Do You Really Have Free Will?

Do human beings have free will? Can people actually make decisions of their own accord, or are they just robots mindlessly responding to the brain and the world around them? Most people assume they can make independent choices, but you might be surprised to learn that the dominant position in modern cognitive science is that there is no free will.

There are so many philosophical issues with the idea of free will that one could spend many hours going through them all. I will just note a few in this post. I will refer to two fascinating experiments which are important to the discussion.

The Libet experiment

The most famous experiment regarding human free will was conducted by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. Libet and his team measured changes in the brain and the timing of ‘choices’.

Libet investigated what happened when people made ‘conscious’ choices. He measured the electrical activity of subjects’ brains by via electroencephalograph (EEG), with small electrodes placed on the surface of the head. The subjects were asked to flex one of their fingers or push a button whenever they felt like doing so. They also had to state when they ‘decided’ to do so. The surprising finding was that the conscious decision occurred about 200 milliseconds before the finger movement. But most crucially, electrical changes began in the brain about 300 milliseconds before any conscious decision was made. Many scientists use this experiment - or similar ones - to conclude that there is no free will because the brain changes first and then conscious awareness comes about a third of a second later. Therefore, it is concluded, the brain causes the ‘decision’, not free will.

A little philosophy

Of course the conclusion that there is no free will leads to a whole heap of paradoxes and problems.

Even scientists who believe they have no free continue to act as if they do. Sheldrake makes this point, too. For example, they continue to hold meetings to decide how to attract funding for their desired research projects. If they truly believed that everyone’s brains are making all these choices, and that those handing out the funding have no free will, why bother having the meetings in the first place?

The same scientists will continue to write papers, book, blog posts, magazine articles with the implicit assumption that they are choosing to do this – and that they can influence the opinions of others. ‘They’ – or at least their brains - will sometimes even get annoyed with the brains of people who have the audacity to claim that they have free will. But why have the debate in the first place, or get annoyed about it if nobody has any choice in proceedings, and their opinions have been decided by their brains?

There is also the obvious paradox that we are supposed to believe that we have no power to change our thinking or actions, yet our entire society spends millions of dollars attempting to manipulate perception and the choices that follow from it. Advertisers, government policy makers, educational administrators, CEOs and even torturers are all trying to change the way people think or feel. As a long time school teacher who has taught students of all ages from pre-school to university, I know that even small children can be masters of manipulating adults, using charm to ‘put it over’ them.

So we are expected to believe that we can readily influence other people’s choices, but not our own? How does a creature with no free will come to the ‘decision’ to try to change the way someone else thinks?

We all make regular choices with the implicit objective of influencing our own behaviour and feelings. Why would you bother to decorate your house in aesthetically pleasing colours if you cannot influence the way that your environment affects you? You might as well just slump in the corner and vegetate. But even that would require a decision.

We can also influence our mental structures, and even autonomic processes like heart rate. Yogis can even slow down their respiratory systems to minimal activity. A prime function of meditation is for the student to gain better control of mental processes, and develop the right relationship with the body and the mind. This is clear evidence that conscious choice can influence the body and brain. This should not be possible if there is no free will. One could argue that it is the brain that is telling itself to relax and breathe deeply. But again, we get into semantics. It seems that the idea of ‘brain’ has simply replaced ‘mind, with the same implicit meaning.

Finally, no matter how many correlations one finds between action and mental activity, in the end the science is merely descriptive.

There isn’t any way around it. We make choices all the time, even if we don’t believe that we are.

Sheldrake and time

In his wonderful book The Science Delusion, biologist Rupert Sheldrake discusses this issue of free will and comes to the same conclusion that I do - namely that even though the choices we make are subject to a whole range of factors that are wholly or partly out of immediate awareness, we are perfectly capable of making conscious choices. There is no contradiction.

Interestingly, even Benjamin Libet believed that there is a place for free will, stating that in the 200 milliseconds between conscious awareness of a ‘choice’ and the action taken, the individual can actually change the decision. Sheldrake writes:

This conscious decision depended on what Libet called a ‘conscious mental field’ (CMF), which emerged from brain activities but was not itself physically determined by them. The CMF acted on the activities of the brain, perhaps by influencing otherwise random or indeterminate events in the nerve cells. This field also helped integrate the activities of different parts of the brain and had the property of ‘referring back’ subjective experiences, and thus worked backwards in time. The CMF would unify the experience generated by the many neural units. It would also be able to affect certain neural activities and form a basis for conscious will. The CMF would be a new ‘natural’ field. It would be a non-physical field, in the sense that it could not be directly observed or measured by any external physical means. That attribute is, of course, the well-known feature of conscious subjective experience, which is only accessible to the individual having that experience.

The most interesting thing for me about Sheldrake’s take on these experiments is that he makes the same point I often have, and that is that consciousness is not localised, and that time is not linear. Logic is only as sound as the solidity of the premises which underpin it. Science is only as good as the presuppositions which scientists take with them as they go about their work.

