One of the most important questions of our time is that of free will. It’s not generally a subject discussed broadly so it may come as some surprise to many that most serious researchers question the very existence of free will. Just this past week a new study shed some light on the subject. Researchers at the University of Berlin, following the work of Benjamin Libet who showed that conscious decisions were initiated by unconscious brain processes, sought to determine whether or not one could consciously over-ride this unconscious process. In the words of researcher, Professor John-Dylan Haynes, “The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that further decision-making is automatic and not under conscious control, or whether the person can still cancel the decision.” He continued, “Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought. However, there is a ‘point of no return’ in the decision-making process, after which cancellation is no longer possible.” 1
Determinism
Those of you who follow this show or my writings know that I have railed against the deterministic perspective often implied by studies such as Libet’s, or the fMRI work showing decisions can be known by a MRI technician watching your brain decided 6 seconds before you know your own decision. It’s not that there is anything wrong with these studies; it’s more a matter of interpretation. Let me unpack that some.
The cortical evoked potential Libet found allows only a few mili-seconds to pass between the P300 wave, the activity in the unconscious, and the conscious action. Given this understanding, it would seem nearly impossible to alter the outcome of an unconscious process dictating a conscious action. However, using fMRI we come to understand more clearly the process and we learn that there is more time than the interval of mili-seconds. Still, the likelihood of consciously making the change is not high unless it is made almost instantaneously. This simply means that the nature of free will we experience is seriously limited unless we consciously and carefully choose and sort out the information our mind will use to make its decision.
Please allow me to parse that out a little more. (I have fleshed this out fully in my book, “Gotcha! The Subordination of Free Will,” but for our purposes here, this short description will work). Think of your mind analogously to that bio-computer so much science fiction has been written about. Or for that matter, years ago a great self-help book by Maxwell Maltz titled “Psycho-Cybernetics,” which addressed the mind as a computer that made computations based on its content. If you asked the computer to calculate the sum of one plus one, it would first need a program to do so and then the programmer would have to enter the data necessary to make the calculation possible. In other words, we must learn basic programs, say like physics, or chemistry, or mathematics before we can understand or work with them.
Bio-Computer
Now this bio-computer of ours contains all of the information it has been programmed with, all the nos, don’ts, can’ts—the negative input as well as all of those experiences that produce doubts and fears. Of course, we also hold all of the positive information but most behavioral scientists acknowledge that the balance between the two is way out of whack, meaning that the negative outweighs the positive by several times.
So here we are when it comes to free will. If the data in your unconscious is not of your choosing, then when you make a choice a fair question might be, “Whose choice is it?” You see, as I have pointed out before, until you wake up to the manipulation we’re all immersed in on a 24-7 basis, you’ll live your life under the illusion of free will.
The next time you think about free will verses determinism, think instead about programming. To be free we must first acknowledge and then limit the influence of the programming. Today, there are literally thousands of little tricks that can and are used on all of us every day to guide our decisions and actions in accordance with someone else’s motive. Whether to win us over to a plank in a political platform or to sell us a product or ideology, our great information age often leads us by the nose, our only escape is to become fully aware of the means and the methods, and that is precisely why I wrote my latest book, “Gotcha!”
Thanks for the read,
Eldon Taylor
Provocative Enlightenment
NY Time Bestselling Author of Choices and Illusions
www.eldontaylor.com
Sources:
1 The Brain Computer Dual