This might seem weird at first when you think about it but at the same time I can guess that it sounds very familiar. I suspect that in every human being there is this little doubt about their reality and a knowing of the truth. This truth is really bizarre so we get conditioned to repress it.
Let’s consider the problem of choice. When you are thinking about two things that you can do, you are making a choice. When you choose one thing over the other, you make a free choice, this is free will. For example the life long problem of whether to attach the toilet paper so it rolls out from the bottom or from the top. I prefer it rolling out from the top because then I can spin it from the top and it rolls out nicely, but some people like to pull it from the bottom…
So this choice and any other you can think about is YOUR free will?
Well actually no. This is the weird part.
When you are considering two things what is actually happening is – you are observing the act of decision making made by your brain. It is not YOU that is making the decision.
When you have made a choice, what actually happened was you observed the act of choice made by some neural network inside your brain.
Test your free will with this experiment. See your mouse lying on the desk? Decide that you want to pick it up in the air and then do it. Please do it now.
Now what happened? Was that your choice or were you simply observing “someone” deciding to pick it up and then actually seeing your hand picking the mouse?
How can you distinguish between you making a choice and YOU OBSERVING the choice? This is an important question.
There is no answer to it, there is no way to make this distinction, I have thought about it long and hard, surprise me with an answer to it. Scientists a long time ago observed that any kind of action or decision is done 0.25ms (I don’t remember the exact number) before reaching consciousness. That means consciousness was not involved in the act itself, it was merely being… conscious of it, that’s all.
This is why everyone has doubt whether they control their lives. However insignificant that doubt is, it is there. That is because you intuitively sense that what you are doing isn’t really controlled by you. Children know about this more than us. If you ask a kid why did he do something he’ll just say “I don’t know”.
-Why did you pee your pants!? -I don’t know!
And you just wanna slap the bastard! But actually that’s more true than our rationalizations. See, when you say I have free will because I can decide at this moment that I can for example jump up in the air, it is just your faulty reasoning. There is no deciding on your part, because you have nothing to do with the part of your brain that does the decision and action.
The truth is, you are a distinct entity, probably a separate brain circuit whose job is to observe stuff going on in the brain. The brain needs a tool to look at itself. When an animal brain during evolution reaches some point of complexity it needs to perform maintenance operations on itself. It is necessary for the whole system to work correctly. 100 billion neurons is a lot of neurons and they have to act in cooperation with each other! If not the organism dies and so do the neurons and brain. So the brain must have a way to connect everything together and to fix bugs. It needs a MIRROR to look at itself. Just like you walk up to a mirror to fix your hair because that is the only way you can know for sure you have done it correctly. You need feedback. Consciousness is feedback for the brain. YOU are the mirror of the brain.
So what is your role exactly and why does it seem that it is YOU that is controlling this organism?
You observe whatever part of your brain is most active at the moment. Consciousness is filled with the activity of dominant brain circuitry. If you need to shit really badly, that’s all you can think about yes? You observe whatever is happening inside the brain and body. In order for this organism to work correctly you need to observe everything, including decision making and acts of “free will” made by the brain. The brain needs to see them inside the mirror so that it can fix it or change it. You observe, that’s all you do. And you do this all the time, even when the brain and body are sleeping. You are conscious of dreams because the brain is making fixes and optimizes at night. The fixes done in the dreams will later manifest themselves in your everyday life, that’s why it seems that sometimes you have future visions while asleep.
You just observe, like a person sitting in the cinema. This is why Zen Buddhists say that everyone is enlightened, they just don’t know it. There is no difference between a so called enlightened person and a “normal” person. Because whether you know this truth or not, you are still doing your job. You are observing.
There is no real practical part of being enlightened. So there is also no practical point in this article. Why did I write it? Because this is extremely funny to me.
Well I guess there is a message here. When you see how funny this is, you’ll stop the effort. Your life will be WAY easier, cause it really isn’t about you anyway. You won’t take everything personally and you’ll start enjoying it more. Like a ride in an amusement park. So get over it, accept this truth. It is funny once you get it. Or forget what I just wrote. It’s a joke.
Or are you even really choosing what you think? When you are thinking about this article, are ‘you’ actually controling what your mind turns to, or is your brain just making it appear this way. For this matter, what exactly is ‘you’. Maybe it is ‘you’ controlling yourself, making the decisions, but the part that really thinks about it (that you are using now) is both seperate and the same as this other part. It is not really a question that can be answered without some clear definitions, which, in these circumstances, are nearly impossible to find.
you are your brain, you make the choice, it doesn’t matter if it is conscious or not.
