only way you can find to assault them is by condemning them for speaking at all and using language to express their choices that enrage you, but probably good choices in fact, which you really can find no fault with. Your condemnation of their language is really your admission that they are right and you're wrong, because they can give good reasons for their choices and you cannot give good reasons for yours.

Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system . . .

Nothing here invalidates the common understanding of free will as our process of choosing or making choices. It could be called "a kind of practical reasoning" or how "we select our actions" -- she even says she has "replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality" without saying they are mutually exclusive -- they're interchangeable. Nothing has been said to show how these contradict each other.

. . . no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems! , . .

Yes, but not with free will, because computers are not conscious, which something must be in order to say that it has free will. Except for this computers could be said to have free will. It's the rationality of the brain, the physical process including the consciousness as part of it, which constitutes something having free will -- i.e., making choices and having consciousness as part of the process.

. . . computers are rational physical systems! - Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist.

Why didn't you quote the part where she says there can't be any free will in our decisions. Or that determinism rules out any possibility of free will. Or that brain cell activity taking place a microsecond earlier cancels out the possibility of free will. That would be the part relevant to our topic.

 

[DBT]

Why didn't you quote the part where she says there can't be any free will in our decisions. Or that determinism rules out any possibility of free will. Or that brain cell activity taking place a microsecond earlier cancels out the possibility of free will. That would be the part relevant to our topic.

I've been saying these things all along, over and over in many different ways. Are you reading or considering what I say, or are you too busy typing walls of text?

To me it looks like the latter....you go off for a day or two busily typing away, producing reams of text that ignores whatever does not suit.

Here's more information to miscontrue or ignore;


Pattern recognition:
''Neuroscientists have repeatedly pointed out that pattern recognition represents the key to understanding cognition in humans. Pattern recognition also forms the very basis by which we predict future events, i e. we are literally forced to make assumptions concerning outcomes,and we do so by relying on sequences of events experienced in the past.

Huettel et al. point out that their study identifies the role various regions of prefrontal cortex play in moment-to-moment processing of mental events in order to make predictions about future events. Thus implicit predictive models are formed which need to be continuously updated, the disruption of sequence
would indicate that the PFC is engaged in a novelty response to pattern changes. As a third possible explanation, Ivry and Knight propose that activation of the prefrontal cortex may reflect the generation of hypotheses, since the formulation of an hypothesis is an essential feature of higher-level cognition.
A monitoring of participants awareness during pattern recognition could provide a test of the PFC’s ability to formulate hypotheses concerning future outcomes.


Responsibility is related to a functional brain with the ability to make rational decisions. The ability to make rational decisions, therefore the assumption of responsibility, being commonly associated with the idea of 'free will' - which, considering the nature and mechanisms of decision making, it is not.

Based on the standard definition of rationality, logical, reasoned....the weighing of a set factors, including the cost to benefit ratio of each of the available options; empathy allows you to understand how someone who may be effected by your choice would feel if you did this rather than that, the consequences of actions as opposed to gain or reward.

Stealing may offer instant reward but has the high risk of being caught and punished, the shame to oneself and family if caught, etc, hence the factor of deterrence in the Law of the Land. Some may act on their own ethical standards and seek to be fair toward others, Sociopaths may not care how others are effected by their actions but may be deterred by the thought of getting caught and punished, which effects their decisions.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

When one settles on a choice it is to explain what the being has already done. Self and free will are convenient illusions to explain away behavior the being is already performing so current modeling of behavior going forward can continue.

The phrase "illusions to explain away" spoils this sentence, turning it from something intelligible into babble. It is nonsensical to call "self" and "free will" illusions and say that they "explain away" something, meaning there is something untruthful or unreal about self and free will. And yet no one has ever said what is untruthful or unreal or false about self and free will. All that has been demonstrated is the difficulty of explaining them, or identifying them in precise scientific terms, like much in life is difficult to explain. To brand something as unreal or false only because it's difficult to explain is unscientific and dishonest.

We are conscious. Being so there needs be a theater continuously set up so models for behaviors already in progress maintaining an illusion of self otherwise there could not be model building for other behaviors since taking.

