
Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain (2008) [pdf] - jimothyhalpert7
http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/NatureNeuroScience_Soon_et_al.pdf
======
hacker42
I liked this interview with Judea Pearl on free will:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=sg7Oq4suH_E](https://youtube.com/watch?v=sg7Oq4suH_E)

The summary is basically that to our best knowledge there is no free will
because decisions are caused by neural activities which in turn are caused by
sensory input and noise (but unlikely by quantum noise). However, humans have
evolved a strong sense of agency because that's simply an efficient way to
reason about machines that produce actions in response to the entirety of
their sensory input (especially regarding parent child relationships and
mutual behavior correction). This neuroarchitectural bias is essentially an
illusion of free will that is so firmly wired into our brains that we cannot
escape it. It is also the reason why the idea of a God comes so intuitively to
many of us: an invisible actor which can be used to explain inexplicable
chains of causation and can serve as a very effective metaphor for behavioral
error correction (as a proxy for actual social repercussions, and hence
relieved from all the complicated and hence fallible power relations to actual
social error correction instances).

~~~
Capt-RogerOver
How does seeing a human as "neural activities which in turn are caused by
sensory input and noise" contradict an idea of free will? The neural activity
is obviously so complicated that it can make "sense" of the sensory input and
the noise, and make intelligent decisions based on past experience, on it's
own generatlizations of experience, on external ideas, etc. etc.

There are obviously some mechanisms for creating new information and action,
based on past experience as well (thus also creating new unforeseen behavior).
These mechanisms can clearly be implemented on the neural machine of the
brain, since it's evident that it can even already be approximated in Google
Deep Dream to create new unforeseen images based on previous inputs.

Whether the human can always verbally describe the decision tree (or whatever
other decision mechanism is used), is another question. But even if it cannot
describe, so what? The decision is done somewhere deep in the net, and the
verbal processor does not have access to it. It's still the network making a
decision...

So what makes you say that free will is an "illusion"? Our brains obviously
soak up the information and then make future decisions based on that
information (subject to effectiveness of learning, etc...).

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That quote makes brains sound like deterministic machines. Which would
contradict free will.

~~~
Capt-RogerOver
The notion that determinism leads to seeing the world in terms of simple
predictable clockwork universe is obsolete. Look up "chaos theory". It
describes how even very few deterministic rules applied to a vast number of
elements can very quickly produce chaotic, unpredictable and non-deterministic
results. Especially if those rules include feedback loops. BBC has a very good
documentary on this called "The secret life of chaos".

To summarize, given all this new informatio: no, deterministic machines do not
contradict free will. Because those machines are intelligent and have feedback
loops and can (deterministically) make intelligent decisions based on the
information.

------
joe_the_user
I've heard of this phenomena from "The User Illusion"[1], so it was known of
(in less detail) years before 2008.

And the thing about it is, the _idea_ that a person reaches a decision
unconsciously several moments before they consciously "feel" they "make the
decision" is threatening to the idea of "free will"

But what exactly is being threatened? Does a person expect their decision to
reached without any physical precursors? Do they expect one magic addition of
pros and cons to be registered at the moment they subjectively experience "a
decision"? I'm using hyperbole not to discount the importance of this
phenomena but to highlight how you have a "highly value experience" that is
simultaneously extremely vague. Psychologists would do well to study _why_
people value such experiences.

[1] The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Tor Nørretranders,
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion)

------
JohnLeTigre
People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to
our will without any form of constraint or predisposition.

If this was the case, freedom would not exist since our whole life experiences
predisposes us to unconsciously exercise our freedom of will in certain ways.

Here is an amusing example:

I'm 12 and I want to try using a big person's hammer for the first time. My
annoying little brother is beside me (as always... sigh).

In mid-air, as I swing the hammer towards the nail, he yells (right in my
ear): "You're going to hammer in that nail and because I knew this before it
happenned, you didn't decide to hammer it on your own".

In this example, the lack of causality is evident and the amount of LBAF is
enormous (LBAF: Little Brother Annoyance Factor)

The parallel can be made with the mind. It's not because we become cognitively
aware of our choices fractions of seconds after some brain activity that seem
to be decisional that we didn't "will" it, for all we know, this activity _is_
the gist of willing.

Furthermore, there is no indication that our cognitive experiences do not mold
our subconscious behaviours, so much that this subconscious activity naturally
corresponds to our actual will.

Clearly, it is not sufficient to break a misconceived definition of will in
order to claim that freedom of will does not exist, with the argument used,
one would also need to prove that this subconscious brain activity is
incoherent with our conscious activity.

~~~
joe_the_user
_People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to
our will without any form of constraint or predisposition._

The problem I have with statements like that is that such statements tend not
to provide an alternative meaning for freedom that most people would accept.

It seems better to say that most people comprehend freedom in a fashion that's
some combination of incoherent, self-contradictory and trivial.

IE, it's better to say people comprehend freedom as you say but such a
comprehension doesn't make sense if you look at it logically.

One thing you might say is that the concept of free and unfree choice makes
sense in informal human concept of control and blame - those who freely choose
things we don't like get blamed for it, saying people should be free is saying
their behavior should be regulated by informal, unconscious interactions
rather than formal, rules-based systems.

