I've been watching a "Swoop bird" diving at shit for a while now. It makes screeching noises at perfect intervals then dives towards the ground making a strange noise that scares it's target.

I watched it leave it's nest to patrol.

Clearly it is an instinctual survival mechanism.

Evolutionary chemistry.

I work with patients who are bipolar, depressed, schizophrenic and everything in between.

Do any of us really have free will? Throw a steak to a starving dog and you know what he will do.

I don't believe in free will anymore...

What do you think?

So maybe it really isn't really free will then. The tight matrix we are born into controls most of our decisions. Even the elite must follow the dictates of their system, or be booted out.

It comes with rational thinking. If we don't have rational thinking, we don't have free will.

I have more free will now than when I was attending church and worried about who would find out about me drinking beer, and smoking and doing $hit on Sundays that wasn't Cult approved. Now I just don't give a $hit who knows whatever about me. I abide by the law but do whatever the f'ck I please. I wish that degree of freedom for all who read this.

Ron Burr

EARLY RM:Excellent quote. If we dont have rational thinking, we dont have free will. cults try to destroy our rational thought. Hm.
Think I will go have a beer now.

I'm not an expert but as I understand it, to almost all top brain scientists, the concept of "free will" is as outdated as a "flat earth." We really make no "choices"-- not about things that are interesting.

Sam Harris gives a good lecture on the topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

Sure, you might consciously choose whether you pick a Coke or a Pepsi but this type of choice is trivial

Another great resource are the following books-

http://www.amazon.com/The-Social-Animal-Character-Achievement/dp/0812979370/

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-ebook/dp/B006IDG2T6/

"I'm not an expert but as I understand it, to almost all top brain scientists, the concept of "free will" is as outdated as a "flat earth." We really make no "choices"-- not about things that are interesting."

The first sentence is just false. Theoretical or cognitive neuroscientists do tend to deny freewill. However, none would compare this issue to "flat earth" thinking. After all, even neuroscientists who intellectually deny freewill live their lives under the "illusion" that freewill exists. I doubt if they would put themselves, or their freewill colleagues into the category of flatearthers.

"Sure, you might consciously choose whether you pick a Coke or a Pepsi but this type of choice is trivial."

This issue is not about some freewill decisions being trivial. Either we have freewill or we dont. If we have freewill to choose a Coke or a Pepsi, that speaks volumes about freewill generally.

Right, the argument is basically that since no one can control their own thoughts/upbringing/brain processes etc, we are only operating under the illusion that we are making our own choices.

I think we have more free will now than ever before in history.

Even if its just the ability to chose and control/manipulate whatever is in our power to do so. I believe that whatever power we do have, greatly personally affects us positively or negatively.

"I've been watching a "Swoop bird" diving at @#$%& for a while now. It makes screeching noises at perfect intervals then dives towards the ground making a strange noise that scares it's target. I watched it leave it's nest to patrol. Clearly it is an instinctual survival mechanism. Evolutionary chemistry."

I am not sure how this survival behavior implies lack of free will--even for the bird. In order to support the claim that this is solely an "instinctual suvival mechanism" involving only brain chemistry, an no independent "will" you will need to provide an account of just what this mechanism is. Whatever the truth might be, it is most certainly NOT "clear."

"I work with patients who are bipolar, depressed, schizophrenic and everything in between."

O.K. our brains affect our conscious mental states and our behavior. What does this tell us about free will? Nothing. Free will does not entail that conscious states are not correlated with brain states. It only states and conscious mental states can have an independent causal effect on brain states.

"Do any of us really have free will? Throw a steak to a starving dog and you know what he will do. I don't believe in free will anymore..."

You have not provided the slightest reason to deny free will. Although there are, of course, arguments to that effect, nothing you have said suggests any of them, and there are many scientific studies supporting free will. Those denying freewill, for example Sam Harris, do so on philosophical grounds, or on the basis of a materialist assumption; namely that all mechanisms in the world must be physical.

The scientific advocates of free will (there are many) often point to studies that clearly indicate that the mind can cause changes to brain chemistry and function, and thereby changes to conscious states, and behavior. One prominent advocate of free will is David Schwartz, a UCLA psychiatrist who studied the ability of obsessive-compulisve disorder patients to mentally effect the physcial cause of the disorder in the brain, and thereby obtain a cure or relief from the symptoms. (J.M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force; See also, Libet et al (ed) The Volitional Brain: Towards a Science of Free Will)

Finally, if you going to abandon belief in freewill, are you also willing to try to live your life based upon this worldview. I think you will find that exercise extremely difficult, if not impossible. Basically all your rational life will have to be considered an illusion.

What research has shown is that the conscious mind is always about half a second behind what actually happens, and it's true wether it's seeing something or deciding to move your arm. Your brain decides that you shall move your arm, and the sense of having chosen to do so is presented to your consciousness with the same delay as everything else the unconscious brain has prepared for you to experience in that very moment.

I would say the jury is still out on trickier decisions since obviously they will reach your consciousness way earlier than any decision will be made and the interplay between conscious and unconscious is really impossible to track scientifically because of our current ignorance of exactly what consciousness is. Regardless however, the final decision will be arrived at unconsciously before it's experienced by the conscious mind.

