Our brains reveal our choices before we're even aware of them

A new UNSW study suggests we have less control over our personal choices than we think, and that unconscious brain activity determines our choices well before we are aware of them.

https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03...aware.html

That's not actually how the researchers favour interpreting the results of their own study (which *is* very open to interpretation). The researchers own conclusions are much more complex, and subtle. But in the end they say...


"In summary, we think that the best way
to explain our results is not in terms of
unconscious decision processes (as it has
been advanced previously in the literature),
but rather by a process in which a decision
(which could be conscious) is informed by
weak sensory representations."

I posted this to consider our free wills may not be as free as we want to believe.

This sounds a bit like Benjamin Libet's experiments in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_L..._potential

Oh dear. 

A new UNSW study suggests ... that unconscious brain activity determines our choices.

... the best way to explain our results is not in terms of unconscious decision processes ...

Self-inflicted foot wound?

Oh dear. 



Self-inflicted foot wound?

My foot is well. Only that philosophers should incorporate new information.

This sounds a bit like Benjamin Libet's experiments in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_L..._potential

I feel the neuroscientist Raymond Tallis deals with this sort of experiment nicely:

How Can I Possibly Be Free?

Let us remind ourselves, however, of the actual circumstances of Libet’s subjects, and of the whole action they performed. Their action did not consist simply of flexing their wrists, but of getting up in the morning to visit Dr. Libet’s laboratory; listening to and understanding and agreeing to the instructions they received; and then deciding to flex their wrists. In other words, the immediate intention was not the whole story, and the timing relation between it and the readiness potential seen in the lab was not all that important. The whole story is one of sustained and complex intentions being maintained over a very long time and taking in a thousand, many thousands, of items of behaviors — getting on and off buses, looking for the laboratory, canceling other appointments, and so on. The flexing of the wrist is just the last component of this action called “taking part in Dr. Libet’s experiment.”

The fact that the making of the movement seemed to precede the intention to make a movement by 300 to 450 milliseconds now ought to seem less disturbing, as the general intention to make a movement of the required kind had been there since the instruction was given, and the general intention to cooperate with Dr. Libet’s experiments had been present there for even longer — in some form or other since the subject read about his experiments and decided to participate in them because they seemed so interesting. The specific intention to flex the wrist belongs to an entire web of intention that has temporal depth and is connected with great swathes of the world of the self — motives, principles, knowing-how, knowing-that, and so forth.

I don't think there's anything in the new experiments to contradict what he says. A parallel argument is made by Feser in Against Neurobabble.

It's nice when an atheist neuroscientist and religious theologian agree on something. :-)

[Laird]

Moved from Other Phenomena to General Consciousness Science.

Moved from Other Phenomena to General Consciousness Science.

I never pick the appropriate subforum. A suggestion. Make a subforum dedicated and labeled "Science".

[Laird]

I never pick the appropriate subforum.

Yeah, you seem not to "get" the way we've structured things.

A suggestion. Make a subforum dedicated and labeled "Science".

Oh, come on. The nature of this forum emphasises consciousness. We have a forum dedicated to consciousness science. We have guidelines for where to post other threads related to science. Surely it's not too much to expect of you to post a thread about neuroscientific experiments in the subforum titled "General Consciousness Science"?