You don't have Free Will.

reply to post by TheBandit795


Completely disagree. Have read a few books on the subject, but perhaps OCD research by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a research professor at UCLA provides the clearest evidence for the existence of free will.

If free will were really mediated by "unconscious" processes, how exactly can a person struggling with OCD For decades, all of a sudden "heal his brain" through directed, conscious effort. From whence in his "unconscious" does this power derive? It seems, I don't know', that a FREE WILL is directing it's thoughts, and the thoughts it chooses to entertain.

Before and after PET Scans of people with OCD show evidence of changed activity, or, in neuroscience parlance, a new circuitry. This was done WITHOUT medication. Dr. Schwartz specifically wanted to satisfy his philosophical interests in the existence of free will.



Free Will does exist; our choice to act good or bad IS real. It is utterly paradoxical for our minds to imagine, because a feeling accompanies a thought or act, and seemingly becomes the "arbitrator" of the thought and act. But it's not true. At any time, I can jettison the act. I can stop myself and NOT act, and whether you like it or not, that was a freely willed desire.

Neurons display something called an "action potential". An action potential is electrical activity within neuron's before they release neurotransmitters to other neuron's. Researchers were interested to know at what point the brain registers electrical activity before it engages in action. Turns out, there's a .50 millisecond delay between the registering of thought, and the actual behavior. Some philosophers took this as "proof" that "see!, Free will is in the brain". But others asked curiously, what of the .50 millisecond difference? Why is there a delay? A half second lies between the first signs of electrical activity in the brain, and the action itself. One philosopher wondered: is it possible that free will lies IN BETWEEN thought and action? That .50 millisecond period is more than sufficient time for the mind to say "no" to the action potential started in the brain.

The unconscious may anticipate the action before it occurs, but we in truth got the final say.

I think we have limited will, not free will. So while we do have some limited will to act within a range of potential choices, inevitably our identity and choices get mixed up with everything else.

Like Les said about how there're weak and strong wills, but no free wills. I liked that one. Person A can sit back and accept the incoming wave while Person B will seek a means to survive. One person seeks to accommodate the world whereas the other seeks to reshape it into something new.

Quantum fluctuations say that there's no super-determinism. There might be a limited local determinism, but since predicting future outcomes is progressively unachievable, it's mute. Even if we know everything about the current moment down to the smallest particles, things are still not predetermined. You cannot say person A will do X and Y without error. You can have confidence, though. That's because there's still some amount of determinism present.

It seems we must define "free" here.

free |frē|
adjective ( freer |ˈfrēər|, freest |ˈfrēəst| )
1 not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes: I have no ambitions other than to have a happy life and be free | a free choice.
• (of a state or its citizens or institutions) subject neither to foreign domination nor to despotic government: a free press.
• [ often as complement ] not or no longer confined or imprisoned: the researchers set the birds free.
• historical not a slave.
• [ with infinitive ] able or permitted to take a specified action: you are free to leave.
• [ in names ] denoting an ethnic or political group actively opposing an occupying or invading force, in particular the groups that continued resisting the Germans in World War II after the fall of their countries. See also Free French.
2 [ often as complement ] not physically restrained, obstructed, or fixed; unimpeded: she lifted the cat free.
• Physics (of power or energy) disengaged or available. See also free energy.
• Physics & Chemistry not bound in an atom, a molecule, or a compound: the atmosphere of that time contained virtually no free oxygen. See also free radical.
• Linguistics (of a morpheme) able to occur in isolation.
3 not subject to or constrained by engagements or obligations: she spent her free time shopping.
• (of a facility or piece of equipment) not occupied or in use: the bathroom was free.
4 [ predic. ] (free of/from) not subject to or affected by (a specified thing, typically an undesirable one): membership is free of charge.
5 given or available without charge: free health care.
6 using or expending something without restraint; lavish: she was always free with her money.
• frank or unrestrained in speech, expression, or action: he was free in his talk of revolution.
• archaic overfamiliar or forward in manner.
7 (of a literary style) not observing the strict laws of form.
• (of a translation) conveying only the broad sense; not literal.
8 Sailing (of the wind) blowing from a favorable direction to the side or stern of a vessel.

