Subject: Re: Free will?
There was a study a few years ago regarding decisions. Turns out the brain made the decision before the conscious mind was aware of it. The mind appeared to rationalize a completely automatic "decision" after the fact.

The Libet experiments with decisions made before we are consciously aware of them, explains nothing whatsoever about freedom of will. Yet it is a very interesting subject.

This subject of being less in control of our decision goes further also. Some other studies reveal that our decision making is not only more automatic than we think, but far worse - we often unconsciously retrospectively revise our own memory of past events, to make them more coherent, or meaningful, as viewed in the present. So not only are we not in control of our decisions (our conscious reflection can be a rationalistion rather than the decision process itself) but what we we thought we believed often isn't what we, in the past, actually even believed.

The following experiment elegantly demonstrates how we revise our memory. Imagine a number of subjects sleeping, each in the REM state of the sleep which is when dreaming is taking place, and then imagine that you suddenly wake each the subjects up with sudden loud crashing sound (without any interruption at all prior to the sudden sound). As they were dreaming, they can explain how the explosive sound interrupted their dream. You would expect them to explain the dream, at least for the few that can remember the dream, such that the crashing sound occurred suddenly and interrupted what they were dreaming about. What proceeded the crashing sound should generally have no relation to the sound itself. It turns out that a remarkable thing occurs - the subjects instead describe their dream as gradually leading up the crashing sound with a causal relation, and interconnected meaning. For example, one subject described driving a car home with friends after seeing a movie, and an attractive woman took the driver's attention, causing the driver to veer in the wrong direction slightly for quite a while, then shout and then move suddenly to the left, and then right, their swerving becoming more extreme, then the car moving into a spin, and a few seconds later, hitting a traffic light post with a crash. The dreams were recalled completely sincerely. Obviously the lead upto the crash was not possible (or if coincidentally timed, would be exceedingly rare), but rather, the subjects were frequently unconsciously backfilling their memory with a narrative that was consistent with experience. Importantly, they did not say that the dream was revised to fit the sound, but rather than this was the way in which they "remembered" their dream.

This subject above is fascinating, as we also recall past events (not dreams, but distant memory) in such a way to be more consistent with our present experience. I conducted a related experiment myself, interviewing 3 friends about how they were interpreting the news as it happened, and then repeated the questions 10 years later. It was not a deliberate experiment at first, but they happen to have written their original response, so I asked them how they recall interpreting the news 10 years ago, and they answered sincerely, but the response was different to their original response. How they remembered their past beliefs was different to the past beliefs themselves. In particular - each response was revised, unconsciously, to be more consistent with new information, ignoring the parts of their interpretation that turned out be incorrect. Similarly as the dream experiment, the news reading experiment supported that we have the capacity to unconsciously revise our memory (not only of dreams) of past experiences to have a more consistent support of the present narrative. There are a number of implications, but one of them is that we a excessively confident about the likelihood that our present views about anything are correct. Even when we are wrong about the future, we'll fool ourselves into thinking that we always knew it.

However this does not relate to the thread topic of free will. Some of confusion likely rests in our inability to comprehend (intuitively) the sheer complexity involved in our decision making. There is a lot of literature on why we don't have free will, and it is interesting to read. However the main epistemology to keep in your mind is that because we don't have an explanation for some phenomenon, it doesn't mean that the pheneomenon doesn't exist. For example, we knew for a long time that dogs can be bred with small changes, but we had no concept of DNA. We were certain that they could be bred to change by simply observation, even when we could not explain the underlying mechanics at the time. But we didn't say "This breeding cannot be taking place" - instead we conclude "The breeding seems to work, but we don't know why, for now". Or, for example, we know that we are able to produce thought, from simply observation of oberving the our speech. However we cannot yet explain the process of producing thoughts, but that doesn't lead us to conclude "Thought's can't be formed by us, maybe someone is forming the for us". We, rather, conclude "Thoughts obviously formed by ourselves, but we don't understand the process, for now". In the same manner we observe that are have moral accountability and can influence each other, make decisions based on our understanding of ourselves, our objectives, our will, and our temporary state of mind - even though are still in an extremely early stage of understanding them the process of forming thoughts.

(Actually, those that aruge against free will actually believe in free will, if they introspect; otherwise, knowing they couldn't change the opinon of the person they were talking to, they wouldn't bother to present an argument against it. If a philosopher believed everyone's behaviour was pre-determined strictly, thus all outcomes in their life unrelated to any extra energy used to influence them, they would immediately not bother to make an argument towards that person as they would believe that their outcome was determined, so no point in wasting energy.. So by trying to argue to a receipient that there is no free will, they are admitting in the process that the receipient has free will.)

- Manlobbi