John Wilkes Booth

alright it seems we need to go a different route

let's try a thought experiment instead. what would you think if some scientist was able to scan your brain and predict your decisions before you were even aware of your choice? would that be compatible with your idea of free will?

Oriphiel

Living is just a constant assessment of your wants and needs. You have a reason for walking the dogs, buying milk, going to work, etc., and every day your conciousness decides whether or not to do them. And if it suddenly decided that your wants/needs could be better fulfilled by taking another course of action, then you'd take that different course of action. You might see this as you actively making choices, while others see it as you simply following your mental programming. Just like how a computer processes and analyzes information in a certain way, the human brain does the same thing.

So what JWB is essentially asking is do humans really decide what we do, or does our programming already have it's reaction to stimuli ready, making our own personal reactions an illusion? For instance, you say that you had the choice to either walk the dog or not, but you very well may not. You were only ever going to take the course of action that you took, using the information that you had. Your brain may have noticed an imbalance of neuro-chemical feel-good signals spurred on by a feeling of powerlessness in your life, and decided that you needed to express a sense of dominance by refusing to do chores and passing them off to others, even if it seemed in hindsight like a needlessly mean thing to do. Or your brain may have concluded that the best way to improve your odds of social survival was to follow your set routine. The argument can be made that either way, with the factors surrounding you, your brain was only ever going to decide to take the course of action that you ended up taking.

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Chula Vista

Tomorrow morning I'm gonna wake up and go through my normal routine. After that I have two choices.

#1 - Do laundry, clean up the patio, vacuum the rugs, wash the SUV, scrub the bathrooms, organize the fridge, buy groceries, balance the checkbook, take a nap.

#2 - Drive to White Sands Beach, set up a chair, read a book while listening to the ocean and the wind and birds, take a nap, - blowing off all of the stuff I should be doing.

How do I decide?

Free will.

Why are you all trying to make it so much more than it is?

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

But how is it that you come to make your decision? What exactly goes into the thought process? And if the reactions to stimuli that we hold are pre-conceived, meaning that our brain examines the information around us and decides what to do before higher thought processes even have a chance to start up, can you really claim to have been able to do anything other than what you ended up doing? I feel like you're over-simplifying an interesting subject, simply because you dislike the feeling that comes from self-examination. To put it simply...

What we're asking : "What makes a car work? The internal components are fascinating, and it's interesting to examine how all of the pieces work together to function as they do."

How you're responding : "What makes a car work? That's easy. You just turn the key and it starts up."

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Chula Vista

Hey, I'm just the dude waking up tomorrow and having to make the decision. What makes me work? I don't have enough hours to chat that one up. It is what it is. If you want to TRY and explain it, have a blast.

PS. I'm not going to the beach tomorrow.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

WWWP

Lack of free will does not imply lack of conscious though, deliberation, decision making, etc.

DwnWthVwls

Here is one of many over-simplified examples of how we don't have complete free will: Brain Games - You Decide (S02E02) - Vídeo Dailymotion - This is an awesome show you should check out some of the other episodes if you find the time.

I get what you're saying but there is also a lot of brain functions we have ZERO control over that go into making us decide things that limit the sort of absolute free will you're trying to explain.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

The Batlord

Dude, that's awesome. If you know a way to use free will to wake yourself up then I need that ****. It's involuntary for me and I was always missing the bus back in high school.

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Chula Vista

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Xurtio

You decide based on a combination of biological wiring schemes (induced by genetics and development), long-term expectations in reward seeking and avoiding punishment and some random permutations of your "default mode network" [1]. Variation doesn't need to be explained by free will - deterministic systems can be unpredictible (such is the case with chaotic systems) and the default mode (along with some understanding of transient mechanisms in neuro function [2]) can be responsible for a lot of variation in day to day activities.

[1] Default mode network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[2] Robust Transient Dynamics and Brain Functions

Protagonists of free will are claiming that they make decisions independent of cause and effect; as you can see from the evidence I posted in the OP, neuroscientists can predict a subject's spontaneous" decision before they've spontaneously made the decision. This suggest that the feeling that you've made a decision was really just the feeling that your brain made a decision and you (whatever that is) got to experience the decision-making process.

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