We can only choose between a given set of options in which we are capable of doing. We cannot choose to float to Jupiter, but we can choose to drink a beer or not. We aren't entirely free are we. Let's restrict our definitions of freedom to the latter, go to the pub, and exercise some of that free will on some pints.

reply to post by LesMisanthrope


Not in this body, no. It is a fetter of the soul.

rather than repeat scientific tripe.... how about we meet and I will prove you have a self will

You see, a face to face encounter is better than a scientific theory you read and believed in full unless what you read and believed was a preprogrammed response in you?

But not me! ???

See the problem?

The basis of all biological organisms is DNA. DNA is a complex molecule that floats in a fluid, but does absolutely nothing unless other molecules are introduced. It responds to its environment in a predictable way, following the rules of atomic and molecular interactions. It can unzip and replicate or it can make other molecules. It governs the functioning of the cell, but basically what is happening is atoms doing what they do. The reason life exists is because a molecule (a collection of atoms) came into existence that replicates itself under certain conditions. This molecule has had many variations over the eons (billions of years). This is a sort of molecular evolution. Matter evolves into more complex forms given enough time. The universe started with two types of atoms, hydrogen and helium. There was so much of it that stars formed. All the heavier elements up to iron were created by atomic fusion in the cores of stars. Elements heavier than this were created by fusion of these elements in supernova explosions. Our solar system was created from the remnants of two previous solar systems explosions. That is why we have elements such as gold and uranium. Not every solar system is a third generation solar system. The type of elements existing in those solar systems would be different. Some will have much higher concentrations of heavy elements, some less. Atoms want to form molecules. Molecules want to form replicating forms and spread. These molecules want to form life. What is after life? Consciousness? The evolution of matter is a natural result of the starting conditions of the universe. Matter and the universe will eventually evolve into something much more complex than biological life. I believe that we have some free will but are constrained by our biology. It is this point in the history of the universe that consciousness has started to emerge at least on our planet. This consciousness will have an impact on the future evolution of matter. I believe we may reach a point when galaxies as a whole may achieve consciousness. This may already be the case, but I do not know how we would know.

God freely chose to create you, He loved you first and now you want to say we weren't given free will by God?

Nonsense, you gotta submit, be humble, accept God's revelation about Himself and His plan.

"Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened." Romans 1:20-21

Paul here warns us that the glory of God is evident to all but not everyone chooses to acknowledge it. Notice that all do have the choice. particularly like the line in the above passage "they became vain in their reasoning"



Romans 1:20-21
For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. [21] Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened.

We all ahve free will, we are the freest of all creatures. ur free will causes all of mankinds problems including climate change wars imorality and family breakups. But one day our freewill will be taken away

reply to post by TheBandit795


define "free will as we used to understand it" then.

Whether or not you have free will depends on what level of consciousness you are operating from.
Regardless, just because there is a scientifically measurable delay in brain activity manifesting biological response does not negate the intention behind the original commands.

Yet sequence of events of time as they are unfolding is like a train that cannot be derailed heading towards a specific definition. You can walk around and do what thou wilt within the train cars but you will still end up where the train takes you. Therefore the potential ramifications of the exercise of your free will may have little effect on the overall outcome of the consensual reality.

-One Person's Thoughtful Response/Opinion

So if magic did exist where the will is one of the most important things but those who know don't want others to know because then there'll be less power for themselves these reports would serve them well. Or have they already done something in the past which helped create autopilot and many of mankind are still in the process of recovering of whatever happened.

Christopher hitchens put it best - of course I have free will, I have no choice but to have it.

reply to post by dontreally


By the time a person is old enough to even give a damn about the question of free will, they have developed a fully engaged "self" that exists separate from the gray clump of matter that these researchers are examining with their fMRI machines for evidence of when the choice is made - free or otherwise. This "self" (you can use the word "mind", "spirit", "soul", or any of a range of terms that have been invented to tag it) is the ongoing result of the human brain's capacity for sapience, which is one level up on the survival shelf from sentience and (basically) the difference between human and nonhuman intelligence. The self - being aware of itself as it "collects" with each "burst" of survival response from the sapient brain - becomes progressively involved in its own development, as the emerging quantity that it is.

Eventually, it finds a way of affecting the brain's response configuration process (it's a fairly complicated process that involves attributing of residual data sets as they are being loaded into the brain's "memory cloud" for use as survival reference information going forward - weighting, relevance, truth, error, good, bad, the whole spectrum of ways to specify information for proper use in future compare-contrast efforts) We see this process begin to activate in children between 4 and 6, and really start kicking in during puberty, as the human "self" initiates its primary effort to establish a permanent and inimitable Identity (generally launched by selecting and embracing an available archetype from its social environment) and isolate from competing Identity archetypes - like parents, for instance.

