Free will, Ha! You’re the last to know “your decisions.

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Billy T, Apr 16, 2009.

  1. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    Supporting evidences in a field which haven't been explored enough? You kidding me?
     
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  3. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    Brain interacts between its database/stored memory patterns for problem solving. You dont have to speak a word for initiating such a process. It often holds its own version of debates using its own methods of debate. Not a single word need to be uttered.

    You don't pull your hand away when it touch the fire after saying "ohh its hot and burning my hands, i must pull my hands away". Our minimal response of a mere "ouch" itself is delayed by a fraction of second after the act of pulling your hand away has been carried out.

    Math seems to be comparatively easier than language for our brain. Its response rate seems to be faster even though numbers are similar to letters or words.
     
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  5. Cannon Registered Senior Member

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    Alright, now is it possible for ones reaction to be in Unison. Such as, one feels the fire at the precise time it touches.

    I know that there are nerve clusters in the hands and feet. As such, is it possible that the pain is felt in the hand and the hand reacts to the fire before the brain knows the pain.

    I'm asking because would it not make biological sense for the nerve cluster of the assigned area to react to stimuli without a intelligent response such as ouch? A verbal stimuli telling you that your hand is burnt when the hand nerve of the burn spot sends the signal to the Nerve cluster. From that point the hand is moving away before the brain noticed damage.
     
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  7. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    So why is that our verbal response is delayed?
     
  8. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    You claim to have explored it.
    Present some of your own work as support.
    Otherwise you're just talking out of your hat (or somewhere much lower on your anatomy).
     
  9. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    11,888
    That would be why we have so many people that are good at mathematics but poor at speaking.
    Oh, wait...
     
  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Really? Surely you published these every interesting and exciting results. - So much so that even a non-research, non-medical, economic magazine does a feature on them. Please give the reference. - I am curious as to your methodology, especially if not by an MRI machine (Few have access to them and you have never indicated you do.)
     
  11. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    No I don't publish anything. I don't even keep records.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2009
  12. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    Unlike most others, I don't care about proving my works to anyone. I do it for a different purpose and don't want anyone else to agree with me. I am not after details but the bigger picture. So I cant afford to waste my time in recording and publishing my own works till I get to the bottom of everything. Even though am keen on sharing, wish to see myself recognized, I find it quite dangerous to give away partial information. So far this world has been screwed up by such partial information providers. I wont repeat such mistakes.

    So if you can think on your own and find out, you would know for yourself that I haven't been bullshitting you. I wouldn't mind helping you to give directions. But if you don't wish to think on your own and waiting for others to prove something to you, then its your freedom to believe whatever you wish to believe about human brain based on thousands of incomplete ideas available for mankind.
     
  13. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Then clearly you have not done any complex experiments / investigations as you have claimed. You cannot even tell what instruments or subjects (how many people in which hospitals, etc.) you claim to have studied.

    Summary: Your claims have zero credibility.
     
  14. Algernon Registered Senior Member

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    176
    I've done some research in the past on brain activity. Psychoactive drugs are one way of supporting the fact that we don't have as much control over our decisions as much as we'd like to think we are.

    In a PET scan, I was administered with radioactive isotopes and my brain activity was measured before and after, along with placebo and test drug. The brain activity in terms of areas that lit up with the isotope represented increased brain activity in those regions, and it seemed that the drugs increased the functions that occurred in my brain relative to not being on anything. This was eye opening to me because previously I had always thought psychoactive drugs were just experimental and theoretical.

    I don't even feel like I think the same when I don't take the meds every day; my rationality and my motivations are definately different. Sometimes it feels scary because I don't think I control my own actions... I talked with my psychiatrist about a time where I actually did petty tasks without my own control (I got up to drink some water, or got up to go to the bathroom or other random chores) and I've managed to isolate and narrow down these moments from which they last about 1-1.5 seconds where I lose control of my decision to do whatever it is I am about to do. Granted I'm glad its not anything crazy, such as cutting off a finger or jumping through the window, but it may not be as crazy as it sounds (When I was a baby I jumped out of my crib and ripped open my chin, and I also jump kicked through a glass window when I was in preschool).

