NationStates Jolt Archive

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13658-brain-scanner-predicts-your-future-moves.html

This IS interesting, does it really scupper the concept of free will?

I would ask, when we talk about subconsiousness, to whom does your subconsious belong?

Not in the slightest (as some of the scientists involved agree). My conscious choices are affected by subconsciuosness, but it's MY subconsciousness. It's simply me, too.
Also, I read in the article: "By deciphering the brain signals with a computer program, the researchers could predict which button a subject had pressed about 60% of the time – slightly better than a random guess."
I don't know the sample size so I only assume it was sufficient (not hard to achieve given the circumstances), but 60% is a weak correlation anyway.

By scanning the brains of test subjects

I see a fundamental flaw in this...

Brain decides

try telling the Ms that

your true self has no physical mass, but IS the "end user" interfaced by the software of your mind, to your physical brain, and through it, the rest of your tangible organic life form.

OF COURSE mental activity is involved in pushing a friggin button! essentially no differently then when your p.c. sends a comand to its printer, or some other output periferal.

i don't really see how this is saying ANYthing about "free will" at all.

=^^=
.../\...

Interesting article.

My first thought was confirmed on reading this sentence - perhaps I already agreed before I read it. :)

And what if we don't like our brain's decision? Experiments to test whether a choice can be reversed are in the works, Haynes says. "We can't rule out that people might be able to change their minds."

Decisions clearly 'well up' inside us. Essentially we conform to patterns of knowledge we've previously stored. Facing a decision, it's interesting that more activity is sent out of the brain as opposed to taken in - we're sending out previous information to inform our decision and movements.

However, we have the power, rarely taken, to override that decision, either to 'try something new' or, possibly similar to random mutation, we simply go against our stored knowledge.

I'd say, and this is gut feeling, that 95% of the time it's not that we don't have free will, it's that we simply don't use it. Yet when we think deeply over something, when we fight our habits for whatever reason, I'd say we have - given limitations of the decision we're in anyway - have free will.

It's still us making the decision. The fact that we aren't aware of it until a moment later doesn't change anything.

It would depend on how you define free will. If you take it to be the ability to choose without your own personality, knowledge, past experiences and the mechanics of your own body and brain influencing anything, then no, we don't have free will. A decision made under those cricumstances could hardly be counted as a decision, anyway.
I think to assume this situation, you would have to believe in the "ghost in the machine" scenario : Human beings are governed by something which sits inside their bodies, but is not influenced by them. A ghost, a soul, a spirit, something like that.

It's still us making the decision. The fact that we aren't aware of it until a moment later doesn't change anything.
Ayup.

It's still us making the decision. The fact that we aren't aware of it until a moment later doesn't change anything.

Well said. We sometimes conceive of the subconscious as some shadowy region of our brains not under our control, but all of it is just chemicals and electrical signals, matter and energy like everything else, influenced and shaped by nature and nurture.

We already know that we make a lot of decisions subconsciously, but that doesn't mean they aren't our decisions. If we happen to bring a hand close to something hot, for instance, we may pull it away before touching the hot object without conscious thought--but that doesn't mean we didn't make that decision. Somewhere in our early childhood we learned "hot=don't touch" and that lesson was stored so that we wouldn't have to think about it every time, but it's still something we once had to learn and decide.