We have no free will, according to a scientist.

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It's true, most humans have been brainwashed into being like robots and zombies with no will of their own. Instead of living life to the fullest they're forced to work to exhaustion for less and less money every day until they die.

Asking folks to think about thinking...and apply a stop watch...to when they want to apply a stop watch...seems like a bogus experiment to me.

No I agree with techstepgenr8tion that this indeed a flaw in the design. You are essentially asking a participant to queue up their brain function to apply a task. But the spike still happens prior to the act.



The latter is from a more recent experiment - Dehaene, Stanislas; Sitt, Jacobo D.; Schurger, Aaron (2012-10-16). "An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (42): E2904–E2913. doi:10.1073/pnas.1210467109. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3479453. PMID 22869750

The general consensus after the above experiments, all the authors concluded that subjects could not distinguish between "producing an action without stopping and stopping an action before voluntarily resuming", or in other words, they could not distinguish between actions that are immediate and impulsive as opposed to delayed by deliberation.] It appears all the early actions are unconscious, and all the later actions are conscious.

For anyone interested in biology and consciousness, particularly in terms of information processing and consciousness-merging, you'd want to load up on Michael Levin interviews. He's an experimental biology professor and researcher at Tufts University and you'll find him in dialog and/or working often with people like Karl Friston and Chris Fields among others.

A few of the really wild things he's accomplished recently:

1) Finding the 'bioelectric template' in frog embryos that could be manipulated to add physical features from very high-level queues (as wild as adding extra eyes on tadpoles). This goes with an explanation he has as well as far as how cell differentiation in embryos works - which up to this point has / had been a mystery.

2) Figuring out how to seed planaria with instructions to build either one or two heads, that this is actually something similar to the above in terms of electrical instruction - that the flat work with one head instructed to make two on next division will do so and if that's reversed then a two-headed flat worm cut in half will only have one head on each division. I'm going to also throw in xenobots, cells scraped off of frog embryos which are something like man-made biological robots that can solve puzzles.

3) Gap junctions as the means by which consciousness is shared across cells in such a manner that trillions of points of consciousness can become something like the experience of a homunculus inside our heads (ie. the feeling of a concrete self residing in the head). He actually said this outright toward the end of an interview on Sean Carroll's Mindscape a few years ago and he's repeated it plenty since.


I definitely think a lot of this will help a lot of the territorial bickering over reductive materialism, panpsychism, etc. by just giving a framework for how consciousness coagulates.

I bring all of that up in this context because I think once we really get our mind wrapped around this a lot of the dumber territorial disputes will drop away because we won't be guessing and calibrating to our particular worldviews, we'll have the experimental data. While my own take on determinism is indifferent to any of this I get that a lot of people think about this from the consciousness meets biology direction so it will be helpful for those here who believe we're likely to settle the free will debate at that level.

Define what you mean by "free". Even when we talk about "free will", it's deterministic in the sense that it's determined by decisions made by the individual. It's not random.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog ... -the-brain

First you gotta prove that consciousness exists outside of neural activity

What Michael Levin's already showing is that cells can connect together through gap junctions and that these are effectively how multicell organisms had internal communication and coherence without neurons. What neurons give us is faster relay and processing speed based on their specialization. That's still biology but something other than neurons carrying consciousness.

I was kicking the problem around more in my head a few nights ago with respect to the biolelectric template Levin describes and it sounds like this is the cells at least having enough local area communication to cooperate as far as which types of tissues form where however one thing that's interesting to note is that if you partially split a frog embryo it will begin developing as a set of conjoined twins, ie. the information seems to be holographic and very local (ie. if there were something outside of the process looking down and supervising I don't think the conjoined twins thing would happen or at least it would push to complete the separation). That still shows embodied rather than disembodiied consciousness but it's at least a step toward being able to tell whether I have to worry about my laptop's feelings (or less jokingly - a near future generalized AI).

The guy who I think has been saying some really interesting, and practical, things about consciousness that's adjacent to Levin's findings (at least in my opinion) is Michael Silberstein whose an advocate of neutral monism and in particular contextual emergence. My challenge with consciousness is how the binding actually works (why do I have a stable self if I'm the energy in the system but the energy comes and goes - could also talk about the 'ship of Theseus' that our cells do every so many years). Contextual emergence - to my level of understanding it - is a bit like saying that consciousness is something that complex living systems draw on for survival and maintaining homeostasis, and it seems to suggest that it gets drawn on as needed and not drawn on if it's not a system that has to manage externalizing entropy as part of it's going concern. Where things get weird is that matter just being disturbances in fields, and adding the increasing realization by the scientific community that both space and time are emergent (the 'spacetime is doomed' thing), it seems that certain aspects of consciousness may very well be universal and environmental because there's nothing we can pin it down to and there's no magic in neurons either, they're just matter in a fancy shape and the same can be said for 100 billion of them firing together. Tononi's trying to pull strong emergence out of phi (IIT) but I don't know how well that's turning out for him.

It's possibly more absurd than that.

Some tantalsing experimental paradigms exist for cellular-neuronal memory. An interesting case are organ transplant recipients who in some cases acquire memories from the donor

Hard to explain exactly, but I suppose by free I mean independent of other influences, at least in principle. So, for example, I can freely choose any particular playing card from a pack, or at least it feels as if I can. But I agree with you. It's probably an illusion that I could have chosen any card other than the one I chose. I think you've rather clinched my already strong opinion that free will doesn't exist. No wonder there's no evidence for the existence of the soul. No wonder God doesn't visit me, show me he exists and tell me what he wants me to do. They made it all up.

What's also wild along those lines is when researchers teach some habituated stimulus reaction to a caterpillar (something too arbitrary to be instinctive), it liquifies in a cocoon to become a butterfly or moth, and the butterfly or moth still remembers what it learned as a caterpillar.

The scientist is correct of course up to a point, most behaviour is predictable and formed by internal biological algorithms.

Most people live their lives like this on a day to day basis, get up , get washed , get dressed, have breakfast, go to work, watch tv etc..

If you want to stress people out give them a real choice with serious consequences, like what subject to choose for a degree, what car to buy etc..

Real choices are hard for humans which is why we avoid it most of the time, we only pretend we like choice & free will is largely an illusion for most people.

There is no free will.

Even the illusion of free will is a rare occurance.

Yes this sounds similar to your earlier example of the dividing planarian worm. I recall an earth worm if you cut in half becomes two new worms. I wonder if this has something to do with undifferentiated stem cells being activated into neuron/brain tissue as happens in a developing embryo.

A full developed human brain could communicate with implanted cells from another person and acquire memories. Of course this doesn't mean they share consciousness/identity with the long dead person.

This is a six minute cut from Curt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything where Michael Levin is explaining the passage of learning from caterpillar to butterfly when having 'dialogos' with Joscha Bach:

With regard to a Planarian or annelid worm bifurcating and producing two new neural centres (one brain becoming two) is there a way to know these aren't just clones with a new brain rather than a shared consciousness?

It's not like we can ask the Planarian that question.