Sometimes, I’ll be sitting down, thinking about stuff, when suddenly my mind goes completely blank. Like, seriously, I’ll suddenly feel like I have no identity, like I don’t know any of my surroundings or any of the people who fill it, even if they’re friends or family members. I’ll feel detached from my body, and yet still connected. It’s like as if I could almost leave my body to look at my face. It’s cool and scary at the same time, and sometimes I need a full minute to work out who I am again. :S
I think it’s funny that you think you’ve hit the nail on the head with this article. Even though I respect your opinion, and what you have mentioned COULD be true, you have no evidence to prove so.
@Splitcoffee
I’ve had this a couple of times. It’s very VERY wierd. It randomly happens sometimes, although when i disrupted my sleeping pattern it seemed to happen. Maybe there is a scientific explanation for it.
But the brain and consiousness and every organ in your body is one unit. So it’s not like my brain controls me. My brain is a part of me, so I control myself. The only field where I am controlled by my brain is instincts and habits. That’s why I try to take control of my instincts by thinking before doing something.
Your are your high-level conciousness, middle-level decision making and low-level reflexes all at once. What you define as yourself is just the high-level functions of your mind. That’s not true. It is true that the lower the level the less influence we have, but consider this scenario:
1. You’re making escape plans from prison and decide which route to choose.
2. You’re on a date with someone and really feel like getting laid and decide whether to start getting touchy or not
3. You stare at an optical illusion like this one : http://z.about.com/d/puzzles/1/0/u/R/001.jpg and decide what is it that you see.
4. You’re scared shitless and decide whether to shit your pants or not.
5. You decide whether your heart will beat or not.
See, high-level consciousness shouldn’t decide about everything. The lower the level the more automated the task is to save you from thinking about heartbeat, heartbeat move food down intestines and start sweating. Social interactions here being in the middle, as you don’t really have to break down the relationship and emotions of a human being based on available data consciously – unless you’re autistic – you just feel it. Just as you can’t decide to be shy or not to a girl directly.
You have an influence on pretty much everything, just that your brain has evolved to handle the low and middle level tasks automatically, without the required intervention of your high-level thinking. High-level thinking is at the very top of the pyramid and it’s that which is responsible for planning, thinking, calculating (a task which the mind is totally unsuited for), creating and admiring.
The medium and low level thinking is what’s still animal in us, and the high-level thinking is a recent invention that allows us to do all that animals can’t. It would be wrong to say that you’re just that very cream of your thinking. You’re essentially still an animal and low and medium level thinking are a part of you as well.
Our decision is only made up by the rules of physics. We are able to initiate some impulses in our brain by our thoughts but this is only the result of the physics and the environment of our world. Each decision is the result of the previous physical happenings, thats why we can’t decide anything. Theoretically you could compute the life of each human being.
OK, there’s the theory of quantum mechanics that declares coincidence as a natural phenomenon and therefore it isn’t computable.
But I, like many other scientists, can’t (will not) understand that you can’t measure the speed or position of something. It seems to me like a human problem. Also Einstein said “God don’t play dice”
It is a bit frustrating to think about himself as a computable machine. The instincts of humans “tell” you everyday what you have to do and that you have either change something or you will “feel” worse. That makes you think that you can control something.
When I’m at home i will think about this topic again. Maybe i will add or correct something. I love that philosophical shit:)
Actually it’s funny that everyone thinks that they know the “truth”.
Are you guys all brain scientists or something?
And as just a side note:
The scientist themselves aren’t sure about whether the human being posseses a free will or not. It isn’t a scientific fact, that humans don’t posses a free will. There are scientist who assume this, there are others who don’t. There are arguments against a free will, but there are also some that enable the possibility of a free will.
So einstein said “god doesn’t play dice”, is this to be considered truth!?