Time can work backwards as well as forwards. While this may seem even more incredible than the idea that no free will exists, it is perfectly consistent with my own mental experience, as well as reports of human experience going back as far as human beings have recorded history.

The idea that the brain records stimuli before they happen has evidential support from scientific experiments. In these experiments subjects are tested for physical and neurological responses, after being exposed to randomly presented stimuli.

One such experiment was carried out in the 1990s by parapsychologist Dean Radin and his colleagues. Photographs were randomly shown to people. Some of the photos were of a peaceful or neutral nature, while others had deliberately shocking or arousing content such as corpses being autopsied or sexual content. Radin’s team measured changes in the skin resistance of the subjects with electrodes attached to fingers. People’s emotional state are reflected in the electrodermal activity of the sweat glands. Significantly, in Radin’s experiments, changes were detected three or four seconds before the emotional images were shown.

Sheldrake argues that mental causation, unlike physical causation, works from the future towards the past, and points out that ”the materialist interpretation of Libet’s finding assumes that causation works in only one direction, from the past towards the future.” He notes that if mental causation works in the opposite direction, then “the conscious choice could trigger the readiness potential.”

It is clear to me that human beings have free will. It is one of the defining characteristics of our species at this time in human consciousness development. Human intention is like a attractor in physics, pulling information into it from pasts and futures. For those who wish to live a mindful life, the key is to bring awareness to the moment of the decision, and to then choose wisely and joyfully.

Marcus

Reference

Sheldrake, Rupert (2012-01-05). The Science Delusion. Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.

The Extended Mind Video

Does the mind extend beyond the brain? For years I have been stating precisely this. Here is a great little video (15 minutes) on this very topic, featuring Dean Radin, Robert Jahn (Princeton Uni), Garrett Moddel and others. It comes at the problem from a science perspective, and Part 1 focuses upon the PEAR experimental data from Princeton. This lab has produced small but significant mind/matter interaction data (telekinesis) for many years. 

The video is produced by the people involved with the Global Consciousness Project, and features some discussion on the effects of mass consciousness events like the 911 incident.

Marcus

Love Ideas

Sorry for the lack of posts of late - I've been a bit busy! I have recently returned to beautiful Discovery Bay on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. I am also back working my full-time job as a secondary school teacher, even while polishing up these futures projects.

• I'm working with my editor on getting my book Sage of Synchronicity ready for its release with Inner Traditions next year.
• I'm finalising the booklet Urban Enlightenment, and the programme associated with it. That programme will be run in Hong Kong, over four weeks in November. I'm quite excited by that one, as it is a potentially life-changing event for participants.
• I am also working on developing a 'learning how to learn' programme for high school students in Hong Kong. Hong Kong kids are smart, but don't always have exposure to a wide array of learning skills. They can get caught up in the rote-style of learning that tends to dominate in schools, and this can have a disastrous effect of their developing the life-long learning habit that is so essential in the modern age.
• There is at least one more programme I'm developing. Recently HK tycoon Li Ka Shing decided he didn't need HK$300 million anymore, and has developed a great way to get rid of it - the "love ideas/love Hong Kong" campaign - www.loveideas.hk . I'm going to be submitting at least one programme, and I hope to be working with a few other wonderful people here in HK.

So you may not see so many long posts here in the immediate future, with my being so busy. However, I do promise to keep posting on a range of topics, although sometimes there may be only a little commentary, and a link to something worth noting.

Here's something that I found to be short, sweet, and fascinating. It's an easy-to-understand entry on Dean Radin's blog, and explains how one of the most famous experiments in parapsychology is undertaken. It's called the Ganzfeld, and involves a person being blindfolded and fed 'white noise'. Then the person has to try to guess what someone else is trying to send him/her via telepathy, from another location. It's worth checking out, for those who have always wanted to know how they do it - and perhaps why these kinds of experiments are criticised by skeptics. See if you can pick the correct card from the description!

http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2010/09/ganzfeld-telepathy-example.html

Cheers,

Marcus

Is the Future is Calling You?

“The state of empirical psi research continues to advance while the state of skepticism continues to stagnate. It doesn't take precognition to guess who will eventually win that type of debate. How long ‘eventually’ will be depends on how many people are actively engaged in research.”

Dean Radin (reference)

Last Saturday evening I was walking past a bar in the Central district of Hong Kong, when I noted a game of rugby on the flat screen TV inside. Now I’m a bit of a rugby fan, being a former player, and since the game was between Australia and the New Zealand All Blacks, I ducked inside to check it out. To my great delight I saw that the game was already in the second half and that Australia was leading 22-9, with just 30 minutes to go. As an Aussie, this was too good to miss, so I sat down and ordered a glass of red wine as a pre-celebration drink for the impending great Aussie victory over the mighty All-blacks. A few minutes of viewing allowed me to see that Australia was dominating the game, and the All-blacks were being run all over the park. The NZ team looked like a complete rabble, like a ship without a captain. On the other hand Australia looked very sharp.  They looked certain winners, for to lose it would require a roughshod NZ team, who had been completely outplayed, to score two converted tries in the last 15 minutes.

