Goodbye Freewill, Goodbye Christianity?

[A_Wanderer]

Originally posted by INDY500

So too is promoting or establishing atheism by the way. Free exercise clause, remember?


An Obama shout-out?

The establishment clause prevents the promotion or persecution of religious belief. Given that evolutionary biology is not a religious belief it is perfectly valid in the science classroom. Not promoting God in a public school is different from teaching children that there is no God.

It is not free exercise of religion to take a theologically based argument like intelligent design and use public funds to promote it. By all means fill childrens heads with rubbish at home and at Church but the taxpayer money mustn't be funneled for the promotion of religious belief. If an atheist high school student is forced to take a test on Intelligent Design that would be violating their religious freedoms because it is affirming this unfalsifiable creator entity that is codeword for God.

To find out how controversial evolution is these days please skim through some abstracts at nature.com, I can guarantee you that not a single one has intelligent design because it's a piss poor model, evolution is dominant because it works elegantly and matches the observations. If somebody finds an exception to the theory they would be at the top of the pile because they would overturn what people thought they knew. But it doesn't seem to be the case, as time goes on the evidence just keeps pointing to evolution not as a result of some naturalist conspiracy rather the nature of reality.

[A_Wanderer]

Originally posted by INDY500


Humans, unlike animals, can make moral decisions. It's the difference between "I'm hungry. Can I eat that mouse?" and "I'm hungry, SHOULD I eat that mouse?"

Animals make decisions that are moral, vampire bats will share blood with other bats that couldn't go out to feed on a particular night - they will sacrifice some of their benefit for another, altruistic behaviour underpinned by the expectation that the favour will be returned (it's the golden rule being played out in the natural world for perfectly good darwinian reasons).

That rudimentary examples of what we consider morality exist in the animal kingdom is important. It shows that despite our incredible brains there is a long evolutionary history of cooperation and "morality" that exists because it endows some selective advantage (and that advantage may be beyond the individual level to the gene level as with examples of kin selection).

You overlooked the point I was making too, that decisions are made by animals, there are mechanisms in the brain that go into decision making and that if a cat can make a decision without what we might consider free will should we really assume that our decisions are radically different.

[BonosSaint]

The pushing of the button though is an act with no consequence.
There is no rationale to decide whether pushing a button at a specific time is better than pushing it at another time. There is nothing to weigh in this experiment. It would be interesting to see a similar experiment when a decision does have consequence and is more complex.

That being said, it certainly seems likely that much of the information that we process is processed underneath conscious level. It also seems that we can negate a decision we have reached.

[nathan1977]

Given what the Bible says about our sin nature -- that is, the preconditioned state of brokenness that we are born into -- you'd be hard pressed to argue that humanity is in fact free. Theologians would perhaps argue that it's Christ who allows true freedom -- in that as we grow in relationship to God we are able to make changes and discover free will. Until then, we're sort of trapped by our circumstances/coping mechanisms/survival tactics/dysfunction/addictions/etc. Grace breaks determinism/karma.

So I don't think this article says anything that would violate Christianity...

[maycocksean]

Couldn't this simply suggest that we make our "free will" choices before we are aware we've made them.

If there were some deterministic "reason" that led to a particular pattern of button-pushing that researchers were able to uncover thus indicating that what appears to be a free will choice instead is already determined, well then maybe there would be something. But simply recording that the brain "predicts" the response before it's conscious to the person as a decision isn't really stopping free will.

I don't think the existence of the subconscious negates free will. . .

[VintagePunk]

For some reason nature.com won't load for me at the moment, so I can't read the entire article, but, it's been accepted for ages that at any given time, there is a lot going on for each of us at a preconscious level. That's sort of a built in measure of protection for us, because if it weren't so, we'd be so overwhelmed by stimuli at times, we probably wouldn't be able to function. We certainly wouldn't be able to focus on the important things, the things we need to in order to survive.

I'd be interested to see the entire study to determine how early in the 7 second window the actual decision is made, and then how much more time passes before the participant reaches what the researchers alluded to as the point of no return in the process, where there was no turning back and changing the decision. It could be that very early in that 7 second window, there was more of a preconscious awareness that there was a decision to be made, as opposed to the actual making of the decision.