Quantum physics shows that god indeed plays dice, “quantum philosophers” argument in this manner that it is PHYSICALLY possible that the free will exists. Quantum physics says that the world isn’t as deterministic as some of you would like to have it. On the other hand there is no scientist on earth that succeeded in creating a scientific system in which quantum physics AND general relativity can coexist. In fact there is no scientific theory that explains reality, may it quantum physics or general relativity. Oddly enough, the rules of general relativity don’t apply to quantum level physics and scientists think that alot that is happening in the quantum physics is happening because of coincidence! They think that there are no rules that they weren’t able to figure out, it’s just that it’s all happening because of coincidence. But in tha macro perspective – there are indeed rules, as general relativity shows, and general relativity is being overflowed with evidence that it is in fact very accurate in explaning macrocosmical phenomenona.
So as you see there is no anwer to the question whether humans have a free will or not, you will never be able to figure it out. There are alot of philosophers and scientists that think about the possibility of the free will, and neither of them was able to prove or disprove it. So don’t assume that just writing an article about the matter will solve anything.
This article is just about some random scientific assumptions shuffled with random theories the writer came up with.
I disagree that “admitting” that humans have no free will make anything easier. The only thing that assuming that humans have no free will will lead to is, that there is no morality, there is no good or bad, no right or wrong. If we are not the origins to our own descision, which meand we don’t really decide on things we do, it means that there is no morality and there shouldn’t be laws to punish us for things we can’t help but do. This is absurd.
As kant said, just the possibility of the free will enables morality, not the fact that the free will exists. It doesn’t matter whether we really decide or not. The fact we can think of several other scenarios makes us moral beings. Dismissing the possibility of the free will shall make our lives easier? I don’t think so.
its only theotical thought like MM did it with the tilet paper.
It’s my theory i couldn’t prove, but i have to make a decision, otherwise i die in case of water loss. There is something like a counciousness for me, but it’s rather a conciousness of all things surrounding me AND myself. The decision is made up by all these complex happenings in my life.
I’ve read about that “qualia” problem. Its a very hard discussion topic because it describes the barriers of human brain.
I hate dualities because they makes my feel “unsafe” in a specific way. But i also prey to god in the hope to break the barrier and let him decide.
Damn it’s not so easy MM, i think
“You aren’t here to make the choice, you’ve already made it. Now you’ve got to try to understand why you’ve made it” – Oracle, Matrix Reloaded
I think that might sum up MM’s post.
SpiltCoffee: Hah, yeah the Oracle is right. It’s like if you understand what I wrote, everything is really very simple. And it does make your life easier because you’re not here to change anything, but just to be aware of it… shit this is really hard to explain and topics like these are really easily misinterpreted, I see this from the comments.
archont: what I’m saying, is that the high-level thinking is also NOT YOU. That is also a part of your brain that you are only observing.
SpiltCoffee you’re right on with the blank mind state. You can easily see that you’re just a passenger here when you get into that state. It’s like you suddenly snap out of the mind/body and look at everything as it is. The only thing that remains is curiosity…
A neurological explanation for this might be that, assuming consciousness is a brain circuit, other circuitry which are responsible for thinking, knowing, feeling and everything that is going on in awareness shuts off sometimes. So you are left with just… awareness. Left only with immediate input from the eyes and other senses, but not filtered through any kind of knowledge you have.
Quantum physics really mess things up. It raises more questions than answers them. But maybe it needs to create that chaos in order to answer the questions. Like you have to mess up a rubik cube in order to solve it.
yv3: you say, you HAVE to make a decision, if not you’ll die. See, this comes from a place of fear. And this very fear is what is holding people to the concept that they control every single thing in their lives. This assumption creates only stress and pain, because there is no way to fullfil it.
Try this, I’ve done this many times. For the rest of your day, assume that you are not in control of this body. You’re also not in control of the thoughts, decisions, actions, nothing. If any decision comes up to your mind just label it as UNIMPORTANT and let it go. This will be hard, so treat it like a game. A game of skill.
So just observe yourself, but don’t identify with yourself, in other words don’t assume control. Assume that you are just an observer. Now if the assumption is correct, what will happen? Will you just sit until you die of starvation? Or will your day look perfectly normal, and just be a lot more peaceful?
“So just observe yourself, but don’t identify with yourself, in other words don’t assume control. Assume that you are just an observer. Now if the assumption is correct, what will happen? Will you just sit until you die of starvation? Or will your day look perfectly normal, and just be a lot more peaceful?”
