Free will could all be an illusion, scientists suggest after study that shows choice could just be the brain tricking itself
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Science
Free will might be an illusion created by our brains, scientists might have proved.
Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it decided to do something, after it has actually done so.
The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In that test, people were convinced that they had made that choice using their free will - even though that was impossible.
The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was laid out in a paper by psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley nearly 20 years ago. They proposed that the feeling of wanting to do something was real, but the idea that feeling and actually doing the behaviour were linked might be an illusion, they proposed.
The new study builds on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.
In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, for instance, people were shown five white circles on a computer monitor. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.
The participants were then asked to describe whether they’d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn’t had time to actually pick one.
Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, even going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.
The scientists suggest that the findings show that the people’s minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle - but they hadn’t actually had time to do so.
That may be happening because if people believe in free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished.
But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists report in a piece in Scientific American. It may be important for people to feel they are control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.
The scientists do however caution that the illusion choice might only apply choices that are made quickly and without too much thought. But it might also be “pervasive and ubiquitous—governing all aspects of our behaviour, from our most minute to our most important decisions”.
“Whatever the case may be,” they write, “our studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong.”
Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it decided to do something, after it has actually done so.
The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In that test, people were convinced that they had made that choice using their free will - even though that was impossible.
The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was laid out in a paper by psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley nearly 20 years ago. They proposed that the feeling of wanting to do something was real, but the idea that feeling and actually doing the behaviour were linked might be an illusion, they proposed.
The new study builds on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.
In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, for instance, people were shown five white circles on a computer monitor. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.
The participants were then asked to describe whether they’d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn’t had time to actually pick one.
Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, even going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.
The scientists suggest that the findings show that the people’s minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle - but they hadn’t actually had time to do so.
That may be happening because if people believe in free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished.
But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists report in a piece in Scientific American. It may be important for people to feel they are control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.
The scientists do however caution that the illusion choice might only apply choices that are made quickly and without too much thought. But it might also be “pervasive and ubiquitous—governing all aspects of our behaviour, from our most minute to our most important decisions”.
“Whatever the case may be,” they write, “our studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong.”
posted from Bloggeroid
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