The word "illusion" is dishonest. This is like accusing someone of a crime without any evidence but out of a rage or hate against them, and lashing out against them with this false accusation, planting evidence on them, and rigging the court against them, and bribing false witnesses to lie in order to get a conviction. It is guilt by accusation, like accusing someone of witchcraft, because you hate them and want them dead no matter what it takes, like a lynching. Calling self an "illusion" is the same as this, only the hate is against an idea or word which the accuser is raging against.

We are aware of what we've done. It's just that we are so shortly after the behavior has been executed.

Not entirely. The behavior is not entirely executed in that short moment/snapshot of time. At least in some cases the behavior occurs over a period of time, like a few seconds or minutes, within which there were moments of awareness BEFORE the behavior was completely executed. It is incorrect to say that the awareness of the act is entirely postponed until AFTER the act is fully executed, even though some of that awareness was preceded by part of the process.

If you want to break down the "act" into tiny pieces, components happening in sequence, and that each separate piece is itself an act, caused by an earlier brain function without awareness at that instant of time, then it might be correct to say each piece happened without awareness of it at that moment. But this isn't necessarily what someone means when they say they made a choice or a decision to act and then did the act.

Our common language of choosing and acting usually contains the sense of a more lengthy process than a short microsecond of brain cell impulse followed by a resulting instantaneous muscle motion. Rather, the choosing or selecting and acting takes place over a period of a few seconds in many or most cases, sometimes even more than a minute or 2, during which moments of awareness also happen.

It's not true that the awareness always occurs only after the resulting behavior has been executed, or completely executed.

Obviously if its will it's will history at best.

What else is there but "history"? What is any behavior or execution or awareness or doing or "after" or "before" -- what can it be other than "history"? What non-"history" do you demand from it? What is the rage against "will" or "free" or "self" that somehow it's accused of being "history" even though that's what everything is?

 

[fromderinside]

The phrase "illusions to explain away" spoils this sentence, turning it from something intelligible into babble. It is nonsensical to call "self" and "free will" illusions and say that they "explain away" something, meaning there is something untruthful or unreal about self and free will. And yet no one has ever said what is untruthful or unreal or false about self and free will. All that has been demonstrated is the difficulty of explaining them, or identifying them in precise scientific terms, like much in life is difficult to explain. To brand something as unreal or false only because it's difficult to explain is unscientific and dishonest.


The word "illusion" is dishonest. This is like accusing someone of a crime without any evidence but out of a rage or hate against them, and lashing out against them with this false accusation, planting evidence on them, and rigging the court against them, and bribing false witnesses to lie in order to get a conviction. It is guilt by accusation, like accusing someone of witchcraft, because you hate them and want them dead no matter what it takes, like a lynching. Calling self an "illusion" is the same as this, only the hate is against an idea or word which the accuser is raging against.

We are aware of what we've done. It's just that we are so shortly after the behavior has been executed.

Not entirely. The behavior is not entirely executed in that short moment/snapshot of time. At least in some cases the behavior occurs over a period of time, like a few seconds or minutes, within which there were moments of awareness BEFORE the behavior was completely executed. It is incorrect to say that the awareness of the act is entirely postponed until AFTER the act is fully executed, even though some of that awareness was preceded by part of the process.

If you want to break down the "act" into tiny pieces, components happening in sequence, and that each separate piece is itself an act, caused by an earlier brain function without awareness at that instant of time, then it might be correct to say each piece happened without awareness of it at that moment. But this isn't necessarily what someone means when they say they made a choice or a decision to act and then did the act.

Our common language of choosing and acting usually contains the sense of a more lengthy process than a short microsecond of brain cell impulse followed by a resulting instantaneous muscle motion. Rather, the choosing or selecting and acting takes place over a period of a few seconds in many or most cases, sometimes even more than a minute or 2, during which moments of awareness also happen.

It's not true that the awareness always occurs only after the resulting behavior has been executed, or completely executed.

Obviously if its will it's will history at best.

What else is there but "history"? What is any behavior or execution or awareness or doing or "after" or "before" -- what can it be other than "history"? What non-"history" do you demand from it? What is the rage against "will" or "free" or "self" that somehow it's accused of being "history" even though that's what everything is?