I’ll send you a post card from the loony bin
Quantum physic is maybe wird but awsome at the same time like a electron that dissipir and appear somewhere else that’s cool
Alright I’m a bad explainer:
“Try this, I’ve done this many times. For the rest of your day, assume that you are not in control of this body. You’re also not in control of the thoughts, decisions, actions, nothing. If any decision comes up to your mind just label it as UNIMPORTANT and let it go. This will be hard, so treat it like a game. A game of skill.”
So MM, you’re telling me to pretend I have no control of myself tomorrow? How is it possible for me to do when its a conscious choice to do this exercise you’re telling me to do in the first place? If I did try this I would end up laying in bed not doing anything because I DECIDE to do the things I do.
Also, everyone does very different things. If what you say is true, this means that whatever “causes” people to make decisions is different in everyone. Since it is different its like a separate mind in everyone anyway so couldn’t you just treat it like your own mind?
Just comprehending doing that is pretty hard… :S
Do you mean you must not make a decision, or do you mean you, in your entirety, must not make a decision?
If we are the observer for the mind, do we still have the ability to change or influence our choices?
I think you guys don’t understand MM’s message: You have to think about to make a choice, but you must accept that this choice isn’t made by your free will. You can’t break the barrier of the observer view. That’s why it is sometimes better not to “decide” who you are and what YOU would do. Just let your brain do that shit. After that, decide how to take the toilet paper (from up or down 😉 )…..
Imagine this:
You pick up a book about the brain (and its actual working mechanizm).
You start to read. You read and read, and feel really excited about the human brain. You really like the book, becouse it gives you so many answers.
But. You feel tired of reading and you put down the book.
The rest of the day is spent with thinking about the book, the brain.
Its YOUR brain thinking about ITSELF.
Weird huh? The “thing” inside your skull is thinking about ITSELF.
Not about shopping, playing soldat, eating etc…
Just think about it.
Don’t make assumptions about the excercise I wrote, before even trying it. Don’t worry that you’ll end up in the looney bin, what will actually happen will surprise you. I once did this for an entire week, guess what happened? Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, I was just enjoying myself more, because I didn’t spend time thinking about bullshit.
Because I believe rational thinking leads to nowhere, I need to test everything empirically. So when I thought about this concept I just decided to try it, what do you have to lose? As I said, what will happen will really surprise you. It’s not that decisions won’t be made. In fact they will, and you’ll start to understand that it is not you that is making them, so just notice them and be OK with it, as if it’s not your problem.
“It’s not that decisions won’t be made. In fact they will, and you’ll start to understand that it is not you that is making them, so just notice them and be OK with it, as if it’s not your problem.”
How is that possible?
When there is a decision to be made my body won’t do a thing by itself until i decide what to do.
MM no offence, but do you have degree in psychology? Biology? Philosophy?
Your posts are reminding me of people comming up and telling kernel hackers to rewrite Linux kernel from C to C++.
You are making assumptions without having complete knowledge on the matter.
Believe me if process of thinking would be so easy to figure out, some specialists would figure it out long ago.
I have an advice for you: write about game development, that’s the thing you know alot about, and that’s the thing for which people come to read this blog.(at least i do 😉 )
“How is that possible?
When there is a decision to be made my body won’t do a thing by itself until i decide what to do.”
You are a slave of your instincts, your subconscious mind and the effects of all physical happenings that surround you. Each decision is made up by physics, not yourself. In conclusion you can’t decide anything.
Many other people and scientists share this opinion. But it can’t be proven so i can’t say that it is true.
Shuger: What if what I wrote here was completely intuitive and everyone “knew” this since they were born, but exactly because of the knowledge and so called scientific education they think otherwise. The brain had to get the idea from somewhere. Who told you that consciousness was in control of this body? I only ask questions, I don’t care what the scientific establishment thinks about it (in science everyone always knows everything for sure, because that is the only way they can get a noble prize, nobody should ever stop questioning the world).
If I had a PhD then would you think about what I wrote? And that is exactly your problem, you don’t think on your own. If you’re basing your thoughts on other peoples thoughts and opinions, you are relying just on the human knowledge. You are relying on the past, hence there is nothing new being created. Being intelligent is thinking on your own. That’s all I’m doing here, if this post sparked some interest and raised some questions, my job is done.
Mike if people followed your philisophies literally, we would all be living like instinctual jungle monkeys. Which is what we really are, but I don’t think poor people realizing their life is just an observation would help you. I think someone would figure “hey Ill rob this rich guy with a bunch of computers” because after all I am just following my instinct. Then you would be dead and that guy would die soon also, without thoughtless masses humanity would not have computers. If you disregard society and science life becomes a brutal jungle.
