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No Free Will? What if the manner in which human decisions are arrived at was shown to be a mostly unconscious process? What if "free will" was merely an illusion, a 'trick' of the human brain, if you will, giving us the impression that we are in 'control' of our acts while masking the fact that our acts result from brain activity we are unaware of? - - - April 15, 2008 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.htm - - - Excerpts: - - - Insert Graphic -- Brain regions (shown in green) from which the outcome of a participant's decision can be predicted before it is made. The top shows an enlarged 3D view of a pattern of brain activity in one informative brain region ... [which can] then be used to predict the outcome of a decision up to 7 seconds before a person thinks he is consciously making the decision. http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/04/080414145705-large.jpg End Insert - - - Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, decision-making may be a pro- cess handled to a large extent by uncon- scious mental activity. A team of scien- tists has unraveled how the brain actually unconsciously prepares our decisions. Even several seconds before we con- sciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. ... "Many processes in the brain occur auto- matically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings." ... The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a aston- ishing finding. ... brain activity predicts -- even up to 7 seconds ahead of time -- how a per- son is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previ- ously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed." - - - end excerpts - - - Comments: Each of us is both an influence-provider -and- an influenced result. This post, for example, resulted from a long his- tory of my interest in this topic + read- ing about this story elsewhere + reading this story today + the totality of all my life experiences + the totality of my gen- etic make-up, consisting of billions of years (at least) of information storage / transference, + the circumstances I find myself in at this exact moment. Such is the case in each moment each of us participates in, far more complex and outside the simple notions of credit and blame and 'free will' that each of us has been programmed, from birth, to accept as 'reality'. - - -
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