I disagree with most of what you just posted. I intended to convey that free will and self are lies, misrepresentations, of an individual actually perceives.

Illusion is exactly what I meant. A person continuously gathers information about the world trying to make sense of what it is she's sensing. What is actually happening is mostly different from her developing models in process. One is defending one from revealing anything about her while one is also processing some stuff her body has produced to sustain and maintain a base level of alertness and comfort which is probably not now relevant. Consequently she comes up with contingency models which may or may not conflict with her primary status models.

You capture a piece of my thesis with your statement about behavior not completely ....
but you miss the main point. The main point is one is continuously evaluating what one has processed after the fact sometimes out of error sometimes out of intent. conflicting with what her behavior was meant to suggest using prior presumptions.

It is a fact that when the 'choice' was made the following conditions are most likely now inappropriate for what one had intended to to do to be useful.

The point is evolutionarily we've developed systems for making multiple models for what we expect which are changed as we see how our latest behavior is received by our social group. It is impossible to remain consistent or accurate given the lag between what we think about the now past and changes by others to that since we executed particular behaviors.

Awareness of actual now is never possible in necessarily respondent beings. We project an awareness anticipating now which is never quite right.

If one looks at social transactions one sees how inappropriate one's behaviors were when we executed them. We are a future oriented machine still operating in the past. No choice, physics.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Self and free will are experienced. They are vital for survival. The brain does not have a mind that knows the tiger is there. The one mind knows it. The person, not the brain, knows it. The brain has no idea what that mind is experiencing. The brain is one level removed from experience. It creates that which experiences.

Anything else is conjecture.

And conjecture from wild guesses about invisible events is folly.

Ah. Yet another declaration from a model foreign from even rational sources.

Show us a bit of research supporting your proclamations. I'm pretty sure you'll find that such as you proselytize come from ramblings of psychiatrists from the early 20th century about unhealthy psyche.

Calling it "research" or "rational sources" isn't good enough. You must show how that research refutes free will and self.

E.g., DBT's cited research, about brain surgery patients whose brain was probed and who made movements in response, does not undermine the reality of free will. Nothing about it disproves that free will normally operates in our decisions, including those same muscle movements. This act of fooling the patient is not what normally happens in our decision-making, because there is not normally a researcher probing our brain to give us signals to cause a muscle movement.

This is the best evidence given so far to undermine free will. It shows not that our normal acts ever happen without our choosing them, or against our free will. It only shows the possibility of some acts by us being produced by an exterior probe, where there's technology to make this happen. Where there's no such technology being used on us there's no reason to say our choices or actions are not done by us freely, or that they happen outside of our free choice.

It only shows the possibility that tricks can be played on us, which we already know (though maybe not this particular trick, which is due to recent technology). This is just a more modern technology-based example of trickery, and it could shock some of us. But it's not evidence disproving free will as the normal way we make choices.

And it's not clear that the patient's movement was really contrary to his free will. It might be a free will act anyway, as long as the patient did the act without being coerced or threatened. Since these kinds of acts are not normal, there isn't really any term for it, because our language terms develop in order to deal with normal experience, and this kind of experience is not normal. If it should become normal in the future, perhaps new terminology will develop to indicate acts which were caused by an exterior probe from someone manipulating us rather than by normal decision-making, and an element of unreality or illusion/deception might become part of the normal experience and language. Until then, our "free will" and "self" terminology is accurate to describe real decisions we commonly make.

Even if that particular spontaneous muscle response was not "voluntary" because it was caused by the outsider probing the subject's brain, that isn't what our normal acts are. It's possible such a subject, or brain patient, is deceived, in that one special instance, and if this should happen in millions of cases and become widely known, then the language would change to recognize that some acts, if caused that way, are recognized as involuntary, just as we recognize the knee-jerk and some other spontaneous movements as involuntary. We know similarly that our acts are not totally voluntary if we're intoxicated or in other distorted mental conditions. E.g., a drugged patient can have feelings of paranoia, reacting abnormally, and can know of these feelings and reactions, maybe at another time, or even the same time, and so have split-personality experiences.