I agree with Shuger.
Michal:
Just because you think “of your own” (in fact you are mixing scientific data here and there to fit your theories, that isn’t thinking on your own), does that mean you are right? Your article has nothing to do with questioning the world, you are telling us how our brain works as if you know it.
“Because I believe rational thinking leads to nowhere, I need to test everything empirically.” This sentence is really weird. Do you mean rationalism with “rational thinking”? Because rationalism is considered to be not compatible with empirism, not “rational thinking”.
Empirical experiments are in fact a posteriori reasoning. Empirical data needs reasoning to be converted into evidence, this is called “a posteriori knowledge”. Knowledge derived from experience, that is. Derived. This is why it doesn’t make any sense to say “Because I believe rational thinking leads to nowhere, I need to test everything empirically.”
If you think that rational thinking is the same as rationalism, you are wrong.
“If you’re basing your thoughts on other peoples thoughts and opinions, you are relying just on the human knowledge.”
Do you think that “thinking on your own” can just be accomplished by having different thoughts than others? What if you agree with them, does that mean that you aren’t thinking on your own? “If I had a PhD then would you think about what I wrote? And that is exactly your problem, you don’t think on your own.” Is that really so? It would rather seem that you know what you are talking about, so it would encourage people thinking about it, too. But as you have no PhD, people are more sceptical about what you write, and admittedly it is rather easy to disagree with you, because your whole article is full of assumptions here and there and mixing up scientific data and only picking those that are favorable for your little theory.
Also, how is it possible to “think on your own”, if humans don’t posses a free will, as you are propagating? Thinking on your own is only possible with a free will, as is questioning the world. If you didn’t have a free will, everything you are councious about has the value of nothing.
This is because our brain then could dictate our counciousness what the “truth” is and what not. Thinking on your own would not be possible, logic would be nonexistant, as that what you are councious about logic is just what your brain feeds the counciousness. Do you really think that it is so easy as to write an article about human brains to explain its nature?
Think about it, on your own – if you can that is…
Its hard to be original when there have been a billion people to have already thought it. Can memory be passed down through our genes, or behavior? If you want to test it. Leave a new born baby by itself. It’s gonna die, but since normal people don’t do that. the baby is going to learn through its surrounding, constantly observing.
Also, it’s a lot easier to remember something with emotions so when you get a gut feeling, its your brain telling you of the result of an alternative method for your logical brain to go through.
Yes, Cranky has said it pretty well. If you don’t make your own decisions you cannot “think for yourself”. You are deciding to think in the first place.
But on a side note, when you said “If you ask a kid why did he do something he’ll just say “I don’t know”.
-Why did you pee your pants!? -I don’t know!”
I can explain this. It is usually because children do not think about consequences. They don’t expect to get a rash, be embarrassed, or get into trouble. They do these things out of ignorance or just not caring because they lack the experience to know what will happen when they do it.
“When you are considering two things what is actually happening is – you are observing the act of decision making made by your brain. It is not YOU that is making the decision.”
It IS me making the decision, because the brain IS a part of ME.
“When you have made a choice, what actually happened was you observed the act of choice made by some neural network inside your brain.”
Not really. See, here’s how the brain works: Low level functions (your heart beating, body temperature regulation, basically whatever is required to keep you alive in the clinical sense) are beyond your control. You cannot decrease your body temperature by thinking about it.
Higher level functions on the other hand are not hardwired. The brain has the ability to use it’s resources (emotion, logic, memory, recognition, reasoning etc.) to make any decision it sees fit.
So you are approaching the question of free will from the wrong angle. You already have free will, because the brain has the ability to reach decisions based on an internal battle of control centers. Whether the part of your brain that controls your self image is aware of these control centers or not has nothing to do with free will. You can have free will even without a self image.
You can of course set your mind to auto pilot. The brain will then use the path of least resistance.
Cranky: My point is, do you view the world as a set of facts or do you view the world as a set of unknowns? I can see you view the world as facts because you think I do the same. I do not claim you should all believe in what I wrote because it is fact (why are you sure I believe what I wrote myself?). What I am doing here will become more obvious in the future with my later posts, you’re certainly an intelligent person, so keep an open mind and know that I am writing this for pure effect only.
hey guys, better go to SF into the weapon balance section buahah!
