This morning I just want to take a few moments to speak at you about free will. As did our ancestors so to do we believe that we are fully aware of our conscious decisions. That is to say, before we act we experience the act briefly in our minds and then the action follows. Before I kiss a girl I make the decision to do so before I do it. Nothing strange about that. In fact, thats how we naturally understand our interactions in the world around us. However, as early as the 1970s (see Libet) a controversy which shakes the very foundation of free-will has surfaced. In short, experiments were ran by first pricking a test subject with a needle and seeing how it stimulated different parts of the brain. Afterwards a second test was ran and this time the test subjects brain was stimulated directly without actually pricking their finger. When the brain was stimulated directly the pain the subject felt was delayed significantly as when the patient was actually poked with the needle. What this means is that prior to the subject being poked, the brain had already began to induce the pain the subject would feel an instant later and only after the brain prepared and sent the message to the consciousness of the subject did the subject actually feel the pain, or become aware of the pain. Because of this revelation it would then seem that all stimulations we experience in our conscious minds are first processed in the brain before being sent to the mind. The controversy is that if everything is this way, then do we truly have free-will or is our brain just leading us and fooling us into thinking we do? One cannot deny evidence. If everything we experience happens in the brain before we are able to think about it, what decisions are we ever really making? The free will controversy has spurred the idea that it is not the mind that is free but the brain and that the mind is a utility the brain uses to filter out improbabilities. If we have free will, then we are brains. If we are minds, then we have no free will. Until an answer can be solved this controversy strikes at the center of all we know and should be meditated upon deeply.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 15:01:05 +0000
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