All this means conscious experience can get complicated and that the "free will" is more difficult to identify when the subject undergoes such artificial stimuli. None of this means there is no free will or that our normal understanding of our free choices is erroneous. It means we could make mistakes in some cases, but also that we can recognize such mistakes, or abnormal influences happening to us, and we're able to adjust to them and avoid making the mistakes. It's still the case that the normal conscious will and free choosing can react to the abnormal influences and take some corrective steps if necessary. Even if those patients were convinced that they were not manipulated, when in fact they were, that still doesn't mean they were regularly being manipulated in their normal experience. They could be mistaken about why they made that move (which was really driven by a probe), but that doesn't mean they or anyone else is commonly being manipulated and falsely thinks they make free choices. Their normal acts are free choices, but it's also possible for them to be manipulated by someone having technology to probe their brain and induce involuntary movements in them.

It's totally unscientific and ludicrous to leap from this to dogmatic pronouncements that there's no free will or free choice or conscious free will. That can make no sense unless you're claiming our brains are constantly being probed by some "mad scientist" Grand Manipulator sending artificial impulses into us to direct our regular behavior, inducing us to post in this website and express our opinions and agree or disagree about something, which makes no sense because our normal deciding and thinking and acting is not induced by a scientist or other outsider probing our brain.

It does pose challenging questions about the possibility of being manipulated in insidious ways, in a future environment of advanced technology. But it does not refute free will or choice or self.

You have to demonstrate the "manipulation" happening -- and overruling free will -- even when there is no tinkering "mad scientist" probing our brain to induce those reactions. Just to claim it's all determined by brain cells or nerves firing off this way and that does not disprove free will.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

I don't have time to trawl through walls of text, sorry. It would help if you can keep it brief, relevant and to the point.

Please find the time to dig out that research -- Stanford Institute of Biopsychology Neuroscience Brain-Probing Technology -- showing that your brain and mine and everyone else's posting here is being probed by that Great Master Brain-surgeon of the Cosmos, directing each of our fingers to hit these particular keys, and making us imagine we're choosing which keys to push.

 

[fromderinside]

Way to go DBT. Fish scaled and cleaned in one post. Broavo.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

All you've shown is that it can be understood as extra complicated when it's dissected and analyzed into its components. Not that there's anything unreal about it or that our common understanding of it is "wrong" or incorrect or false or delusional. Maybe you can turn up something surprising or shocking about it, but that still doesn't make it unreal, or our belief about it "wrong" or incorrect.

What I've done is show that information processing is mostly unconscious and not driven by conscious will . . .

No, you have not measured how much is unconscious and how much conscious, and nor have you shown this measurement done by anyone else.

. . . by conscious will or ''you'' as some sort of driver of the brain.

Your phrase "not driven by conscious will or 'you'" is nonsensical and meaningless. You have not shown that the conscious will does not do information processing in the ordinary sense that people mean when they say they made a decision, or selected from among alternative choices. Nothing about this conscious "will" or deciding rules out the unconscious brain activity which you have shown.

The fact that some such brain cell activity happened a microsecond prior to the consciousness of it does not mean the "conscious will" did not also drive the decision-making or information processing. You've not shown how that "conscious will" isn't also there in the deciding process, just as everyone ordinarily understands it. That ordinary understanding of the "will" in the decision-making has never ruled out the possibility of unconscious activity also being involved, perhaps even happening a microsecond earlier than the consciousness, or the "conscious will" or "free" choice.

You haven't shown how that unconscious element somehow erases the conscious will as also playing its part, as commonly understood. You just keep preaching this without saying why your obliteration of the "conscious will" or "free will" is necessitated by the existence of the unconscious part of the process.

The brain does most of its work unconsciously and represents some of that activity in conscious form.

No, you've never shown any measurement of the work to show how much is unconscious and how much conscious. Your word "represents" is meaningless. Both the unconscious and conscious elements in the brain do the "work" of the brain -- the deciding or choosing -- and there is no dissecting it into the conscious and the unconscious parts to measure how much each one does compared to the other. Probably each is inseparable from the other in this processing and the two together do the work without any way to claim one does "most" of it, or more than the other. Choosing or deciding is not possible without the consciousness happening as part of the process. You can't give any example of choosing or deciding which can happen without any consciousness happening with it.

