On the Subject of Free Will
I just finished a major website content project about internet marketing from a neuroscience perspective. Among the resources I used to research that subject was a book by Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel Prize laureate in Economics and a Psychology Professor at Princeton. The book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes the research used and the conclusions drawn that led to the Nobel honors. I highly recommend it if the subject interests you. There's a reason it was a NYT Best Seller.
The research involved human decision-making, which turns out to be very important when it comes to marketing. Using fMRI scanning technology, along with other techniques, the research looked at what parts of the brain were involved in actual decision making during those scans. Long story short, Kahneman concludes that decisions are made by two broadly-defined systems of the brain.
System I, as he names it, is associated with activity in the limbic system, the more primitive parts of the brain that evolved relatively early in mammalian evolution. Decisions made by System I are intuitive, fast, and involve primal issues, deeply ingrained memories, and conditioned responses, primarily. Such decisions are essentially unconscious choices, for the most part. System I decisions make up the vast majority of the tens of thousands of decisions humans make daily. Due to the rapid response, many of those decisions are not in the best interests of the individual making them, and mistakes are frequent. But, System I is quite dominant and actually ends up deciding most things.
System II, on the other hand, involves the cerebral cortex, and is activated when System I is unable to decide quickly. System II operates more slowly, and involves calculations, searches for additional information, logical processes and other more complex thinking before a decision is actually made. In fMRI scans, the researchers could watch as different areas of the brain became active during both System I and System II activity. System II comes into play when making choices has longer term effects, or when fast System I decisions are not appropriate for the situation. Important decisions, in other words.
Interestingly enough, System I often takes over after activity in System II, making the final choice. An example would be a person carefully investigating the purchase of a new car. After looking at available and desirable models, checking reviews, comparing prices and features, what often happens at the dealership is that the final choice ends up being made based on color, comfort or some unique feature that appeals to the customer only when in the actual presence of the vehicle. While the research and thought informs the decision to some degree, the final choice ends up being made by the more primal, immediate response of System I.
All of this is very interesting, and the book, along with three or four others I used in my research for the project, was very useful to me. Marketing is all about choices people make. Neuromarketing, or Consumer Neuroscience as it is euphemistically called, is all about using that knowledge to successfully sell junk and services to unsuspecting consumers.
However, it has implications in the area of Free Will. Based on my reading, we do, indeed, have free will in our decisions. We can, and do, make decisions based on significant calculations, information-gathering, logical reasoning and other factors. We can, and do, make decisions that affect our lives over the long term. However, at any time, we may also make even crucial decisions based on a sudden desire, fear, or need, with the primal part of our brain leading us to unconscious choices we may not fully understand.
There's a song from back in 1967 that sort of brings it all into focus for me. You may recognize it. It's all about evolution. We're the smartest land mammal. We can make decisions for ourselves and we do. But, earlier-evolved parts of our brain may end up taking over and fooling us. There's free will, if we are determined to use it, but we can also just let our squirrel brains do the deciding. It's our choice, really.
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Bear with me here:
Two decision-making algorithms; one rapid, and possibly with some randomness, and another slower, but deterministic. A third algorithm chooses, deterministically, which algorithm to employ.
What you haven't shown is that any of these three processes is non-deterministic or non-random. If deterministic, then no free will exists. If random, then no free will exists.
And what is free will to begin with? The ability to factor in (deterministically) one's preferences or emotions surrounding a choice? Free will is flat out impossible. To believe otherwise is to believe in a non-causal world; a world where some effects have no cause at all, but occur only because some transcendental thing called "free will" reaches down from some realm beyond the physical to influence the physical world. The belief in free will amounts to magical thinking and a disavowal of the bedrock principle of science: cause and effect.
So to believe in free will is to believe that something about consciousness transcends, and is apart from the physical world. And if that's the case, then ... https://www.democraticunderground.com/1218278870
( Disclaimer: I do believe in free will, but I also believe in all that free will implies. It's a package deal. Take it all, or leave it all. )
(just messing with you)
