This is not intended as a discussion of free will, but it might be difficult to avoid that issue. I encountered an article relating to decision making in the last five years. My time sense is bad: I cannot pin the time down any closer than 2-5 years ago. Perhaps what I read was a rehash of research from more than 5 years ago, but I do not think so.. Neuro-Scientists believe that they can identify parts of the brain associated with various functions: Conscious awareness, origin of motor nerves signals, et cetera. The article claimed that they ran the following types of experiment. Subjects were asked to perform some simple task like pushing a button when they saw a blue light. If they saw a different color, they were to do nothing or perhaps push a different button. The actual details are not important. Some brain monitoring devices determined when the motor signals were dispatched to the fingers & when the conscious awareness level was activated. It was claimed that the experiment showed (proved?) that each decision was made below the level of conscious awareness & the conscious awareness level was “later informed” of the decision. I think this claim is valid.. The subjects claimed to have made the decision at the conscious level & believed that the fingers were directed to act by the conscious level. I think the experimenters claimed that they had shown that all (or at least more complex decisions were similarly made at a level below conscious awareness. I have doubts about this claim, but do not dispute it with true conviction. The above is not likely to be an accurate description of the research, but I am pretty sure it conveys the general idea. At the time, I was much more interested in other subject matter, but now find the issue very interesting. First of all, I like to think of the levels below conscious awareness as one or more junior executives given goals and general instructions by the conscious level (The boss or chief executive). For example: I remember learning to drive a car. At first I seemed to be directing all the activities & it was not easy. Push the accelerator, turn the wheel, look at the traffic light, look at the car along side of me, look at the car in front of me, signal a left turn, et cetera. I could not carry on a conversation with my instructor (father) or pay attention to anything not related to driving the car. All the activity was soon taken over by a junior executive. I could enjoy glances at scenery, carry on a conversation, et cetera while driving. Later in life when I commuted to work, I often arrived at my destination with no memory of the trip. Some junior exective drove the car. I was thinking about my job, my plans for the weekend, some radio station, whatever. On a day when something unusual happened, I seemed to get a message like: “Hey boss, do you think that car is going to stop at the stop sign or run it?" At such times I believed I was directing action from the conscious awareness level. Now I wonder. Are the neuro-scientists correct or are they unjustified in extrapolating the results beyond the level of the very simple experiments actually performed? It seems to me that my junior executive could be quickly programmed to take over such simple tasks, invalidating the experimenters’ conclusions applying their data to more complex tasks. I would be interested in comments relating to the above, including disagreement (if any) with my description/interpretation of the article (assuming that some one here read the article or a similar one).
My internal word processor/ verbal commentary thought machine seems to be rather late in the process of knowing and acting or reacting. Where my consciousness focuses is not the same thing as the sources of my ideas feelings and actions. So I wondered what the point is of having my verbal processor running when there is nobody around to talk to and what is the point of having consciousness at all. Sometimes I forget where I intended to go and just drive the route I usually drive until my consciousness notices that I am not following the plan for that day. It seems that the part of me that I would call my "will" can not control the body in the moment without consciousness connecting that piece of intent to the rest of the system. Intent is about manipulating the future. No animal with the possible exception of dolphins is as involved with manipulating futures as humans are. We run complex simulations in our consciousness. I think the Scientists are a little off. The religion of science wants everything to be physical and testable and is impatient for science to explain everything. The science of science does not get impatient and excepts the unknowns as unknowns. Sometimes scientists can't see the distinction between the religion of science and the science of science. The religion of science insists that matter makes consciousness. The science of science takes no position on this and the mystics say matter is made of consciousness. The mystics have earned some credibility with me and while they are often faulty I will not dismiss their opinions lightly. The religion of science has not actually supported their thesis that consciousness is material. Effecting the object of consciousness is not the same thing as measuring consciousness. There are a number of separate things that we tend to call consciousness. They really each should have separate names. One group that is sometimes called consciousness is the total vastness of types of sensations, feelings, perceptions and Ideas and hallucinations that we are capable of witnessing. Related to that are our tendencies towards what we choose to witness. Related to that is what we are witnessing now. Another thing that gets called consciousness is our laying down of a time sequenced memory track. We say we were unconscious while we slept because we had no memory of what happened while we slept. But our system