If by free will you mean that only the conscious part of the brain is in charge then science suggest you are wrong. But if you consider free will as your ability, as this entire organism making up your body, to "decide" for itself what to do, then that's obviously the case. As far as one can tell we're not puppets in the hands of some mysterious puppeteer.

Actually, based upon the Libet studies, the positive conscious decision to act seems to occur about 350-400 ms (just less than a half a second) after correlated brain event ("readiness potential"). which is about 200 ms before the actual motor event. This suggests that the mind is responding epiphenominally (without causal effect) to the pre-existing RP, and therefore there really isn't free will at all.

But these small time parameters are hardly conclusive. There may be other factors playing a role in the sequence. Note also that Libet, the founder of these types of studies, believes in freewill, primarly because the evidence (he claims) supports the fact that human volition can "veto" the "decision" during the 200 ms prior to the motor action.

"I would say the jury is still out on trickier decisions since obviously they will reach your consciousness way earlier than any decision will be made and the interplay between conscious and unconscious is really impossible to track scientifically because of our current ignorance of exactly what consciousness is. Regardless however, the final decision will be arrived at unconsciously before it's experienced by the conscious mind."

Yes. I agree; particularly with your statement regarding the impossibility to track sequences without understanding just what consciousness is. There may be non-physcial "mechanisms" of consciousness that play an important role and that pre-exist the readiness potential.

"If by free will you mean that only the conscious part of the brain is in charge then science suggest you are wrong. But if you consider free will as your ability, as this entire organism making up your body, to "decide" for itself what to do, then that's obviously the case. As far as one can tell we're not puppets in the hands of some mysterious puppeteer."

THere is no "conscious part of the brain." There are only brain processes that result in consciousness, and conscious experience. The "entire organism" is a nothing more than mechanistic machine, by scientific definition. The brain (and the body) responds mechanistically to environmental inputs; weighs such inputs against existing neural structures; and computationally produces responses in the form of output (behavior). This is the standard, computational view of a human being in the neuroscience community. Consciousness is causally irrelevant. So, you cannot bootstap freewill onto a holistic view of "organism" unless you allow consciousness to have causal properties separate and apart from the brain, notwithstanding the fact that it arises from the brain. That is why the so-called mind-body problem (and freewill) remains an enigma in science. We are forced into a freewill debate that either minimizes consciousness (and freewill) by insisting upon the causal closure of the physical, or allows for causal effects of consciousness that are not physcially explanable.

Yes I know there is no specific part of the brain that is conscious or unconscious. (Actually there are some regions that clearly are unconscious in that they merely process sensory input in a way that the final picture is never experienced. Thus for example you have blind-sight.) Here I meant with "part" merely whatever processes that isn't conscious or is conscious, not any specific regions of the brain.

And you're right if an action takes more than a few hundred milliseconds it can somehow be consciously repressed and we enter the stage where science can no longer track the interaction between conscious and unconscious processes.

And I wasn't talking about or defending any kind of magic "free will" that defies physics. No, I don't believe in such a thing. Merely "free" as in having autonomy and "will" as in being able to express that autonomy.

the stomach = the heart's evil twin

If you have a chronic health condition that flares up randomly, you know how thin the illusion of freedom can be. Epilepsy as one example. You can be fine one moment, then completely laid out the next. Your choices robbed from you.

I've read some about this and thought some about this.

I personally believe human's have thought and do, in fact, have choice and free will.

That is not to say that there is not very strong evolutionary programming at our core that very, very, heavily influences our decision making, what we do, and what we are interested in.

However, I still strongly believe that at the core, a relatively mentally balanced human adult still has choice.

Free will of a sort exists, but it's not at all what we assume it is. I've been lately fascinated with studying it. In a simplistic way we haven't got free will because the world, as random as it appears, is deterministic. Everything you think or do is based on previous impressions and learning or how previous events molded your mind. We do have choice-making abilities, but they aren't at all the same for everyone.

The way this idea makes me think about criminality and punishment is enlightening. If a person commits a crime, I can no longer judge him/her without knowing all the life events that led up to it. Perhaps they couldn't have done otherwise. Punishment is therefore unjust. Put people in prison for only two reasons, then; To rehabilitate, or to protect the public, not to punish.

We can't take a lot of credit for being "good people." It's a crapshoot, like if your parents were crackheads, you wouldn't have turned out the same. You'd have vastly more challenges trying to conform to basic societal rules, and that wouldn't be your fault.

I like the concept that free will is the gap between stimulus and response. We don't always take advantage of it, but we can. Some of us, based on various factors, cannot overcome the programmed response, or find it harder than others to do so.

Follow the programming too much, we call you mentally ill, weak willed, or some other kind of negative stereotype, assuming the program is one that society has come to define as being socially unacceptable.

The only time we have free will is when we are faced with choices that are equal in their appeal. Otherwise we are programmed to choose the more appealing of the choices. That is why I always get pralines and cream even though I also like chocolate and vanilla.

The variable is the knowledge we have about the choices. As that knowledge changes and grows, the appeal of the choices may reverse. For instance, finding out the truth of the church changes the appeal of staying with the church--thank goodness.

The surprising thing is that some will find the new information and choose to see truth as negative. But that is a whole other subject. That is brainwashing wherein the ability to choose has been hog-tied.

All I know is that even though I constantly try to be the new and improved me, the old me wins out every time.