Free will, but only after

Marcus Menezoid and myself sat late into the night talking about a bunch of things. Free will turned up into the picture with Marcus threatening to go get the kitchen knife, chop my finger off and offer to show me that it’s free will and real. This post narrates the line of thought I took to pooh-pooh the knife threat. And Marcus, here are some videos that explain how this works…

SURE THERE IS FREE WILL, But only after a decision has been made for you!

To be able to successfully answer this you need to drop the chain of causal events to just one link in the chain. This way you can negate subjective perception of events and work on the impression at hand. How do we make decisions? A lifetime’s worth of information related to other bits of memory flotsam, made contextual through intensive cross references comes into play when you are offered a choice. The thing that is You cannot directly play on or access this information at choice. The information is literally offered to you by your brain and you make your decisions off that. In that sense, it is second hand information (but still uniquely yours) and it may be free will, but maybe we should name it ‘free- but after a perception decision has been made for you by your brain-will‘ just to be clear.

Try this to test it for yourself. It’s logical and certainly not baffling though it raises a lot of epistemological questions including determinism in relegions, which we should not get into now.

Here’s a cool, though kinda sensationalist video on the nature of neural impulses and resultant perception. Thanks to Manoj for the link.

and this one explains how mind constructs the concept of time through the sense of perception.

The video below has some material which also explains the nature of ‘the observer’ in the double slit, quantum physics experiment. Besides the brief neurological perspective, It has nothing to do with this post, but if you’d like to watch the rest of it… look on the sidebar to the right or go to mindbind.vodpod.com)