Consequently, for the given reasons, decision making is not an example of free will, neither is conscious will, . . .

Your handing it down as a decree does not make it so. You have nothing to show that people do not make decisions freely, as they normally understand. Those who make decisions never claimed that there was no brain activity or no unconscious element happening as part of it. Their free will decisions, or conscious will, was acting in the decisions, regardless of the fact that there were unconscious activities also happening as part of it. Nothing you claim and no science you cite has shown otherwise. Just because there are brain cells doing something does not disprove the existence of free will and consciousness or conscious decision-making.

. . . neither is conscious will, which does not run the brain according to the idea of 'free will.'

The conscious will is an essential part of decision-making regardless of your mindless obsession to erase it. Conscious will exists regardless of the unconscious part which also exists. That there is the unconscious activity does not mean the conscious activity is erased or is made less important. Without the conscious part there is no will, or free choice, or deciding, even though the unconscious activity may happen a microsecond earlier.

You continue to ignore the fact that the deciding process is not limited to a one-time snapshot microsecond of activity, but is spread out over several seconds in many/most cases, and in such a time period there is some conscious activity also preceding some of the unconscious activity, with these happening several times. So that some conscious awareness of the selection does take place prior to the later unconscious activity, because not ALL of the unconscious activity is limited to only the earliest part of the process as you keep pretending. None of your science data claims that ALL the unconscious activity is confined to the earliest point only, prior to everything else in the process. Rather, some of that unconscious activity happens 1 or 2 or 3 seconds later than other parts when there is conscious activity.

You are insisting that every decision happens only in a snapshot microsecond moment, and that never in our decisions do we take more than one second to arrive at our choice. And when we become conscious of the decision, we never have any chance to change our mind, not even for one second, because the decision has already been made and the action taken even before we know of it. Which is ludicrous.

You just paste your free will label however it may please you, with no regard to the nature of cognition.

No, you're pasting your dogma onto everyone who makes decisions, telling them that they could never consciously decide anything, because whatever they decided had to all happen prior to their awareness of it.

You've offered no facts about the nature of cognition to show that consciousness can't ever happen until AFTER the decision has been made. You're just pronouncing this as a dogma, that the process can never be affected by consciousness of it. You have no science or data to show this. None of your data show that the deciding process has to happen in only that one microsecond prior to any consciousness taking place, and that no deciding process can ever happen beyond one second.

You're telling everyone who ever made a decision that they made that decision in less than one second, and that they were incapable of considering it longer -- like for 2 or 3 seconds or longer. You're saying that's impossible, because it all had to happen in a microsecond flash before their consciousness kicked in, and after that the decision could not be changed, even though many decision-makers will tell you that some of their decisions required several seconds or minutes and even hours. But with your nonsense you wipe all that away, saying somehow whatever they end up choosing was actually decided earlier than they thought, way back there several seconds or minutes or hours earlier, with no chance to ever part from the earliest snapshot moment of brain cell activity, and it was all over before they could even become consciously aware of it.

More:

A parietal-premotor network for movement intention and motor awareness
''It is commonly assumed that we are conscious of our movements mainly because we can sense ourselves moving as ongoing peripheral information coming from our muscles and retina reaches the brain. Recent evidence, however, suggests that, contrary to common beliefs, conscious intention to move is independent of movement execution per se.

This is an example of citing research which is irrelevant to anything. Nothing here shows that conscious awareness, or conscious will, does not play a necessary role in decision-making.

We propose that during movement execution it is our initial intentions that we are mainly aware of.

If the movement continues over a time period, requiring ongoing execution, then the consciousness of it happens, which can then lead to a change in the intention, if the movement conflicts with our desire. So we "mainly" become aware of more than only the initial intention, after a time lapse (maybe only a second or 2).

Furthermore, the experience of moving as a conscious act is associated with increased activity in a specific brain region: the posterior parietal cortex. We speculate that movement intention and awareness are generated and monitored in this region. We put forward a general framework of the cognitive and neural processes involved in movement intention and motor awareness.''

