From Matthew Mackinnon at Psychology Today:
Illusion of Choice: The Myth of Free Will
…
It is at this point that you have the conscious experience of, “I chose to wink with my right eye.” The human brain is a logical machine and it seeks to establish linear causation regardless of the temporal reality. The fact that your prediction aligned with the actual action is interpreted by your brain to mean that your conscious thought caused the action. In reality, your thought, “I chose to wink my right eye,” is nothing more than a retroactive inference generated in an attempt to transmute a largely unconscious process into a conscious one. More.
These claims come in many varieties but their outcome, if not their purpose, is transparent: No one, including the naturalist atheist, is responsible for what he does. Consider what that means for issues like intellectual freedom and responsible government.
See also: Free will viewed in the brain?
Freed from the fear of free will
Another naturalist slam at free will
and
How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice?
Follow UD News at Twitter!
It is fascinating that subconscious parts of the brain show preparatory activity prior to the conscious decision to act is fascinating in itself but it raises an equally fascinating question. If the subconscious mind is capable of preparing and initiating actions on its own, why go to the bother of feeding information to the conscious mind that creates the illusion of conscious decision-making?
The belief in free will as an after the fact decision of the mind to match reality has a spectacular problem. What is the proper scenario for the easily accomplished time delayed response?
For example, If i asked 100 people to raise there right hand after 10 seconds, how many of them could accurately do it. I would think 100%.
So how is this explained by the “seeks to establish linear causation” crowd. Did we subconsciously mutually decide upon a 10 second interval, and then wait out the 10 seconds and then finally after 10 seconds the brain establishes that I had actually asked for 10 seconds. What about 100 seconds? What about 10 hours?
The fact that human intelligence can choose to do things at an arbitrary time in the future puts the nail in the offing of the “seeks to establish linear causation” theory of free will.
I really can’t stand people like Matthew Mackinnon who deny the obvious failings of their latest attempt to avoid the existence of free will.
A few notes to Libet’s work i.e. ‘readiness potential’:
The following experimental work directly refuted the materialists’ claim that determinism was proven by Libet’s work
Also of note on Libet’s work:
Quantum ‘retro-causality’ and ‘quantum biology’ provides the correct mechanism for explaining the preceding experimental result:
As well, the following meta-analysis on anticipatory changes is also of related interest
Moreover, in direct contradiction to the atheistic claim that our thoughts are merely the result of whatever state our material brain happens to be in, ‘Brain Plasticity’, the ability to alter the structure of the brain from a person’s focused intention, has now been established by Jeffrey Schwartz, as well as among other researchers.
Quote of note:
Moreover, in quantum mechanics, the claim that past material states determine future conscious choices (determinism) is directly falsified by the fact that present conscious choices effect past material states:
You can see a little better explanation of the “delayed-choice entanglement swapping” experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video:
In other words, if my conscious choices really are just merely the result of whatever state the material particles in my brain happen to be in in the past (deterministic) how in blue blazes are my present choices on how to measure a particle instantaneously effecting the state of other material particles in the past? This experiment is simply impossible for any coherent materialistic presupposition that holds that my current thoughts are merely the result of whatever state the particles of my brain happened to be in in the past!
Moreover, due to these recent advances in quantum mechanics, the materialist is now forced to claim that our free will choices, if they were determined, instead of being determined by the random jostling of the material particles in our brain, as atheists had originally claimed, is now forced to claim that our free will choices, if they really were determined, were somehow ‘superdetermined’ almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself:
And in this recent video Prof. Anton Zeilinger mentions that the freedom of choice loophole is closed:
Here is a more detailed explanation of the closing of the freedom of choice loophole
Here is a video lecture of the preceding paper:
Moreover, if you truly believe that your free will choices were somehow ‘superdetermined’ all the way back at the big bang, then I say welcome to Christianity since strict Calvinists have, for centuries, held to a ‘superdeterminism’ view of reality.
Here is an excellent sermon by Tim Keller that gets the strict Calvinist’s ‘God is omniscient we are not’ position across very well.
Of personal note, although, because of my high view of God’s sovereignty, I lean heavily towards Calvinism, for the most part, being true, none-the-less, because of ‘personal responsibility’ side of the debate, I hold that some amount of personal free will has to be in play. Especially in regards to personally accepting or rejecting Christ.
As CS Lewis clearly pointed out, although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options. Eternal life, (infinity if you will), with God, or Eternal life, (infinity again if you will), without God.
And exactly as would be expected if the Christian view of reality were correct, we find two very different eternities in reality. An ‘infinitely destructive’ eternity associated with General Relativity and a extremely orderly eternity associated with Special Relativity:
Moreover, due to the finding of conserved non-local ‘quantum information’ in our bodies, in every DNA and protein molecule, the Christian Theist is now also vindicated in his belief that we have a transcendent component to our body that lives past the death of our material bodies:
Verse:
Of supplemental note, all of the preceding experimental work establishing the reality of free will is kind of beside the point since the denial of free will, by materialists, is a self defeating proposition in that it undermines science itself by undermining our ability to give our assent to the truthfulness of an argument: