ps418

Involuntary choices? Choices without volition? They're about as common as square triangles. You might want to think through your terminology a little bit better.

Patrick

yguy

No, because they can always retract their consent to be guinea pigs, even if it means ripping the wires out of the machine. I think the subjects' apparent lack of volition parallels to a small degree the Milgram experiment.

Not if the belief in the illusion is an excercise of free will.

Normal

I meant "involuntary actions".

But then again, you knew what I meant.

Jesse

Normal:
Why is it impossible for a function of the brain to send the decision to the hand and the consciousness at the same time, thus accounting for the delay? I'm not implying the function made the decision, I'm saying the function is sending the signals to enact the decision to the consiousness and the hand at the same time.

Sure it's possible, but again, only if you believe that the conscious experience of making a choice need not coincide with actually making the choice. Again, if such a thing were true I think it would rule out all first-person experiences as "evidence" for actual free will.

Jesse:
I don't understand the distinction. Part of one's experience of making a choice is of making it at a particular moment. If this experience is an illusion, then it seems to me that the conscious experience of making a choice is worthless as "empirical evidence of the choices."

Normal:
Not the consious experience of making a choice, the conscious experience of having the option of multiple choices. You have the conscious experience of choosing one of many choices. It is still unclear to me how that is possibly an illusion.

It's the same problem either way, because if the soul has already made the choice when you have the experience of multiple options, your sensation of multiple options at that moment is an illusion. At that moment, despite your sensation of considering multiple options, your soul has already predetermined the option that you will have the experience of "choosing".

Jesse:
Suppose I get up and decide to improvise a speech, and I have the conscious experience of making it up as I go along, choosing my words as I go. Your position would seem to imply that it's conceivable that the free-willed soul actually planned out the speech hours beforehand...if so, how could my subjective experience of choosing my words as I go possibly be valid evidence of free will?

Normal:
Your twisting my definition of soul quite a bit. Where did I ever say the soul planned anything? The soul plans nothing, it merely makes the choices as you go.

Perhaps "planned" was a bad word, but the point is that the soul could conceivably have already chosen each word in the speech hours before you got up and had the conscious experience of choosing the words in the speech. This is just an extension of the idea that it could have chosen the words a few seconds or fractions of a second before you consciously experienced choosing them.

Normal:
Saying something along the lines of "the free willed soul controlled me" is a non sequitur, and really is utter nonsense. The past choices are contained with your memory and conscious experience, that is all.

If what is happening with the soul is distinct from what is happening with my conscious experience, then I would tend to identify the "self" with experience rather than the soul. For example, I'd rather have the conscious experience of being in heaven while my soul is "really" roasting in hell than vice versa.

Jesse

Jesse:
If subjects always show a build-up of brain activity before they make a choice to press the button, and they always find themselves "choosing" to press it immediately after that build-up (without being able to choose not to press the button when they see the slide change), doesn't this suggest that the soul has no power to affect anything either way?

yguy:
No, because they can always retract their consent to be guinea pigs, even if it means ripping the wires out of the machine.

Total non sequitur. What matters is whether the brain activity actually takes place prior to every experience of choice, not whether or not the brain activity is measured in an experiment. Surely you're not suggesting that brain activity always precedes choice when we measure it, but not when we aren't peeking?

yguy:
I think the subjects' apparent lack of volition parallels to a small degree the Milgram experiment.

I don't see a connection. The Milgram experiment had to do with social pressures causing people to make immoral choices, the precognitive carousel has nothing to do with social pressure or moral decisions.

Jesse:
Also, if you accept that our sensation of making a choice is at least sometimes an illusion, doesn't this undermine the whole case for free will based on first-person experience?

yguy:
Not if the belief in the illusion is an excercise of free will.

