There's too much political crap in here. We need a good old fashioned philosophy-based, religion-aggravating, possibly-scientific topic for discussion.
Fundamental question: Do we have "free will" and to what extent, or do we have something else?
In the last year or so I've slightly deviated from my psychology major into cognitive neuroscience, and this is a big question that comes up a lot. On a broader level, it's an old argument that goes back quite a ways to "dualism" vs "monism".
Dualism is that old traditional idea that we have a soul, that we have spirit, that we have thetans, that we have a mind, or just that we have something beyond the physical.
Monism is the opposite, and has been gaining a lot of ground in recent times; we are a product of biological processes. Consciousness is an illusion, it is an "epiphenomenon", simply something that occurs when you have many complex processes occurring simultaneously in the brain. Whether it occurs as a result of electrical activity, neurotransmitters, a combination of brain structures activating, or quantum mechanics is as-yet unseen.
Free will is obviously a very important concept to a lot of people. Neuroscientific evidence is a bit on the fence as to whether it exists though; in one study,
researchers could predict when a participant would decide to pull a lever six seconds before the participant realized they were making the decision. This doesn't necessarily account for impulse or gut reactions, but those could just be chalked up to various kinds of conditioning. Even at the microscopic levels,
classical conditioning (avoiding a taser that you have been shocked by) has been shown in amoebas, which don't even have brains. In humans, brain activation is in general reduced if someone has been "primed" with prior information when considering new information that is related.
There is a flip-side to these findings, however. While medical professionals used to think that the brain couldn't recover or change itself to any meaningful degree,
the brain has an astounding ability to alter itself for something supposedly static in decision making. This is called neuroplasticity, and it's one of the great findings of the last 20-ish years. It's possible for multiple-stroke victims to become artists, for children who have had half of their brains removed to function at completely normal levels, and for people to be born without entire brain structures without ever knowing. Buddhism has latched onto this concept as proof that humans, given the right "nudge", can change themselves for the better. And again, these brain studies are all well and good, but
people don't always have 10 seconds to ramp up their brain activity to make decisions.On the weird part of the coin seemingly stuck on with a piece of gum, we find some strange theories with a bit more basis than you would expect. Remember the lever study a few paragraphs up? Well,
participants still had this weird capability to tell their brain activity "no", completely throwing off the bets made be researchers. Is this evidence of "free won't"? Going stranger, like anything else in the world, brains have atoms, and at a quantum level there's some randomness.
Maybe consciousness starts at this seemingly random level, and simply scales upward into observable brain activity and behaviors?
These are just some of the arguments I've come across in my classes, with no particular citations unfortunately
. There's a lot to find out there though, and I'm sure as hell not an expert. Hell, I only understand things from one perspective; I have no clue the philosophical arguments out there. Here's an article I just came across that comes from the "no free will" camp, written by a physicist:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-st ... lp00000009 This article does an excellent job of discussing the legal ramifications for these sorts of allegations. Can we punish criminals? How should we, when they are slaves to their own electrical activity? And more importantly,
IS FREE WILL CRAP?
