Free Will (2 parts)

Everything and anything can be investigated with science, including free will.

I did some research on free will a few years ago and found the following:

A few years ago the Scientific American had an article on free will.
This is one of my sources.

Brain research has shown that it takes about a third of a second for a person
to become aware of an event, thought, emotion, etc. Many bodily activities, such
as speech, thought processes, decision-making, imaginings require less than that
time for sensory input (if needed) and then to react to it.

Brain activity becomes intense during this third of a second, after which,
our conscious mind, becomes aware of the bodily activity, words, thoughts,
decisions, and opinions that are the result of this unconscious brain activity.

In other words these things have already been formed in the unconscious,
before they suddenly “pop” into our head and we become aware of them.

The physical changes in our body due to an emotion, for instance, are happening
before we realize we are emotional.

Example: Anger. Our body is already changing for anger before we know we are
angry.  Our body is already set
angry before we consciously know it.

It looks like the conscious “I” is not the origin of these things,
but is only a receiver after they have been produced by the unconscious part of
the brain.

In other words, speech, thoughts, decisions, imaginings, emotions, feelings
freely come to our conscious mind already formed in the unconscious.

To us, things like speech, thoughts and imaginings seem to come to us
automatically.

So the question of free-will arises. Is conscious free will a sham?  Is
there such a thing as unconscious free-will?

Does free-will really reside only in the unconscious and that the conscious part
of us is pre-determined by it?

Also: The unconscious can multitask, whereas the conscious can only work on a
single task at a time, sometimes alternating tasks in quick succession.

A good description of the interaction between the conscious and the
unconscious parts of our brain was done by Cordelia Fine in the book “A
mind of its own” using the simple example of tapping a finger:

(1) Unconscious Mind: 
{to waiting neurons} Tell Conscious Mind to think, “Tap finger”.
And get that finger up.

Then Conscious Mind: I’ll tap my
finger…

(2) But according to the research the Conscious mind could cancel this
directive:

the Conscious Mind can react to this as
follows:  I’ll tap my finger …oh, hang on.  Actually I won’t.

Finger remains still.

However, it seems the following actually occurs:

Unconscious Mind:  {to waiting
neurons} Tell Conscious Mind to think “tap finger”.  And get that
finger up.

Conscious Mind: I’ll tap my
finger …

Unconscious Mind:  Change of
plan.  Put the brakes on that finger.  And don’t forget to tell
Conscious Mind to change its mind.

Conscious Mind:  Oh, hang on.
Actually, I won’t tap my finger.

Finger remains still.

So where is free will?

Of course, we can still act as if we have free will.

Some speculations:

Did the evolution of our four times as large mammalian brain, compared to the
ape’s, concentrate mostly on the development of the more important unconscious
part and the conscious part was just there, kind of a side phenomenon?

Brains of other organisms are structured like the human brain. It would
follow that they would also have this important part of the brain, the
unconscious. Do these organisms also have a veneer of consciousness that we
have, but their consciousness has to depend on a smaller, less able unconscious
part?  Is this the reason these
organisms do not have the degree of abilities that humans have?        

Is one of the evolutionary reasons
of consciousness in sentient creatures, more efficient communications between
beings? 

As we know things can go wrong with
the brain through accidents, disease, genetics.  This can often especially affect the unconscious part of the
brain, but also the conscious part.

See Application at end.

Orland Hooge

Part 2: 

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our
intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The
brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become
conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought.

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.

“We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist
John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in
Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that
consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will,
but it does make it implausible.”

Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway
and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows
our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that
orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.

In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the
human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn
from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to
decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they
predetermine our choices.

To probe what happens in the brain during the moments before people sense
they’ve reached a decision, Dr. Haynes and his colleagues devised a deceptively
simple experiment, reported in April in Nature Neuroscience. They monitored the
swift neural currents coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they
decided, at their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their
left or right hands.

In all, they tested seven men and seven women from 21 to 30 years old. They
recorded neural changes associated with thoughts using a functional magnetic
resonance imaging machine and analyzed the results with an experimental
pattern-recognition computer program.

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream
across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their
right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter
that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.

Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision,
the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had
decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About
70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students
would push.

“It’s quite eerie,” said Dr. Haynes.

Other researchers have pursued the act of decision deeper into the
subcurrents of the brain.

In experiments with laboratory animals reported this spring, Caltech
neuroscientist Richard Anderson and his colleagues explored how the effort to
plan a movement forces cells throughout the brain to work together, organizing a
choice below the threshold of awareness. Tuning in on the electrical dialogue
between working neurons, they pinpointed the cells of what they called a
“free choice” brain circuit that in milliseconds synchronized
scattered synapses to settle on a course of action.

“It suggests we are looking at this actual decision being made,”
Dr. Anderson said. “It is pretty fast.”

And when those networks momentarily malfunction, people do make mistakes.
Working independently, psychologist Tom Eichele at Norway’s University of Bergen
monitored brain activity in people performing routine tasks and discovered
neural static — waves of disruptive signals — preceded an error by up to 30
seconds. “Thirty seconds is a long time,” Dr. Eichele said.

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are
understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who
argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut —
not by thinking about them too much.

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of
Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated
consumer choices — which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take —
appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus
consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely
the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed
journal Science in 2006. “The idea that conscious deliberation before
making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness
creates for us,” Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

Brain may prepare decisions in advance may
prepare decisions in advance

April15, 2008

Courtesy Nature Journals and World Science staff

Cer­tain pat­terns of brain ac­ti­vity pre­dict
peo­ple’s de­ci­sions up to 10 sec­onds be­fore the peo­ple are aware of
them, ac­cord­ing to new re­search that casts fresh doubt on wheth­er we
have free will.

The an­cient de­bate over free will cen­ters
on wheth­er it’s an il­lu­sion to be­lieve our thoughts and de­ci­sions
are in­de­pend­ent, since our brains really con­sist of atoms bounc­ing
around ac­cord­ing to their own rules.

The new study suggests the questioning many be
justified.

One Application of the unconscious (brain and other parts of the body):
One of my uses of the unconscious that is slower then words and sentences fully formed popping into my awareness is problem solving.

When confronted with a seemingly
impossible problem as when composing a computer program, I often totally leave
thinking of the problem to do something else such as having a short nap, going
biking, reading, or working on something totally separate from my program.
Suddenly, out of the blue a solution(s) pop into mind.
Often the solution is a creative one, often piling up with solutions
beyond this one.

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