None of this contradicts the point that a decision, and resulting act, can easily happen after one becomes conscious of it, and this consciousness can then change the decision to act, if this is a decision process or act extending beyond a second or 2. So the consciousness or conscious will is routinely part of the deciding and choosing, and it's incorrect to say that the consciousness does not play a necessary role in deciding among alternative options. Regardless of early unconscious brain-cell activity which might happen a microsecond earlier -- that earlier unconscious activity is not the whole decision-making process to the exclusion of anything happening a second later.

 

[untermensche]

The fact that some such brain cell activity happened a microsecond prior to the consciousness of it does not mean the "conscious will" did not also drive the decision-making or information processing.

There is nothing but subjective wild guesses about invisible internal events showing there is this microsecond difference.

It is not hard evidence.

 

[fromderinside]

Whether the evidence properly formulated can be proven is up to examining the evidence through material review.

By material review I refer to methods and measures used to acquire and record physical data.

There is a system of standards organizations throughout the world that establish, conduct experiments and take measurements, and maintain as international, national, state, local, including corporate and academic measure references headed by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bureau_of_Weights_and_Measures

By domain there are many organizations that use data from the international bureau and contribute to the methodological standards within their purview.

Scientists, engineers, quality, and product development activities must use instruments calibrated and maintained in compliance with those measure standards they provide information or result.

Now to the races. We have a lot of information available to us before we ever decide to record.

The tricks are all about relating electrical (EEG), and oxygen (fMRI) uptake related activities of known structures (histogram) and we have an ever mounting history of study and data all controlled by adherence to standards of measure and technique.

For someone to go off all half cocked and wave hand over this base of information is a bit like a crowd refusing to see nakedness because it is the king who is naked.

We are not wandering in the desert here. A substantial body of information exists all pointing to certain conclusions. Denial won't work. Magic isn't an option.

Thank ewe very much.

Just an aside. I've looked over many Chemical Rubber Publishing Company Annual editions of Mathematics tables, Chemical, Biological and Physical Standards and Measures. Not once have I seen create as a product activity after receiving categorical material input.

 

[DBT]

No, you have not measured how much is unconscious and how much conscious, and nor have you shown this measurement done by anyone else.

. . . by conscious will or ''you'' as some sort of driver of the brain.

Your phrase "not driven by conscious will or 'you'" is nonsensical and meaningless. You have not shown that the conscious will does not do information processing in the ordinary sense that people mean when they say they made a decision, or selected from among alternative choices. Nothing about this conscious "will" or deciding rules out the unconscious brain activity which you have shown.

The fact that some such brain cell activity happened a microsecond prior to the consciousness of it does not mean the "conscious will" did not also drive the decision-making or information processing. You've not shown how that "conscious will" isn't also there in the deciding process, just as everyone ordinarily understands it. That ordinary understanding of the "will" in the decision-making has never ruled out the possibility of unconscious activity also being involved, perhaps even happening a microsecond earlier than the consciousness, or the "conscious will" or "free" choice.

You haven't shown how that unconscious element somehow erases the conscious will as also playing its part, as commonly understood. You just keep preaching this without saying why your obliteration of the "conscious will" or "free will" is necessitated by the existence of the unconscious part of the process.

The brain does most of its work unconsciously and represents some of that activity in conscious form.

No, you've never shown any measurement of the work to show how much is unconscious and how much conscious. Your word "represents" is meaningless. Both the unconscious and conscious elements in the brain do the "work" of the brain -- the deciding or choosing -- and there is no dissecting it into the conscious and the unconscious parts to measure how much each one does compared to the other. Probably each is inseparable from the other in this processing and the two together do the work without any way to claim one does "most" of it, or more than the other. Choosing or deciding is not possible without the consciousness happening as part of the process. You can't give any example of choosing or deciding which can happen without any consciousness happening with it.

Consequently, for the given reasons, decision making is not an example of free will, neither is conscious will, . . .

Your handing it down as a decree does not make it so. You have nothing to show that people do not make decisions freely, as they normally understand. Those who make decisions never claimed that there was no brain activity or no unconscious element happening as part of it. Their free will decisions, or conscious will, was acting in the decisions, regardless of the fact that there were unconscious activities also happening as part of it. Nothing you claim and no science you cite has shown otherwise. Just because there are brain cells doing something does not disprove the existence of free will and consciousness or conscious decision-making.

