Scientific Experiment on Free Will
"oh my god, I can’t tell the difference between the activity from the outside and what I consider to be a voluntary movement!" - Rodolfo Llinás is a giant in neuroscience, having published over 500 peer reviewed scientific articles.
In short: If unknown to you a person stimulates your brain in such a way as to make your leg move, you will feel that it was your own decision to make your leg move at just that time!
According to Llinás this means that the feeling of having willed an action simply occurs when your brain is able to anticipate what will happen next, e.g. that your leg will move.
Explanation of the experiment is found 36:00 in this interview with Rodolfo Llinás:
Does this experiment show that free will is an illusion? What do you think?
Be careful what you answer though! Another experiment has shown that “beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level.” ;)
Is this what all the "There is no free will" stuff is about recently? This proves nothing about free will, it just proves that you can deceive someone into believing that they did something voluntarily when they really did it under control. That's hardly novel, that's what happens every time someone walks out of a store with some crap they didn't need and can't give you a clear reason why they bought it. Usually they'll say something like "I just wanted it" but that's not a reason, that's a tautology. Why did they want it?
In other words, this only proves that some externally controlled actions can be perceived as the result of free will decisions. It does not prove that no actions are internally controlled and actually are the result of free will decisions.
I agree, but I wouldn't trivialize the result. If he's right it clearly establishes that the feeling of free will does not necessarily imply free will. Contrast this with pain: If I feel pain then necessarily I am in pain. It could have been the case that free will was like pain, but his account seems to imply that it isn't.
I believe that we don't really have free will, we are just like "objects" with different atrributes and properties and we are rolling down an inclined slope that is the environment we live or in other words our life, we just react at any "objects" or information we percieve in our way downwards, our path is probably pretetermined before we even started rolling.
Our "atributes and properties" are defined by our genes, personality/ life experience so far and can change with time, even small factors like a tree at 100m from our home could play a role in who we are and change a bit our "attributes". A small obstacle in our way could leave as a "dent" and affect our remaining course.
randomness and chance might have more influence in us than "free will"
In other words we are like super complicated objects created from a class and we just react to the information that is pased to us.
If time travel was posible and we traveled back in time just before we vote for the OP would we change our mind and vote differently this time? my opinion is that if all other factors remained the same, we would not vote differently, if some factors changed/added or removed, like having a phone call this time or a dog barked at distance, this could posible make us react differently.