At that point I did what I often do when watching sporting events. I measured the energy on the outcome using the Quick Check. I have found that this divination method is extremely reliable for picking the outcomes of sporting events (although if I am ‘following’ one of the teams, I sometimes get over-excited and get the reading wrong). I didn’t get the reading I expected or wanted. There was no ‘energy’ on Australia winning the game.

Allow me to backtrack a little.

The first time I realised that sporting events are actually determined before the opening whistle is even blown, was when I had a dream during the 1991 rugby world cup. One night during that time I had a dream where I saw the English captain Will Cahling being interviewed and thanking his supporters for the tremendous victory they’d had. The next day I learned that England were playing Australia, so I stayed up to watch the match with my flatmate. Even though at that time I had not really developed none of my ability in Integrated Intelligence, I felt strongly that the dream was a precognition. As the match progressed, Australia took the lead, and stayed there. In the final minute of the game, Australia was leading by one or two points, and they had the ball in hand (which means England would not be able to score). I told my flatmate that Australia would lose the ball and England would win. Well, I was only half right. An Australian player decided to kick the ball, and England took possession. It was literally the final second of the game, and he was on the half way line, way out near the sideline. I watched bemused as he ran backwards (away from Australia’s tryline, where he was supposed to be running!), suddenly pivoted, turned round, dropped the ball onto his foot. The dropkick straight sailed over the goal posts from an impossible position. Never looked like missing.

The full-time siren sounded. England had won. There followed a few ads, then Will Cahling appeared and thanked the English supporters, just as I'd 'seen' the night before. (As an aside, my flatmate was a die-hard science graduate and skeptic, and refused to accept that my prediction had been anything more than good luck, after I told him how I ‘knew’. I was a skeptic too at that time – but an open-minded one).

Another precognitive vision of a sporting event which I had was symbolic (in fact many precognitive dreams occur in symbolic form). It occurred just before the 2004 cricket world cup. Australia went into that competition as the reigning champions, but had lost a lot of games, including a warm-up game against a low-ranked team, and many people wrote them off. However, I had a dream which convinced me they were going to ‘wipe the floor’ in that competition. As I was half asleep thinking about the competition one night, a vision came to me of a giant wild boar, running towards the tryline on a rugby field. The image was of an unstoppable force (imagine being a rugby player and trying to tackle a great boar charging towards you!). I just knew that the boar represented the energy of the Australian team, and that it symbolised their path through the upcoming competition. The vision was true. Australia smashed all other nations and went through the competition undefeated.

I have also had many premonitions involving my participation in sports events. One Saturday morning about 15 years ago, when I was to play a game of rugby, I awoke and heard the song “You go and save the best till last” being blasted into my head (I often hear these songs to this day).  I felt strongly that it was to do with the game I was going to play. When I got to the playing field I was very disappointed to find I had been put on the reserves bench. I was a bit pissed off to tell you the truth, but remembering the song I had heard that morning, I decided to be patient and kept my mouth shut. I waited, and waited... Half time came and went, and the game was drawing to a close. Then with just two minutes left the coach threw me onto the field on the wing (which is where I played anyway). I had barely run on, when our half back made a short break in our own half. Bypassing my two inside centres, he sent a long cutout pass to me, perfectly timed, such that I was into open space. I ran the thirty metres or so to the line without a hand placed on me, and scored. There was no time for a restart, and the game was over. The best had indeed come at the last moment.

After I was taught the Quick Check, I became able to predict the outcome of most games before they even began. Or even during games. I remember that during the 2005 soccer world cup, I rang my wife, and she said she couldn’t talk because she was watching a game, and they were having a quick penalty shoot-out at the end. I did a Quick Check and told her Korea would win the shoot-out, and that she needn’t bother watching. I was right.

So, last Saturday as I watched the Australia/New Zealand game, I was somewhat shocked to ‘read’ that there was no energy on Australia winning the game, despite their dominant position with the minutes counting down. Sure enough though, New Zealand scored two late converted tries, and completely against the run of the game, ‘got out of jail’. They won by one point, 23-22.

I now know that most, if not all sporting events are determined before a ball is kicked, hit or touched down.

Even the specifics of individual plays are largely determined. One morning when I was to play a game of cricket, I awoke, and the number ‘26’ appeared in my mind’s eye. 

Entanglement: The Next Big Thing?

Just a few months ago on his blog, parapsychologist Dean Radin boldly claimed that the idea of entanglement will soon become taken for granted in biology. Entanglement is the idea that all things are connected at a deep level, and that this connectivity transcends the currently understood limits of space and time, as held in mainstream science. In the post, titled “Quantum biology now. Quantum psychology next?”, Radin suggests that psychology will quickly follow suit, taking on entanglement as a founding principle of mind.

 Dean Radin

Radin has long held the belief that entanglement will eventually be embraced in science, but his confidence received a boost at the beginning of the year because of a paper published in the prestigious science journal, Nature by Elisabetta Collini and colleagues.