I had a feeling of flaming while most of your guys had answerded MM posts in this topic. Thats why im getting angry. Most of MM ideas are old, well known thoughts of many philosophers. You just grab his ASCII-Letters and try to find some unlogical statements to disagree instead of finding some logical truth in it. So here is MY statement:
@Cranky:
By saying “Think on your own” MM probably don’t meant “decide” on your own, but rather trying to think about something without having prejudices and be aware of that everything could be wrong that was said or thought by him or someone else before. There isn’t something like “own” knowledge because every thought is build up by past information that other gave you or the physics. MM called that phenomenon “observing”. Mixing several theories together and tryining to find “plausible” consequences is the only thing we can do.
@mixus:
The child dies because a part of its “memory” with instructions of how to get food was deleted by the previous human generations (Nothing is for free). Therefore memory CAN be indirectly passed through genes.
@NooMoahk:
Thats intresting, i need to read about it. Maybe there isn’t any systematical difference between children and mature people in making decisions. Maybe it is only a problem of information amount.
@bigbossSNK:
What is ME? It is your brain that controls your body, there is nothing beside it (for me). I don’t “see” a cut between the brain parts. You can both control your temperature of your body by training and each thought of the “high level”-part also depends on the lower parts because you aren’t a PC. Each decision is “filtered” by the “lower” parts.
Don’t take it too much seriously guys. It is only my point of view. Maybe ill change my mind tomorrow after reading a good post from MM
..but probably not, i think
“What is ME? It is your brain that controls your body”
Your brain has internal structures that control whether you have an image of yourself or not. Your self image is only a subset of the brain’s many functions.
“I don’t “see” a cut between the brain parts”
Tough. Compartmentalization of the brain has been the basis of neuroscience for decades.
“You can control the temperature of your body by training”
Regulation of the body’s temperature is an autonomic system response and as such, a function of the brain, not a thought. The hypothalamus responds to internal thermal sensors and regulates the temperature accordingly. Physical exercise can lead to elevated body temperature, but it isn’t the thought of physical exercise that raises the temperature, it’s the action. And yes, of course there is a difference.
“Each decision is “filtered” by the “lower” parts”
Every magnetic resonance imaging ever performed on studies on decision making denies your claim.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071030184533.htm
Just face it, your brain has free will, even if that small part of the brain that gives you your self awareness isn’t working. Practically, a stroke or trauma patient with no self image can still make decisions for others.
The only requirement for free will is that the decision isn’t predetermined, or completely random. So long as there is some internal control mechanism that fits that bill, your existence as a self referencing entity is unimportant.
Michal:
I didn’t assume you were believing what you are writing, that is why I used the word “propagate”
As you should be able to conclude from my post also I think the world is a set of unknowns. I will always relativate everything, as there is no definite answer to everything (and this is my believe, no facts here). I also wrote earlier that the world isn’t black and white. In my first post on this article I wanted to show different perspectives to this matter, because your article seemed just too definite.
yv3:
“There isn’t something like “own” knowledge because every thought is build up by past information that other gave you or the physics.”
This is something that is being debated since the dawn of philosophy.
It is called “epistemology”.
Is knowledge acquired by pure reasoning without the need of experiences, or is knowledge derived from experience? Is there the possibility that there could be both? If we can’t even think on our own and our brain feeds our consciousness with filtered information, can we then even talk about knowledge?
I’m sorry if my posts may seemed like I tried to flame Michal (which I didn’t try, honestly). I’m interested in developing games, that is why I read development blogs, because they are interesting. But I’m also interested in philosophy, this is why I started posting here because I think there is no definite answer to everything. With my comments I tried to merely show that.
But when reading the article, I didn’t see any of these “old, well known thoughts of many philosophers”. Michal begins one paragraph with “There is no answer to it”, but in the same paragraph he gives an answer to it. Another paragraph begins with “the truth is”.
This is why I thought I should comment on this article.
But I like thinking of these matters, this is why I am posting comments in the first place.
Well, sometimes I can stop my “will-to-shit-of-my-almighty-brain”…explain that …phew.
Heh, it’s all philosophy, really, isn’t it?
Different ways of looking at the same thing.
Your brain works as it does, but you ARE you brain, in this world. Your brain is you.
So it is, in fact, you deciding that you want to “pick up the mouse”.