. . . neither is conscious will, which does not run the brain according to the idea of 'free will.'

The conscious will is an essential part of decision-making regardless of your mindless obsession to erase it. Conscious will exists regardless of the unconscious part which also exists. That there is the unconscious activity does not mean the conscious activity is erased or is made less important. Without the conscious part there is no will, or free choice, or deciding, even though the unconscious activity may happen a microsecond earlier.

You continue to ignore the fact that the deciding process is not limited to a one-time snapshot microsecond of activity, but is spread out over several seconds in many/most cases, and in such a time period there is some conscious activity also preceding some of the unconscious activity, with these happening several times. So that some conscious awareness of the selection does take place prior to the later unconscious activity, because not ALL of the unconscious activity is limited to only the earliest part of the process as you keep pretending. None of your science data claims that ALL the unconscious activity is confined to the earliest point only, prior to everything else in the process. Rather, some of that unconscious activity happens 1 or 2 or 3 seconds later than other parts when there is conscious activity.

You are insisting that every decision happens only in a snapshot microsecond moment, and that never in our decisions do we take more than one second to arrive at our choice. And when we become conscious of the decision, we never have any chance to change our mind, not even for one second, because the decision has already been made and the action taken even before we know of it. Which is ludicrous.

You just paste your free will label however it may please you, with no regard to the nature of cognition.

No, you're pasting your dogma onto everyone who makes decisions, telling them that they could never consciously decide anything, because whatever they decided had to all happen prior to their awareness of it.

You've offered no facts about the nature of cognition to show that consciousness can't ever happen until AFTER the decision has been made. You're just pronouncing this as a dogma, that the process can never be affected by consciousness of it. You have no science or data to show this. None of your data show that the deciding process has to happen in only that one microsecond prior to any consciousness taking place, and that no deciding process can ever happen beyond one second.

You're telling everyone who ever made a decision that they made that decision in less than one second, and that they were incapable of considering it longer -- like for 2 or 3 seconds or longer. You're saying that's impossible, because it all had to happen in a microsecond flash before their consciousness kicked in, and after that the decision could not be changed, even though many decision-makers will tell you that some of their decisions required several seconds or minutes and even hours. But with your nonsense you wipe all that away, saying somehow whatever they end up choosing was actually decided earlier than they thought, way back there several seconds or minutes or hours earlier, with no chance to ever part from the earliest snapshot moment of brain cell activity, and it was all over before they could even become consciously aware of it.

More:

A parietal-premotor network for movement intention and motor awareness
''It is commonly assumed that we are conscious of our movements mainly because we can sense ourselves moving as ongoing peripheral information coming from our muscles and retina reaches the brain. Recent evidence, however, suggests that, contrary to common beliefs, conscious intention to move is independent of movement execution per se.

This is an example of citing research which is irrelevant to anything. Nothing here shows that conscious awareness, or conscious will, does not play a necessary role in decision-making.

We propose that during movement execution it is our initial intentions that we are mainly aware of.

If the movement continues over a time period, requiring ongoing execution, then the consciousness of it happens, which can then lead to a change in the intention, if the movement conflicts with our desire. So we "mainly" become aware of more than only the initial intention, after a time lapse (maybe only a second or 2).

Furthermore, the experience of moving as a conscious act is associated with increased activity in a specific brain region: the posterior parietal cortex. We speculate that movement intention and awareness are generated and monitored in this region. We put forward a general framework of the cognitive and neural processes involved in movement intention and motor awareness.''

None of this contradicts the point that a decision, and resulting act, can easily happen after one becomes conscious of it, and this consciousness can then change the decision to act, if this is a decision process or act extending beyond a second or 2. So the consciousness or conscious will is routinely part of the deciding and choosing, and it's incorrect to say that the consciousness does not play a necessary role in deciding among alternative options. Regardless of early unconscious brain-cell activity which might happen a microsecond earlier -- that earlier unconscious activity is not the whole decision-making process to the exclusion of anything happening a second later.

You have no case in any way you care to look at it. You are arguing from faith and semantics, a belief held without the support of evidence and common language usage, which does not take the underlying means of production into account, that decision making is not free will for all the given reasons that you ignore.