~~~
JohnLeTigre
I agree

------
dopu
Supplementary information and methods for the paper can be found here [0]. A
more condensed version of the methods (in presentation form) can be found here
[1].

[0]:
[http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1.pdf)

[1]:
[https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/...](https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/Unconscious%20determinants%20of%20free%20decisions.pdf)

------
mettamage
For me, taking a meditation retreat in total silence showed me a lot about how
thoughts just spontaneously jump up in my mind. Normally, I don't notice it
that often. And in normal situations I tend to act on a lot -- but not all --
of those thoughts which then invokes a thought train which may or may not
invoke an action.

~~~
Capt-RogerOver
If you will keep meditating and will discover more about your mind, you will
find that almost none of the thoughts that pop into our minds are random. They
are all processes that have quite specific purposes. A lot of it comes from
suppressed feelings, past trauma, beliefs about what you "have to do", or how
you "supposed to feel", etc.

~~~
mettamage
What kind of meditation do you do? When I do Vipassana I can't be fully aware
of my thought processes since I'm focusing on 'feeling my body' in a non-
judgmental way. I've been most aware of my thought processes in between breaks
in meditation retreats.

~~~
Capt-RogerOver
This is obviously an area too big to adequately address in a HN comment, but
just the broad strokes: Spontaneous thoughts that you were referring too, can
basically (simplifying) be seen as the mind's way to avoid certain feelings
that it has labeled as "bad". For example there can be some situation which
you translate into feeling "alone" (only an example), and that feeling is
labeled as "bad". Every time such situation will happen, that feeling will
start to manifest in your system, but the brain will usually very quickly
start to think some thoughts in order to distract you from such feeling. For
the brain it sounds like a good idea, because there will be less of that "bad"
feeling in your conscioussness, while you think.

Now of course, in general, it's not a very good solution, because it only
masks a problem. The problem itself is that you don't fully accept and
understand all your feelings, and instead are labeling some of them as bad.
Additionally to this, if you don't accept the feelings, but instead try to
mask them with thoughts - that just makes them grow, because the feelings are
not being let out of the system and start living their own lives.

What happens during meditation is that you force out all of the thoughts, so
that feelings that exist in you become much more clear. You can finally switch
your attention to the feelings that have been craving it. Then you become more
aligned with them, understand them better and they stop being problematic.
Each time you stop meditating - it's just so much more easier to notice that
certain thoughts come from feelings, as opposed to "just randomly initiate".

So it's not really about being aware of the thought process during the
meditation, it's more about using the experience gained from meditation, as a
reference point, in order to notice deviations from it and how they are
experienced.

~~~
mettamage
Thanks for showing the broad strokes. A lot of this seems very recognizable,
although I couldn't put it into words like that.

Small recent example, I experienced my illness not being labeled at all. It's
just a feeling, from an experential non-language standpoint / 'a feeling
standpoint', a mindful standpoint perhaps -- it's hard to talk about stuff
that I don't experience in language. Equanimity is awesome.

------
conjectures
Really interested in this topic, not sure about this paper:

\- Downplays how inaccurate the classifiers are (55-60% accuracy according to
the figures).

\- No table of actual left / right frequency pushing frequency. So we can't
compare this to the empirical rate of chance (they assume 50% - I would bet
£100 that it's not 50%).

\- Exclusion policy of people who don't push buttons the right way was
inadequately justified, particularly given the above.

\- Vague explanation of their statistical methods, even in the supplementary
material. In particular I can imagine several ways to interpret what they said
about the ANOVA - it shouldn't be up to me to guess what they did, the paper
should tell me.

\- No use of hold-out data sets.

------
cronjobber
I find it easy to replicate this for myself. I cannot stop me from sort-of
imagining the movement before the "decision".

After a few repetitions, it became apparent why this may be so. It's the
instructions. I'm to move the finger "immediately". My brain prepares the
movement because it wants to do it "immediately" after "deciding".

Here's a more relaxed setup. Alternate between looking at two fingers at a
relaxed pace. At any moment, decide to move the finger you're currently
looking at _after silently counting to five_.

Introspectively, I find no imagined movement before the decision with this
task.

------
privong
This research uses fMRI, but recently some bugs were found[0] which have
called into question a lot of the result. This includes, I think, many of the
results regarding free will.

Is there an expert here who can comment on the accuracy of this 2008 study,
given the more recent news about bugs in fMRI software?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269)

------
Hondor
Common experience tells us we make decisions without consciously thinking
about them all the time. When you do something a bit silly and someone asks
"why did you do that?", you try to make up reasons when really you didn't know
why you did it. It was some subconscious process.

