It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
New research suggests that our idea of 'conscience choice' might not actually exist on the short-scale, and hints that free will is actually nothing more than a cruel, cruel trick our brains play on us. In other words, we're not actually making decisions, we're just telling ourselves we did.
The new study was performed by neuroscientists from Yale University, and only applies to choices made over short periods of time (we're talking a few seconds here). But they found evidence that people aren't actually making split-second decisions before an action happens, even though they think they are.
"Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice - that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived - was a choice that we had made all along," writes one of the researchers, Adam Bear, over at Scientific American.
The big-picture question is why our brains would have evolved to do this. There's a chance that it doesn't actually happen in the real world, and our brains just aren't fast enough to process decisions without glitching in the space of time given in this experiment. Or perhaps, Bear speculates, our brains tricking us into thinking we have free will might actually be beneficial - giving us the perception of control over our lives, and encouraging us to punish people for wrongdoing.
originally posted by: roadgravel
Saying something is true, like free will exists, because you think so isn't proof. People have fooled many times.
originally posted by: cuckooold
So, if free will is an illusion, does this affect the outcomes that occur as a result of our choices.
The 2010 Austin suicide attack occurred on February 18, 2010, when Andrew Joseph Stack III deliberately crashed his single-engine Piper Dakota light aircraft into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas, United States
originally posted by: akushla99
originally posted by: roadgravel
Saying something is true, like free will exists, because you think so isn't proof. People have fooled many times.
...but spending the money on an internet plan in advance, to turn a computer on, to log into ATS, to select a thread, to formulate a response - is proof of what?
Å99