Abstract
''A thorough analysis of the question of whether we possess "free will" requires that we take into account the process of exercising that will: that is, the neural mechanisms of decision making. Much of what we know about these mechanisms indicates that decision making is greatly influenced by implicit processes that may not even reach consciousness. Moreover, there exist conditions, for example certain types of brain injury or drug addiction, in which an individual can be said to have a disorder of the will. Examples such as these demonstrate that the idea of freedom of will on which our legal system is based is not supported by the neuroscience of decision making. Using the criminal law as an example, we discuss how new discoveries in neuroscience can serve as a tool for reprioritizing our society's legal intuitions in a way that leads us to a more effective and humane system.''



More;
''How is this supposed to work? First, we have to accept the view that prior events have caused the person’s current desire to do X. Wanting to do X is fully determined by these prior causes (and perhaps a dash of true chance). Now that the desire to do X is being felt, there are no other constraints that keep the person from doing what he wants, namely X. At this point, we should ascribe free will to all animals capable of experiencing desires (e.g., to eat, sleep, or mate). Yet, we don’t; and we tend not to judge non-human animals in moral terms. Exceptions occur, but are swiftly dismissed as errors of anthropomorphism.''

 

[fromderinside]

My only critique of your quoted information is too many polysyllable words. You audience may not be able to handle all of them at one reading.

 

[DBT]

My only critique of your quoted information is too many polysyllable words. You audience may not be able to handle all of them at one reading.

I doubt that those who believe in free will are going to consider or even read what is said. Once fixated on a belief, free will in this instance, the cognitive filter goes up and any and every alternative become invisible, thus disproving the very thing they believe in and argue for.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Do you choose to get sexually aroused?
Do you choose to get angry?
Do you choose to be happy or depressed?

We choose how we will respond to all the above.

We are all conditioned by genetics, by how our brains are wired, and by both conscious and unconscious conditioning from experience and perceptions. It starts from the day we are born. By all accounts Trump is the result of conditioning by his father, mostly negative.

And my correcting your typos above was my free choice, which was prompted by my former conditioning. It's both a free choice AND is also a result of previous conditioning. No one has shown how both are not the case, or how there's any contradiction between them. The earlier conditioning might be conscious or unconscious -- either way it doesn't change the fact that the resulting choice is free.

There can be improvement in one's understanding by having awareness of the earlier conditioning that influences the choices. However, it's unnecessary and wasteful to have to investigate and introspect into every choice we make to determine what the earlier conditioning may have been.

If you know of the earlier conditioning, i.e., become conscious of it, this could then cause you to change the later choices to be made. Becoming aware of the conditioning can lead to a change in the later choices. In which case the consciousness becomes a causal factor in the later choosing. But if you know only the choices you're making without knowing the conditioning, these choices are still free, because you're conscious of them, and as long as you're conscious of the choices you're making, they are free choices, regardless of the earlier conditioning.

Free will implies a totally unbiased decision, . . .

No it does not. The norm is to make decisions every day, and these are based on the decision-makers' preferences, which the decision-makers are aware of, so they are deciding based on their bias or preference or predisposition, no matter what caused these. That a "bias" may have caused the decision does not make it an unfree choice.

I do not think that is possible.

You can't make something impossible by defining it as impossible. If you could provide facts to show that something is impossible because it never happens in nature, or cannot, then you can argue that it's impossible. But you don't make it impossible by pronouncing it impossible a priori and then using your pronouncement as proof that it's impossible.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

The so called 'choice' is a determined process which occurs after time t based on conditions existing at time = t. It, the process, is what has been determined.

Maybe. And one of the so-called "conditions" of the so-called "process" is consciousness, which (in some or most cases) happens partly AFTER so-called "time = t".

I.e., the consciousness is something happening at different time points, not one microsecond flash only, and also the "time = t" are different time points rather than necessarily one time point only. There is not only one "time = t" time point in the process, but several, some of which may happen later than some of the consciousness time points.

Analyzing a "choice" down into its "time = t" time points could easily identify thousands of such points, within a total time span of 1 or 2 or 3 seconds (or more).