07.28.10

More on Times article re: free will

Posted in General at 2:31 pm by nemo

More on Free Will article
The author finds this reasearch frightening. Why? I find it the usual scientific predatory fundamentalism trying to debunk man, and that is a form of domination, a will to power.
Scientists really hate humanity because it won’t enslave easily, although it can be hypnotized without much trouble. Convincing you that you have no free will hasn’t quite succeeded yet, but they are getting there.
Scientists can make fun of religionists, but they can at best reach a stalemate with Kant. So study Kant here.
I would be the fist to admit the free will question is confused, but I think scientists are as confused as the proponents of free will.
You cannot resolve this question using scientific methods, because those methods are studies in causal analysis, and such studies eliminate free will by definition at the first step.
Those who claim free will should be prepared to study a figure like Kant who is honest and won’t allow causal issues to go away. His framework doesn’t fully answer the question, because it is a work in progress.

But his perspective (which, btw, is challenged by Schopenhauer) demands an aspect to the self that is not in space and time, and therefore not causal.
Scientists will never buy into such a thing. So follow the science game here, but don’t be bamboozled.
This research cited is silly. So what? And it is not even about man.
Free will is an abstraction. The question is, how do we observe the degrees of self-consciousness at moments of will and/or free will?
Note that discussion is too abstract. Free will could not likely be continuous.
And the issue of will and consciousness forgets the classic distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness.
And that real moments of will often spring from the unconscious, that is, the self-consciousness. So this experiment is beside the point.
In general, defining terms, and observing facts of psychology has never gotten off the ground, so what to say of scientists jumping to conclusions with tricky experiments. Nonsense.
Kant can be helpful here because he shows the complexity of the issue, which religionists neglect.
And he reminds us that the real mind/self is veild by a noumenal boundary that is unknowable.
Don’t be swindled by tough guy science jocks who will exploit this fact to see only the machine.

In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys were not deliberating, but rather reacting to visual stimuli, researchers were able to plausibly claim that the computer could successfully predict the monkeys’ reaction. In other words, the computer was reading the monkeys’ minds and knew before they did what their decision would be.

We have no reason to assume that either predictability or lack of predictability has anything to say about free will.

The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will decide before they themselves know it, what is left of the notion of human freedom? How can we say that humans are free in any meaningful way if others can know what their decisions will be before they themselves make them?

Research of this sort can seem frightening. An experiment that demonstrated the illusory nature of human freedom would, in many people’s mind, rob the test subjects of something essential to their humanity.

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