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Originally Posted by CoccoBill
There's an argument to be made that consciousness indeed doesn't hold executive control, but is merely a front-end to the real boss, subconscious.
I wasn't arguing for free will. I just was responding to your point that the subconscious was still 'us', because I thought you were implying that that somehow gave us free will.
Originally Posted by CoccoBill
The subconscious processes several megabits of data per second, all the time, from audiovisual and other sensory stimulus, memory, etc. At the same time, the conscious part is shown to process roughly 16 bits per second. That's not a lot if you think about it.
I'm not sure where they get those numbers from, but I'm in agreement that most of our mental processes are unconscious.
Originally Posted by CoccoBill
There's also plenty of research that shows that whenever the conscious self decides to do something, such as press a button, there's subconscious brain activity happening roughly half a second before that, sort of priming the person for the upcoming action. The conscious part gets all its data from the subconsciousness, pre-processed and filtered. This process takes time, a few tenths of a second of lag for the conscious mind. The conscious minds just tricks itself to think there was no lag, and feels good about itself having reacted instantly. However, whatever reactions do happen before that half a sec response time, are subconscious. Our subconsciousness knows half a second in advance what the conscious mind is gonna do.
More or less my understanding as well.
Libet did the classic experiment showing that if you present someone with an analog clock, and tell them to press a button whenever they want to, then ask them to report where the second hand of the clock was when they decided to press it, there's activity in the brain that precedes and can predict the decision - the brain actually starts the chain of events leading up to the button press before the person reports having made the conscious decision to do it. E.g., if you say 'I decided to press it when the second hand was on 10' the brain will have begun to alter its activity before that, e.g., when the second hand was between 9 and 10.
Another interesting set of studies involve presenting stimuli in close succession such that one is separated from the other by a few degrees. So you see very briefly a circle in the middle of the screen, the screen goes blank briefly, then a circle to the left of center. The whole thing is done super quick so it lasts only about 1/4 of a second.
The conscious brain perceives this as a single object moving from the center to the left, when in fact it's two separate objects being presented. The important thing is that if we were experiencing the stimuli in real time there's no way the brain could anticipate the direction the object would be moving in, so no way it should perceive motion. It shows the whole episode is constructed by the brain after the fact.
Originally Posted by CoccoBill
What is clear though, is that we're not as firmly on the driver's seat as we'd like to think we are.
If at all. It's a lot easier to provide examples of the absence of free will than to show its existence.
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