    Although I'd like to think that I have some form of external control over my actions, otherwise I don't know whats keeping me from picking the wrong decision in those moments where I can't control my actions.

    PS: For more information on that test I participated as a subject in, look up Dr. Gene Wang/Brookhaven Nat Labs/ADHD
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Anyone who has hit a pitched baseball has made decisions and launched a conscious response in less than .3 seconds. The total travel time of a professional fastball - which must be recognized and evaluated for path and speed before the swing of the bat is begun - is about ,45 seconds.

    But beyond that, I am not persuaded this measurement of delays and gaps addresses the issue of free will at all. How exactly is the timing of the awareness, for example, established? Where is the "will" supposedly located, in these brain scans?

    If one were to disconnect consciousness from the brain - with anesthetics, say - I predict the decision to tap the finger would be affected.

    We also have the example of the famous brain-half separations, to stop severe epileptic seizures: commonly, one half of the brain does the reporting, so that when the other half is doing something like stacking blocks with its hand, the reporting half is unaware - may even interfere, using its hand, if it has had different task requests presented to its eye or ear. Does this mean that the non-reporting half has no will of its own, free or otherwise?
     
  16. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575
    if i am the last, who or what is the first?

    it wasn't me, your honor!
     
  17. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575
  18. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    Obviously. I am not in it for recognition.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2009
  19. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    In any such cases, your sensory organs provide information to the brain. which responds at a faster rate than any situation involving inputs in the form of any language. Also in a game, its practiced for a long time to hit the ball. Your objective is clearly defined over time like in the case of a war or a combat. So there is no possibility of a free will in any of those cases.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The decision of whether or not to swing at a pitched baseball is a conscious, free will decision that is made in less than .3 seconds.

    I'm not sure what the difficulty is with that observation. The arguments against it seem to rest on the existence of physical substrate for the patterns that make up the will and other mental events - these are not pertinent. All patterns in the world have a physical substrate. What exactly did you expect?
     
  21. theobserver is a simple guy... Registered Senior Member

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    338

    How conscious was it? Good enough to be put in words within .3 seconds???
     
  22. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I usually use the example of a fast game of ping pong, plaid close to the end of the table to show that one is not as cognitive sciences standard POV states perceiving the "emergent" results of many stages of neural transformation of the sensory transduced external stimulus. I.e. I use our ability to play fast game of ping pong as proof that what we perceive is the internal construct I call the Real Time Simulation, RTS, (or the external world, which is constructed by projecting ahead in time slightly to compensate for the synaptic and neural transmission delays as action potentials travel down the axons.

    I agree that these delays, especially large ones like the 8 seconds discussed in the Economist article do Not eliminate the possibility that free will exists, but I see no way to escape the conclusion that CONSCIOUS decisions or free will does NOT in all cases. The Economist article does not deal directly with decisions. It shows that solving at least some problems is done by the brain long before (up to 8 seconds) your conscious personality becomes away that a solution has been found. This POV is very consistent with the commonly experienced sudden realization of a solution to a problem than you have been thinking about for some time, perhaps for hours. I.e. we have all had "eureka moments" when the complete solution to a problem seems to just "pop into our consciousness"

    Benjamin Libet's much earlier experiments deal with the delay (only a fraction of a second observed) between the decision the patient thinks he consciously made to move his finger at a random time of his conscious choosing and the earlier time when the decision was not only made by his brain but the pre motor cortex (where his brain surface electrodes were) is already constructing the muscular commands that the motor cortex uses to cause the finger to move. I very seriously doubt that the actually decision was made in this pre-motor cortex. Surely it was made in other parts of the brain, even before that caused activity in the pre-motor cortex.