As well, depending on the type of computer task they were doing while engaged in pushing the button, how attention-intensive it was, it's possible that the attention given to that task suppressed the attention, and therefore the participants' automatic consciousness of, the button pushing aspect of the task. I've been involved in deployment of attention studies, and one of the knowns is that we can only really focus on a limited number of parts of a task at a time, so that things do become automatic and preconscious. Researchers base studies upon using our attention limits to get access to our preconscious minds all the time.

Also, BonosSaint and maycocksean have made some excellent points about the simplicity and automaticity of a dichotomous task such as button pushing (do I push - yes or no? Right or left hand?), and it doesn't exactly require reasoning or higher thinking.

All that said, it's an exciting finding for the field. I just think it's maybe a tad premature to generalize the findings to an absence of free will.

[A_Wanderer]

The question marks and if qualifier in my posts are important

[BonosSaint]

Is the subconscious then the link between brain and mind? The dynamic that flows between the two? We assign the brain tasks (either consciously or unconsciously) that it then resolves below conscious level. Does the subconsious belong to the brain or to the mind?

[VintagePunk]

Originally posted by BonosSaint
Is the subconscious then the link between brain and mind? The dynamic that flows between the two? We assign the brain tasks (either consciously or unconsciously) that it then resolves below conscious level. Does the subconsious belong to the brain or to the mind?

I'm sure A_Wanderer could address this much more articulately than I'm about to, philosophy of the mind stuff bores me silly, so I tended not to pay much attention to it, but, to me, I guess you could say that yes, in a way, preconsciousness is sort of a bridge between unconsciousness and consciousness. I'm assuming that when you say 'brain,' you're referring to completely automatic, unaware processes, and when you say 'mind,' you're referring to things that are fully within our awareness. Preconciousness is a state between the two, where we might not be aware of what's going on at any given time, but we can usually access it if there's a need to.

I don't really think of preconsciousness belonging to either the brain or the mind, to me, they're one and the same, it's all just a continuum of consciousness within the brain.

[BonosSaint]

Thanks. Basically I was thinking out loud or thinking in prose about the role of the preconscious/subconscious. Just amusing myself. It's a subject that interests me but I haven't done much reading on it, just some observation.

I follow the brain and mind being the same--I was just using mind as the conscious state. The subconscious seems to be the information organizer/problem solver. Deep subconscious and shallower subconscious ("it was on the tip of my tongue") much
closer to the conscious level. I'm always fascinated how all this works together in the human machine, the flow of it.

[VintagePunk]

Originally posted by BonosSaint
Thanks. Basically I was thinking out loud or thinking in prose about the role of the preconscious/subconscious. Just amusing myself. It's a subject that interests me but I haven't done much reading on it, just some observation.

I follow the brain and mind being the same--I was just using mind as the conscious state. The subconscious seems to be the information organizer/problem solver. Deep subconscious and shallower subconscious ("it was on the tip of my tongue") much
closer to the conscious level. I'm always fascinated how all this works together in the human machine, the flow of it.

I agree, it really IS a fascinating area.

When I stated "I don't really think of preconsciousness belonging to either the brain or the mind, to me, they're one and the same, it's all just a continuum of consciousness within the brain," I should have also said that there are many philosopher-types who disagree with me. A great deal of the time, I can't make head nor tail of what they're on about.

I once signed up for a very in demand honours seminar series about the history of psychology, thinking that we'd be studying the way the field has evolved through time by looking at major figures and the development of their theories. Boy, was I wrong. 90% of it was mind-numbingly boring philosophical stances, from ancient times to present day. Ick. I left the room every week looking like this ----> So yeah, the philosophical end of things is not my forte, and hopefully A_Wanderer will expand on what I've said.

[BonosSaint]

I can sympathize with boredom with the philosophical end. I like my philosophy in other fields. But I'm fascinated by the nuts and bolts aspects of it and its eccentricies.