All of your statements seem like non sequiturs to me. Are you saying that all our choices of actions could originate in the brain, but that we'd still have "free will" if we chose to (falsely) believe they originated in the soul? Would that belief itself come from the soul or the brain? If you asked subjects to press a button if they agreed with the statement "I believe that my choices originate in a free-willed soul", and to press a second button if they disagreed, would we not see brain activity precede their conscious decision to press a particular button?

yguy

I don't see why that's so important. The quote you posted said one researcher didn't do the followup experiment of introducing a delay to determine how long it takes for the subject to refrain from pushing the button. By bypassing the physiological delay and allowing the subject to see the results of the decision before the body has a chance to execute it, it appears that an illusion of the overriding of free will has been created when it may be no more so than when a person can't let go of a live electrical wire.

Consider this: it is possible to drive for miles at such a level of consciousness that you forget how you got where you are. Do all the semi-automatic responses and actions during the trip constitute decisions? If so, are they evidence that freewill is overridden in such a case?

On a second read of the article, it appears that indeed we don't need to get that deep.

No, I'm saying that it's possible for a soul to willingly give up its free will. If your brain says to eat that extra piece of pie even though you know you shouldn't, you can follow that impulse so as to forget the feeling of emptiness that food pretends to fill. Again, it's like Rumsfeld, Franks and company drawing up a battle plan which can't be executed until Bush signs off on it.

I don't know. I suspect in most cases you would. That's where I believe watching the brain activity of martial artists in action would be instructive, because what they do is way to fast for cogitation as most of us know it.

Jesse

Jesse:
What matters is whether the brain activity actually takes place prior to every experience of choice, not whether or not the brain activity is measured in an experiment.

yguy:
I don't see why that's so important.

It's important because if it were true that anticipatory brain activity always occured before a person's subjective experience of making a choice, regardless of whether this was observed in an experiment or not, then the view that some choices originate in the soul and are then passed on to the brain could not be true (unless you want to say, like Normal, that our conscious experience of making a choice may happen after the soul has already made it some time earlier).

Are saying that there is some characteristic of the experimental setting that would cause anticipatory brain activity to always precede choice-experiences while the experiment is happening, but that this might not be true in other settings? If so, what would the critical factor that makes the difference be?

yguy:
The quote you posted said one researcher didn't do the followup experiment of introducing a delay to determine how long it takes for the subject to refrain from pushing the button. By bypassing the physiological delay and allowing the subject to see the results of the decision before the body has a chance to execute it, it appears that an illusion of the overriding of free will has been created when it may be no more so than when a person can't let go of a live electrical wire.

OK, you're saying that somehow seeing what the brain was getting ready to do would somehow paralyze the soul's ability to choose something different? Why?

yguy:
Consider this: it is possible to drive for miles at such a level of consciousness that you forget how you got where you are. Do all the semi-automatic responses and actions during the trip constitute decisions? If so, are they evidence that freewill is overridden in such a case?

I don't see what this has to do with a situation where subjects are unable to refrain from "choosing" to press the button after the slide is changed due to anticipatory brain activity. That would be more like if someone told me ahead of time that I was going to choose to drive to a particular location, and I was unable to choose to drive somewhere else even if I tried.

yguy:
No, I'm saying that it's possible for a soul to willingly give up its free will. If your brain says to eat that extra piece of pie even though you know you shouldn't, you can follow that impulse so as to forget the feeling of emptiness that food pretends to fill. Again, it's like Rumsfeld, Franks and company drawing up a battle plan which can't be executed until Bush signs off on it.

Is Bush the "soul" here and Rumsfeld & co. the brain? The important point is that Bush is able to choose to reject their plans on occasion--if he wasn't, we'd suspect he was just a puppet. The precognitive carousel experiment suggested that subjects were unable to choose not to press the button once the slide changed, and that the slide changed before they had the experience of making a choice.

Gurdur

No, there are a couple of fallacies there.
Given the ethical boundaries on experimentation, it's doubtful that the question would in fact ever be resolved.
But let's look at the fallacies:
1) Self-awareness almost by definition must be built up after more "unconscious" elements have operated.
2) However, self-awareness is usable for self-reinforcement --- and the alteration (long-term) of those self-same "unconscious" elements.
This was what destroyed B.F. Skinner's initial psychological determinist model.
3) Routinization of a task removes it from the self-awareness sphere; one would expect the more complex a task, therefore the more self-awareness enters into the decision-making process.

