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From: Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Making your mind up
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2024 20:51:09 +0200
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On 06/04/2024 10:18, Martin Harran wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Apr 2024 19:19:37 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
> 
>> On 05/04/2024 18:05, Martin Harran wrote:
>>> There was quite an interesting discussion a few weeks ago on Free Will
>>> vs Determinism but it died a death, at least in part due to the
>>> departure of some contributors to the Land Beyond GG. I'd like to take
>>> up some of the issues again if anyone is interested.
>>>
>>> One point made by Hemidactylus that didn't get developed any further
>>> was the way that we sometimes give a lot of time and effort into
>>> making a decision - he gave the example of buying a car. It's also
>>> common for someone to want to "sleep it on it" before making a
>>> decision where the decision is important but it is not clear what
>>> decision is best. If a decision is essentially predetermined then what
>>> is the point of that time and effort or sleeping on it?
>>>
>>> Tied in with that is our ability to change our minds after we have
>>> made a decision - has determinism some convoluted way of working that
>>> predetermines what way we will make a decision but also predetermins
>>> that we will change it?
>>>
>>> A reminder that in the Libet experiments so beloved of determinists,
>>> there was no precursor activity found in regard to making *major*
>>> decisions or changing one's mind so how does that fit in?
>>>
>>
>> I don't know if it's exactly the Libet experiments (I suspect so, from
>> context) but I thought Anil Seth's "Being You" had some good points
>> about free will. In terms of those experiments specifically he suggested
>> they weren't necessarily identifying a *decision* being made so much as
>> *the brain priming for action* - and even more specifically that the
>> brain might have cycles going where, whichever decision is made, it will
>> only *prompt action* at specific points in the cycle, and it's those
>> cycles the experiments were seeing.
> 
> I see that as a very plausible explanation. A variation I see is
> related to Libet (and others) finding that brain activity before
> conscious decision only applies to trivial decisions not major ones.
> I'm wondering if this is the equivalent of the autopilot mode we go
> into when driving, working our way through traffic and traffic lights
> without even being aware of what we are doing; if, however, something
> significant changes, say we spot a group of children up ahead playing
> with a ball, we immediately switch into fully alert mode. Perhaps in a
> similar sort of way, trivial decisions are made on some sort of
> autopilot whereas important decisions put us into a greater state of
> alertness.


My intuition would be that the Libet experiments (I looked them up and 
I'm pretty sure they're indeed what Anil Seth was talking about in his 
book) don't represent the same thing as this "autopilot" mode, depending 
on how widely you're thinking of it at least. By that I mean that 
decision-making is a complex system with many unconscious components 
(mostly unconscious components really, and I don't mean that in a "we're 
machines" way but a "elephant & the rider metaphor" way), and I don't 
know if "autopilot mode" was meant to mean "any unconscious component" 
or "the unconscious components involved in that phenomenon specifically" 
(which is how I usually use the expression).


If it's the second meaning of the word then I don't think it's the same 
phenomenon because that one I think involves complex strings of actions 
being done unconsciously because our conscious attention is focused on 
other things. They're trivial decisions because presumably important 
decisions *would* require conscious focus, but the main thing that makes 
them unconscious is that lack of focus. The very same actions could also 
be done consciously (like Weingarten describes in his famous article).


The Libet experiments on the other hand don't involve that at all, as 
far as I can tell the conscious attention of the participants is very 
much focused on the action being studied.


>>
>> In terms of making your mind up I think it's even more obvious that
>> actions can't be completely involuntary when you consider not just
>> "sleeping on it" (where you could figure you end up making the decision
>> you would have made anyway, which is definitely a thing that happens)
>> but *gathering information*. While there are some decisions we hash out
>> at length while finally making a decision one could argue we were going
>> to make the whole time, there are also some where that's definitely not
>> the case because the final decision depends on information we didn't
>> have at the beginning of the process.
>