Website review: Case Closed for Free Will? -- You...
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worldviews
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laodan discovered 4 weeks ago- Case Closed for Free Will? in ScienceNOW Daily News by Elsa Youngsteadt
Our brain may make up our minds before we do. Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. "We weren't expecting this kind of lead time, " Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren't perfect, "there's not very much space for operation of free will," Haynes says. "The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision." Case Closed for Free Will? Libet's short delay The conclusions of this research paper imply that our personal decisions are not really determined by our consciousness. Wow! But let's not err, Our personal decision-making process is not determined by pre-determination either. It's more as if the working of our brains was producing decisions that we then consciously accept. But this would thus mean that free-will is a myth and that our personalities are resulting from the "computing process" of our neurones instead of what we long thought being ourselves or our freely thinking personalities. Practically that would mean that our present state of mind would be the computing result of all our lives' inputs since being born, or perhaps earlier since we were conceived and even earlier since our DNA could possibly be part of the total input. But then what about the idea of personal responsibility? If our decisions are the computing result of all of the inputs, one should think that, we should not be held responsible for our decisions and actions. But this squares with any societal form and norm. Societies are indeed the ones that fix the rules and personal responsibility is then no more than self imposed respect of those rules. This brings us back to the content of my earlier comments on You Can Blame the Bugs. Morality and personal responsibility are then the result, for each individual alike, of his sharing with all the others of the common societal worldview.
- Case Closed for Free Will? in ScienceNOW Daily News by Elsa Youngsteadt