Well, I'm not saying anything as yet except that neuro processes centered around routinization of a fairly simple task involving no great ethical choices is hardly a basis to build up an argument against free will.

And if people want to bring in souls, heaven forfend, then the same problem applies.

IOW, this is a fairly basic argument that won't cope with more sophisticated models of either neuropsychology or theology.

yguy

I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise, since we don't know that the observed brain activity is a manifestation of the exercise of will rather than a "lower level" decision, if you will, like that made by a judge and subject to review by a higher court (the soul).

No.

No, I'm saying that because the process happens in time, there is a point of no return. After you pull a trigger, you may think better of your choice, but then it's too late.

Yes.

If after signing off Bush thinks better of the decision, there is some point at which it is too late to reconsider. The subject makes the choice to grant power to his brain to dictate his actions by failing to be objective to the stimulus, I suspect.

Jesse

Jesse:
It's important because if it were true that anticipatory brain activity always occured before a person's subjective experience of making a choice, regardless of whether this was observed in an experiment or not, then the view that some choices originate in the soul and are then passed on to the brain could not be true (unless you want to say, like Normal, that our conscious experience of making a choice may happen after the soul has already made it some time earlier).

yguy:
I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise, since we don't know that the observed brain activity is a manifestation of the exercise of will rather than a "lower level" decision, if you will, like that made by a judge and subject to review by a higher court (the soul).

Because if it was just a decision made by the brain but subject to review by the soul, the soul should be able to override it and decide to do something different. If anticipatory brain activity is always followed by a choice to take whatever action was building up in the brain, the soul could not play the role of a "higher court" either.

Besides, our experience of choice is not limited to having an action pop into our mind and then being able to refrain from taking that action--sometimes we make positive decisions about what to do to.

Jesse:
Are saying that there is some characteristic of the experimental setting that would cause anticipatory brain activity to always precede choice-experiences while the experiment is happening, but that this might not be true in other settings?

yguy:
No.

Then your argument about people having the choice to "retract their consent to be guinea pigs" was indeed irrelevant to this discussion, since we are talking about what the experiment tells us about choice in general, not just about what it tells us about choices made in an experimental setting.

yguy:
The quote you posted said one researcher didn't do the followup experiment of introducing a delay to determine how long it takes for the subject to refrain from pushing the button. By bypassing the physiological delay and allowing the subject to see the results of the decision before the body has a chance to execute it, it appears that an illusion of the overriding of free will has been created when it may be no more so than when a person can't let go of a live electrical wire.

Jesse:
OK, you're saying that somehow seeing what the brain was getting ready to do would somehow paralyze the soul's ability to choose something different?

yguy:
No, I'm saying that because the process happens in time, there is a point of no return. After you pull a trigger, you may think better of your choice, but then it's too late.

But what the people experienced was apparently not that they first made a choice to push the button, then the slide changed, and then they found it too late to stop themselves from pushing it. Rather, they observed the slide changing before they made the choice at all. Again, unless you want to take Normal's route and say that the moment we experience making a choice has nothing to do with the moment our soul actually makes the choice, your analogy about "thinking better of your choice" after you've already pulled the trigger is not appropriate, since that's a case of a process that you can't stop after you've already made a choice to set it in motion.

Jesse:
The important point is that Bush is able to choose to reject their plans on occasion--if he wasn't, we'd suspect he was just a puppet. The precognitive carousel experiment suggested that subjects were unable to choose not to press the button once the slide changed, and that the slide changed before they had the experience of making a choice.

yguy:
If after signing off Bush thinks better of the decision, there is some point at which it is too late to reconsider. The subject makes the choice to grant power to his brain to dictate his actions by failing to be objective to the stimulus, I suspect.

But the point is that Bush can choose not to sign off on the decision. To be an analogy for anticipatory brain activity in the precognitive carousel, Bush would have to be unable to ever do anything other than agree to the plans Rumsfeld & Co. already drew up.