is running. What wakes us up when there is a strange sound while we are sleeping? Sometimes when I have a dream and we say to ourselves wow thats a weird dream, I want to tell so and so who were in the dream about the dream when I wake up and then I go back to sleep and in the morning I only remember my thought that the dream was weird and my intention to tell about the dream but I forgot the dream. I don't believe that the witnessing stops during sleep. Dreams are witnessed. Body relaxation is witnessed. Sounds in the night are witnessed. What stops during sleep is the creation of memories. I have a hunch that some part of this laying down time sequenced memories system might be what the neuro-scientists are measuring when they think they are measuring consciousness. An interesting thing about memories is that you can't store them very well if you have no emotions connected to them. At minimum you need a slight be of interest to store a memory. It will take a lot of repetition to remember for longer than a day something that you have no interest in and have no desire to remember. Another type of consciousness is the witnessing itself. Not the object, not the memory of the object, not the senses that brought you the sensation of the object, not the part of mind that interpreted the object, not the ideas and emotions associated with the object but the process of beholding all physical and mental objects of consciousness. Then there is whatever is creating and directing the witnessing and what is limiting the witnessing. Then perhaps there is the blank screen of undirected alertness/witnessing completely devoid of relationship to objects. Then the mystics talk of an undivided ocean of consciousness and claim that the individual consciousnesses are just illusions and than on a deeper level (undivided by perspectives I think) all consciousness is one and all material is an illusionary dance of consciousness pretending to be divided. On an animal level modeling the universe is what the consciousness is for. Consciousness is for working with potential realities not for working with the here and now physical reality. Will also is for making potential realities become future here now physical realities. Consciousnesses connectedness with pretending makes sense when you realize that pretending is what consciousness is for. So you are lost in thought driving your car and something pokes into your field of consciousness and asks your consciousness "is that car going to run the stop sign?". What is your consciousness supposed to do? 1 run simulations fast. 2 bring whatever information intuition has to offer into the system. 3 Chose the best hopefully cautious simulation and drive as if that we be reality until the alarming car makes it's intentions clearer. Had there been a real emergency without the time to run simulations you simply would have slammed on the brakes or swerved the car before the conscious mind could perceive what was happening. In the pushing the button experiment the conscious mind and will needs to set up the program/ write a bit of temporary code to follow the commands because the conscious mind may work to slow to follow the commands. While temporary programmed code is simple and inaccurate compared to complex deeply ingrained programmed code like how to walk and how to drive it is still faster than what the conscious mind can do. There is some indication from mystics that consciousness separated from personal will and the constrictions of consistency with old interpretations might not have the slow response time that the conscious mind system as I know it has. Intuition is an interesting thing. Intuition requires an relaxed alertness to function. To much relaxation and the mind wanders all over. Not enough relaxation and the system clamps up and can't be creative and can't intuit answers to unknown problems. Unrelaxed minds or rigid minds tend to only be able to give back previously learned answers rather than look at something and respond to it intuitively with unlearned understanding that came from some unknown source. In science we break big problems into a bunch of little problems which we alertly but relaxedly look at until the necessary intuition miraculously happens. If we tried to solve the problem the problem all at once without breaking it into smaller pieces we either would not be able to focus or we would be too tense to intuit. Is anything real if we can't speak about it? We might understand something but if we can't communicate it that understanding dies with us. The language processor is both for communicating to others and for converting ideas and perceptions into short hand. I think the ideas and perceptions are processed unconsciously and then fed into the verbal processor. If we like or dislike the internal verbalized idea or we think it is note worthy it becomes something in our memory. If this Idea comes up repeatedly and we keep thinking it is noteworthy then we will remember it for a very long time and it will come up more frequently triggered by any thought vaguely related to it. I suspect that just as a page of text requires much less digital memory than a bitmap that verbal memories require less biological resources than more vivid nonverbal memories do. Verbal memories seem to usually be run through the consciousness and perhaps have a little simultaneous blast of dopamine released in the brain as they are in the consciousness in order to set themselves up to reemerge later as recurring ideas.
Those were some well thought out posts. I might only add that I recall hearing about this study and the commentator claiming that they pretty much disproved the idea of free will. But, as your above discussions note, the fact that your conscious mind is not always in control does not mean there is no free will any more than the fact that a CEO delegates many of his tasks means that he's not in charge.