You’re observing it, and you decided to do it.
But do you have an impact on your decisions? Or are you just like a computer program – doing what the inner workings tell you to do?
Can you change your decision? And if you do, isn’t that just your brain making a decision to change your decision?
Endless cycle, really.
Comes down to what we are – what you consider to be YOU.
What i think : We DO have control on our lives, but we DON’T have control over the fact that we control our life.
One musn’t simply think ” my organism doesn’t give me the capacity of choosing so i will lay still and wait to see what’s gonna happen”
What’s gonna happen ? NOTHING, cuz YOU are the one living and YOU decide what you do, relatively to the power of your consciousness.
BUT STILL, you are not, in the END, responsible of what you do. Here’s why.
******
When we make a choice, the person that we are could not have made another choice, cuz :
The choice’s been made by who we are, in a certain place in time IN WHICH we COULDN’T have been with another mindset that would have chosen differently.
*****
SO i’m saying that in the end we’re not responsible of our choices, BUT WE STILL MAKE THOSE CHOICES.
We always do “our best” to choose things right, to me there’s no such thing as “not doing as best we can”.
Feeling that we actually take part in our life will make us take choices rather than leaving the decision to “life’s causality”, but we still do not have the control on “how much we feel we’re taking part in our life”
So in the end, we are innocent to what we ARE, but not to what we DO. And even if what we DO can change what we ARE, it is still what we ARE that determines what we will DO.
What a life..
What is YOU? what you consider…
“So just observe yourself, but don’t identify with yourself, in other words don’t assume control. Assume that you are just an observer. Now if the assumption is correct, what will happen? Will you just sit until you die of starvation? Or will your day look perfectly normal, and just be a lot more peaceful?”
You will act just like the character here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/396965
Your brain works as it does, but you ARE you brain, in this world. Your brain is you.
I wouldn’t say I’m the brain. It’s like saying I’m my clothes, just because I am attached to them. A good way of thinking about this is, what part of the brain would I have to cut out to stop being “myself”.
SonOfBeer: Interesting point. We are making decisions, but the decision we make is the only decision we could make at the time. So in fact it is not free will, but only in the context of time. Depending on how you view time, the now and moments, that is how the perception of free will changes in this point view. A mind twister, I like that :).
Funny thing about the unconscious decision-making is that the actual practical chance of deciding for one thing over something else is exactly equal (random). It’s why even smart(er) people tend to do stupid things at times.
Obviously there’s a fluctuation based on mainly intelligence in how we respond to these subconscious decisions and whether ultimately we ‘agree in these splitseconds of time’ to act the way the choice ‘dictates’.
I think it’s simply the result of something that used to be even more random at first, but became less and less random ever since we are able to consciously think about stuff, giving us more control about the final actions that are going to be made.
In nature there seems to be not much sense in consciously making choices when deciding it random is fine enough to survive (by far most choices we would consider ‘bad’ won’t instantly kill you to punish you; actually one of the reasons why some people think that people will become ‘dumb’ again.).
PHeMoX: Yeah it’s like playing on the stock market. Studies show that totally random buying decisions are better than most stock market players.
Michal says:
“I wouldn’t say I’m the brain. It’s like saying I’m my clothes, just because I am attached to them.”
Ah, so your belief is that you are an entity inhabiting your brain?
eg. your spirit or soul.
Michal says:
“A good way of thinking about this is, what part of the brain would I have to cut out to stop being “myself”.”
I’ve always wondered a similar thing… what part is the actual part that makes us conscious and self aware.
haha i think about stuff like this too, then decide that i dont know the answer and wait for some online person to tell me his ‘expert’ opinion XD.
[…] I mentioned in the comments in the post It’s a joke what is holding you to the idea that it is you that makes all decisions and does stuff is fear. […]
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breast enhancement procedures are getting more and more popular these days`;:
breast enhancements are expensive and can have some nasty side effects*;~
my girlfriend had her breast enhancement procedure done just last week and the results are awesome “
Here is the 2nd time concerning come across your blog within the last few few weeks. Appears like I should take note of it.
but can it be accomplished with an Internet Fax. Sure can, with most subscriptions you can increase your productivity 9 fold. By sending a single or multiple faxes to as many as 9 people at once. Do fax machines really use that much extra paper though. Studies have shown that they do.
Mighty useful. Make no mistake, I aprcpeiate it.