From there. survival becomes much more complicated, since the human self is actually dealing with competing versions of survival - survival of the body versus the survival of the unique Identity that it has chosen for itself and has decided to actively pursue in ongoing development. Tragically, a chosen archetype can feature extremely negative personality traits and some are aggressively self destructive. Teenagers can often embrace the most romantic and compelling archetypes, and if left to their own naive interpretations, can express wildly extreme versions of such archetypical behavior, with results that land them in jail or the morgue. Again, it's the competing definitions of survival that the brain and self pursue as the human being moves forward in gestational development. It doesn't have to make sense, and it often doesn't, when viewed from a distance.

We can watch fMRI images, and we can observe the Homo Sapiens hominid in its natural setting, but the "self" will remain elusive due to the fact that it is (1) informational in physical structure and (2) it is a work-in-progress. And as your scans indicate, it can (and does) reach in and affect the material structure of the brain that feeds it with "bursts" of intellectual response, and this is the nature of the relationship it has with the brain. They used to call it "bio-feedback" in the mid-70s, but I think they call it "getting your sh*t together" these days. AA calls it "One Day at a Time", and it seems like everyone has their own label to describe the self's capacity for cleaning its act up.

The brain generates the self, and the DNA sets the basic survival dictates, but the self - as the hybrid result of both information and action trajectory - is always involved in what's generated next in response and initiation. The self knows that it exists, and it has its own vision of what a desirable Identity looks like. And it's the development of this permanent Identity that drives the self to do what it feels it needs to do to affect the entire human development process, for good or otherwise.

Can you choose what you prefer?

Originally posted by Itisnowagain
Can you choose what you prefer?

You do choose. As to how self-aware you are as you choose, that's a very different question.

So is the opposite of "free will" determinism?

Originally posted by NorEaster

Originally posted by Itisnowagain
Can you choose what you prefer?

You do choose. As to how self-aware you are as you choose, that's a very different question.

Do you choose to like some foods but not others? Do you choose to be attracted to women and not men or men and not women? What turns you on? Is it a choice?

reply to post by slugger9787


"Free will" as I'm using it in this discussion is the ability of the conscious mind to make choices and decisions completely on it's own without any influence of the subconscious mind or any other factor.

reply to post by ZeuZZ

Originally posted by ZeuZZ

These sort of studies are nearly always done by either physicists or people that do not make a living by studying consciousness or creativity. Determinism based ideologies are usually down to in part from physicists trying to find correlations between outdated deterministic world views of the laws of nature and human behavior.

Well these are not physicists, but psychologists:

Henk Aarts

aarts.socialpsychology.org...

Ruud Custers

custers.socialpsychology.org...

John A. Bargh

psychology.yale.edu...

Originally posted by dontreally
reply to post by TheBandit795

 

If free will were really mediated by "unconscious" processes, how exactly can a person struggling with OCD For decades, all of a sudden "heal his brain" through directed, conscious effort. From whence in his "unconscious" does this power derive? It seems, I don't know', that a FREE WILL is directing it's thoughts, and the thoughts it chooses to entertain.

Funny thing is that your thread inspired me to write this one. I personally believe that somehow they were "through conscious effort" able to make a change in the unconscious, which caused the OCD to go away. I would have to look further into the technique he used, but that's what I suspect.

Before and after PET Scans of people with OCD show evidence of changed activity, or, in neuroscience parlance, a new circuitry. This was done WITHOUT medication. Dr. Schwartz specifically wanted to satisfy his philosophical interests in the existence of free will.

I'm not sure, but I think I once read about an experiment where they tested people with multiple personality disorders who had a different brain scan when they "changed personalities".

Free Will does exist; our choice to act good or bad IS real. It is utterly paradoxical for our minds to imagine, because a feeling accompanies a thought or act, and seemingly becomes the "arbitrator" of the thought and act. But it's not true. At any time, I can jettison the act. I can stop myself and NOT act, and whether you like it or not, that was a freely willed desire.

Then how do addictions exist?? How can millions, if not billions of people not stop addictions even if they wanted to??? And I'm not talking about substance abuse; I'm also talking about eating disorders, bad habits and behaviors.