Marlon - May 18, 2014, 11:40a
If free will is a feeling are there findings which support this, like the presence of endorphins or something? There should be some neurological changes that occur during isolated decision making in a controlled environment. One problem is how to correlate "a unit of decision making" as it happens in our minds... with anything physiologically - to me this is the problem a priori. Can we define a choice that is novel made in circumstances which are completely unknown, i.e. made by the individual and not programmed by your friends, parents, or Nabisco, for example.

If we could locate a novel decision point for said individual, then we could look to see if there are any "feelings" that can be measured, altered, induced (like pleasure, love, pain or hate) when the individual is presented with unknowns. My hunch is most people don't even really know when they are presented with unknowns, or to the contrary, when they have encountered the same set of choices before, and this feeling of having made a decision happens irregardless of the facts.

I look at determinism from a non-physical approach. People 99% of the time are completely unaware of the social conditions and training which have pre-empted our feeling of decision making. So there most certainly is "a feeling" that we have make decisions even though we haven't, even if science never finds any of the physical bio-markers. But this doesn't mean in the absence of pre-determined situations that some .1% of decisions aren't self-determined, it just means people follow predictable, or at least, traceable social patterns, principles, ideologies, ethical behaviors, most of the time. And when and if there are anomalies, we as decision feeling receptors, may not even be aware of either the time we are pre-determined, or of the time that we just defied the entire rule system.

Ultimately I think this oblivious feeling of decision making is a good thing for survival, as automatons it means we can break new ground without being aware of the risks or rewards.


nikhil - May 20, 2014, 6:34a
Hi Marlon,

Good to hear from you. There is very little research on the mechanism of the feeling of free will. The most famous experiment on free will is one by Libet in the 80s. In this experiment, Libet measured an EEG signal that preceded a subject's decision to move their finger. This experiment suggested that brain events might precede the decision to act, at least in these narrow circumstances, and called into question the idea that we make decisions somehow independent of our brains. But there aren't any good studies of the molecular basis for the feeling of free will, as far as I know. It is generally difficult to measure molecular events in humans in real-time.

And like you point out, a lot of the decisions we think we're making independently are likely the result of social influences that we may have forgotten (e.g. advertising, cultural expectations).

Towards the end of your comment, you seem inclined to think that true free will might actually occur during some small fraction of the decisions that we make (e.g. 0.1%). But as I see it, determinism precludes even this. On what grounds do you think true free will can occur at all? Or are you simply referring to a more authentic feeling of free will only occurring a fraction of the time?


Ameya - Nov 26, 2014, 3:10a
If I didn't know mushrooms were edible, I'd have never eaten one, ever. How many people are actually aware of freedom (to even think)? It is hard to handle. It is hard to even imagine. From a collective point of view, free will is possibly being supressed un-(collective-concious)ly (if that even exists, Mr. Jung!) for survival of the human species. From my personal experience, realizing that I am actually free is quite disorienting: to the extent of losing the meaning of life. A bunch of people going through the same existential crisis together , convincing 'true' freedom to the masses and being successful about it would be enough to disrupt a country's economy, I feel.

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