2015.40: Thinking is Not What You Think

 Posted on February 12, 2015 in Uncategorized

Do I have free will? If you believe that I do, on what evidence do you believe that? The only evidence that you might have is your perception that you have free will-anything outside of that can be easily faked. If you ask me to do something and I do it, you don't know whether that's out of free will or some compulsion. But it seems to you that you have free will, so you believe that you have free will, and because you believe that you have free will and assume that I am the same you believe also that I have free will.

It seems to me that I have free will too. So why do I believe that I don't have free will? Because it doesn't make sense to me that the human brain would be any less deterministic (which is not to say "predictable") than the rest of the universe. I could conceivably be wrong, but I count my perception that we have free will as an illusion. That just makes more sense to me.

Accepting that free will is an illusion is liberating. It opens up the possibility that our minds plays other big tricks on us, that they don't work the way they seem to in other ways either.

One of the experiments designed to try to answer the free-will question (a question that I think no experiment will ever really answer) was the Libet Experiment, the results of which Libet interpreted to mean that the impulse to voluntary action arises before a consciousness of the impulse-that by the time we "decide" to move a finger we have already initiated the action, and only think in retrospect that we have made a conscious decision.

In other words-and I don't think the Libet Experiment is conclusive on this point, but it is provocative-conscious decision making is an illusion. Each of us perceives himself or herself as consciously making decisions, and can justify those decisions if pressed with rational reasons. But we know that our "rational" thinking is raddled with cognitive biases that render its rationality suspect at best. We don't, of course, recognize these biases when they are affecting us-another illusion, and more support for the premise that conscious decision making is an illusion.

That conscious decision making is an illusion is the major premise of my model of juror decision making, and of my Grand Unified Theory of Trial.