    BTW, I have slightly assisted neurosurgeon, Dr. Perry Black, do some interesting experiments on Rhesus monkey motor and pre motor cortex. We learned that if the a small part of the motor cortex that controls for example the right thumb, is removed, then post Op, the monkey ability to take a piece of fruit from your hand with his right hand is greatly impaired or impossible. Soon he will not even try, but use his left hand; However in about two months he will again have that right hand grasping ability. If however, you also remove the associated pre-motor cortex in the initial operation, he will never recover the right hand grasping ability. Presumably his still intact pre-motor cortex can learn to take over the task that the missing motor cortex once did in about two months. This work was published, I later learned, and Perry was kind enough to include me as one of the authors, but I never even read the papers. (Because I was interested, I worked for free mainly on Saturdays, in his primate lab, which was called "Friends of Neuro Science" and very loosely associated with JHU hospital, where Perry was on the staff, as his full time job. Friends was supported by the Baltimore Police Dept (for evaluation of drugs) and by NIH grants, as I recall, but always short of money so my cost free help was appreciated.


    I am sure there is no known answer to these question. The best one can say is that certain areas of the brain are involved in certain activities.

    I would certainly agree with that. No one really understands why or how anesthesia works. It can terminate consciousness, but how is a mystery. (Many different and quite different chemicals can do this.)

    Some people with a fully intact brain also have this problem. It is called: "alien hand" as one hand is active, often in a purposeful, not random, way but not under the conscious control, as if some alien were controlling it.

    The most interesting part of the split brain studies is how forcefully they show that humans "confabulate." (Make up and fully believe a reason for their actions.) For example: A winter scene with deep snow may be projected into the eye so that only one side of the brain (of patient whose corpus coliseum has been cut) "see" it while the other side of the brain sees a chicken coup with chickens all around and in it. Only the non-verbal side of the brain, which saw the winter scene, is allowed to chose (by grasping in the hand it controls) a small model of a tool (one of three usually, for example, a pair of scissors, a snow shovel and a bucket labeled "chicken food.")

    That hand selects the snow shovel but all three choices are seen by both sides of the brain and of course the verbal side of the brain, which saw the chickens and their coup also sees the hand it does not control grasp the snow shovel (not the more appropriated chicken food). When that verbal side is asked to explain the choice of the snow shovel, without the slightest hesitation, the patient/ subject of experiment / replied:
    "Well, chickens make a lot of mess in their coup. I'll need a shovel to clean it out."

    The point is we seldom really understand why we do what we do or draw correct conclusion about causes of many things, even though we normally become quite sure of their cause when given hundreds of repeated examples to watch. There have been many experiments with normal college students as subject to demonstrate this. One I vaguely recall displayed 20 playing cards on a computer screen (five in four rows). There was always with each 20 displayed a "special" card, which the student tried to learn how to guess (as when he did correctly there was a financial reward). After he designated a card as "special" the computer displaced which card had been "special," so he could determined the rule that fixed its identity.

    Actually there was no rule -the "special card" was a random selection by the computer. The student could stop the sequence of displays and tell the rule by which the cards were usually designated as "special." He also was told that the commuter would not always follow the rule, but occasionally chose at random. The sooner he stopped and told the rule correctly the greater would be the prize (Always >$200, and if could be > $1000 if quickly discovered, as I recall.) he would gain. The subjects knew that stopping terminated their chance to earn the smaller rewards (5% of the time). All most all stopped in less than an hour and told their rule when they were confident in their rule.
    Some rules were quite complex, involving various prior sequences of colors, positions in the 4x5 array, and values that had been the "special card" in prior trials. This and many other experiments demonstrate how easy it is for humans to come to false conclusions and firmly believe in them, even as to the true cause of their own actions.

    Many psychiatrists make a good living helping people discover why they do what they do. (Personally, I tend to think these "assisted conclusions" are not more valid than the ones the patient originally accepted as to why.) The evidence continues to mount that our brain makes decisions and controls our behavior with little if any conscious input and sometime later tells our conscious self what the decision or choice was. If we just do something and do not know why, we will quickly and effortlessly fabricate a reason. (I.e. we just "confabulate" one we believe is why.)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 19, 2009
  23. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Don't worry. You will not get any for your thinking. There is no proof in that, only in demonstrations which can be fasified. ARAIK you have not done anything that can be tested, at least not even told what apparatus or type of subjects you observed. - Some "observer" you are! You are just a confabulator. (See my last post, 39, if you do not know that term.)
     

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