More on Free Will

28 June 2012  Louis Brossard

“Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain-scanning activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made.”* In other words, our choice is made before we make it consciously. For there to be free will one must be aware of the decision one makes before it is made. Our consciousness is just a spectator of what our brain process has decided.

Here again, we find that our lack of understanding of what consciousness is prohibits us from making sense about it, we just don’t know how to define consciousness scientifically. Like free will, we feel we know we have it but can’t make a rational explanation of it. We know we can’t choose to fly. But do we know that our culture also severely limits the choices we think we can make? Can a member of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon jungle choose to go to Harvard? Culture and physics limit our universe of choice. But so does intelligence, skill and aptitude.

As you read this make a conscious decision to do something like get a drink of water. Then realize that the decision you made happened before you found out about it. Then try to consider what your consciousness is. Study a bit of neuroscience and find out what parts of your brain are active when you are thinking about this. This mixture of science, psychology and philosophy are what fascinated me at university. It is why I took the brain out of an old man whose body was given to science when I studied neuroscience. It is also why I wish to make my body available for such study even if it is used by some naïve undergraduate such as I was. It has taken much longer for these concepts to be part of main stream science than I expected but I rejoice that it has now happened. Hopefully it will not take such a long time for our culture to follow. Our popular culture in the United Sates is far behind most of the developed world. I wish I could do more to awaken my compatriots to the promise the scientific method offers the world.  

*Scientific American Magazine  July 2012 What Happens to Consciousness When We Die