I'm going to be in Amsterdam today and thus not following FFL, but I thought I'd use my free will :-) to throw out one last set of thoughts that your writings on the free will issue have triggered in me.
Probably because I just finished writing a short article about proprioception, in my mind many of these supposed neurological studies about whether we have free will link with that phenomenon in my mind. I think that the neuroscientists might be confusing the distinction between *conscious* decision-making and *unconscious* decision-making when trying to "prove" their contention that we have no free will. *Both* forms of decision-making are present at all times. It has been estimated that fewer than 1% of the mind-body processes that keep us alive ever register as conscious thoughts in the human mind. You don't have to consciously try to breathe, or to keep your heart beating. Similarly, in most cases you don't consciously have to try to keep your balance, because your proprioceptive system (in conjunction with the vestibular system and the visual system) enable you to do so without your conscious mind having to get involved. Specialized proprioceptor nerve cells transmit and receive signals to and from the cerebellum, reacting to changing stimuli (like "Am I walking on a slippery surface?") from the muscles, tendons, joints, and skin. The cerebellum processes the incoming information -- literally millions of such impulses per hour -- and calculates how the muscles should react to the changing stimuli, and with how much force to (for example) keep your balance. Interestingly, however, just as cognitive functions start to deteriorate with age, so does your proprioceptive system. This is the reason why the number one cause of hospital admissions in the elderly is falls. Their proprioceptive system starts to fail, and thus they can no longer keep their balance any more, and they fall and injure themselves. This is where the free will rap comes into the picture for me. The proprioceptive system doesn't *have* to fail as you age. Doctors have found that if they can urge the aging person to perform a couple of minutes of balancing exercises per day, they can both keep their balance from failing, and "bring it back" if it had already begun to fail. Just intentionally walking on uneven surfaces or balancing on a bongo board or a BOSU can drastically reduce their likelihood of falling and injuring themselves. In a way, this is a parallel to mental exercises like doing crossword puzzles, which can delay or reverse the failing of cognitive functioning we see in senility. The "free will" aspect of this I see is that the elderly person still has a choice. They could *not* do the simple exercises for a couple of minutes a day, and thus watch their sense of balance continue to erode, or they *could* do them, and watch it come back. And none of this requires any conscious decisions like "Oh, I am listing to the right so I should move my upper body to the left to retain balance." It just happens automatically, because the proprioceptive system is healthier. The "free will" involved in my opinion is whether the elderly person is willing to improve their lot by following the doctors' advice or not. If they are, their balance will improve. If they're not, it won't, and will continue to degrade. THAT is a conscious free will decision, on the basis of which literally millions of unconscious decisions relating to balance change. You may not find this interesting, but I did, so I just thought I'd throw it out. This is one of the reasons I'm not as impressed by neurological tests that show a "lag time" between a stimulus appearing and recognition of it happening in the conscious mind. Stimuli becoming *consciously* recognized is neurologically a very slow process *anyway*, and in many cases is simply not necessary for the body to react properly to the stimulus. So using "when the person becomes consciously aware that they have made a decision" as a "test" of free will seems to me to be fatally flawed from the outset. The example is (in a healthy person) placing your finger on a hot stove by accident. Your body jerks your finger away long before your mind has even consciously noticed that your finger is burning. That does NOT in my opinion mean that you don't have the ability to make conscious decisions about choices that HAVE reached your conscious mind. An example of the latter is doing balance exercises to improve one's failing sense of balance -- that is a conscious decision, and one's future very much depends on it. No fate or determinism involved. That's all. Now I'm off to have some breakfast and head into Amsterdam for the day. Jai and away, and thanks again for all the delightful conversation. If nothing else, our conversations should prove to a few people here that it is possible to disagree without the disagreement becoming a drama queen moment. :-) :-) :-)
