More like your subconscious is making decisions, talking with your mouth, moving your hands, etc... Then you have your consciousness (your "real" self). The subconscious makes him feel and think like he is in control so he (you, your "real" self) doesn't freak out.
But he (the subconscious guy) has the real power and control.
It would be interesting to see experiments that try to pry back the lid a bit on the line between conscious and the subconscious and the communication therein.
They must be out there.
But it's pretty obvious to me that consciousness would not exist if it was not useful.
One way it would be useful if unconcious mind made an automated decision and then ran it through conscious mind to ensure that it was a correct one.
While you can develop actions and skills to the point where you can do them without needing almost any conscious input, it just seems ridiculous to say there's no control from the conscious part of the mind and it's just an illusion...
If all it took to be a musician was conscious will, then I’d be able to play the guitar, instead of constantly procrastinating.
Most people do not really believe that the subconscious impacts our decisions. They may even theoretically say they do, but in practice their executive function believes it decided the decisions that were really done subconsciously.
Ironically, if you believe that you are making the decisions, you cannot override them, and then you are actually not making the decisions.
The key to free will is to really understand that you do not have it.
It just appeared to me that this question is something that interests you, so I wanted to point you to a direction that I have found helpful.
The general process, which appears to be common to various approaches, is to practice specific kind of meditation long enough that you start to see your automatic reactions to the sub-consciously made decisions to slow down, so you are in a way creating room for something before the immediate reaction, and then you can verify the truth in what I describe by yourself. So there is no need to believe what I say or nothing directly actionable that I can transmit through this medium that would be helpful to you.
Few books I have found interesting on the subject: Gallwey: Inner Game of Tennis, Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, Nicoll: Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
1. https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/conscjournal/vol8/iss8/1/
I've linked it below, but here's a snippet from it that talks about the ms delay:
Neural correlates of conscious perception occur 150–500 ms after impingement on our sense organs, apparently too late for causal efficacy in seemingly conscious perceptions and willful actions, often initiated or completed within 100 ms after sensory impingement. Velmans (1991, 2000) listed a number of examples: analysis of sensory inputs and their emotional content, phonological, and semantic analysis of heard speech and preparation of one's own spoken words and sentences, learning and formation of memories, and choice, planning and execution of voluntary acts. Consequently, the subjective feeling of conscious control of these behaviors is deemed illusory (Dennett, 1991; Wegner, 2002).
In speech, evoked potentials (EPs) indicating conscious word recognition occur about 400 ms after auditory input, however semantic meaning is appreciated (and response initiated) after only 200 ms. As Velmans points out, only two phonemes are heard by 200 ms, and an average of 87 words share their first two phonemes. Even when contextual effects are considered, semantic processing and initiation of response occur before conscious recognition (Van Petten et al., 1999).
Gray (2004) observes that in tennis “The speed of the ball after a serve is so great, and the distance over which it has to travel so short, that the player who receives the serve must strike it back before he has had time consciously to see the ball leave the server's racket. Conscious awareness comes too late to affect his stroke.” McCrone (1999): “[for] tennis players … facing a fast serve … even if awareness were actually instant, it would still not be fast enough ….” Nonetheless tennis players claim to see the ball consciously before they attempt to return it.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2012.0009...
An illusion doesn't trick anyone if there's noone to observe it.
An illusion is arguably a perception that, taken literally, entails a false conclusion, so I don't see a need to tie it to a subject.
Or in this particular case, perhaps the feeling of "deciding to press the button" is in fact the brain confirming that the muscles in the fingers have responded appropriately to the impulse provided, and sending out the appropriate messages?
Or 2 - the conscious reflective self is more like a saccade of attention moving between various systems operating according to its overall supervision.
I think two makes much more sense, since we don't observe the actions of others to be random or inconsistent (in ordinary circumstances), no matter how quickly they're responding. If George is on edge, and we throw a ball at George, George will do what he generally does - flinch, react with anger etc. George won't catch the ball perfectly in contrast with his emotional state. If Sue sees a famous criminal on the street, Sue will generally react as Sue would be expected to based on her priors - scream, run, freeze etc. Sue is unlikely to smile and raise her hand for a shake. Circumstances where we and others deviate from the 'reasonable' instantaneous response are rare, comical and associated with inattention, distraction or visceral symptoms (like illness). Therefore either we presuppose another personality operating at a preconscious level - or we are queuing classes of responses that make sense on some general level, even if they occur too fast for linguistic reflection or 'conscious' perception.
The language example in the comment above is a great reflection of this. We are able to carry out coherent, situationally appropriate conversation including symbolic reasoning. So I'm not sure what kind of conditioned mechanism or second personality is supposed to be responsible if consciousness is eliminated.
I am completely unfazed by the fact that what I intuitively thought the process might have been isn't the real process. The entire history of science from start to finish has been the unrelenting story of taking a closer look at something than we ever have before, and being surprised by what we found. The exceptions to that, such as predicting antimatter or the Higg's boson, are notable stories precisely because they are exceptions. Nevertheless, those surprises never negate our previous experiences. They reveal unexpected sources and surprising nuances, but the fact that we were surprised by where our higher-level concepts came from reveal that our previous understanding was in error, not the higher level concepts. Water has been wet for the whole of human experience, no matter whether it was its own element, or a essence, or a composition of atoms, or a pattern of fluctuations in quantum fields, or whatever the final Grand Unified Theory might declare it "really" is. Our understanding of water has been greatly enhanced by those advances, but it remains wet.
Nevertheless, my self is whatever is making decisions. The only way to break me off that definition would be to remove the entire "making decisions" part, which gets into its own philosophical thicket. Even in a fully deterministic universe I may still be "making decisions", despite popular belief to the contrary; one must simply be more careful about the definition of "making decisions" but meaningful definitions can still be produced.
There's a very long history of this sort of word chopping. Declaring this or that thing an "illusion" simply because it isn't exactly what we thought it was, or because it turns out not to be an atomic object of its own in the universe (hardly surprising since the only atomic things that seem to actually exist in this universe aren't very philosophically exciting, like quarks and electrons) is one very common tell, but it's not the only one. Consciousness gets a lot of stories like this where someone tries to manipulate words to "reveal" conscious experience is some sort of fake or something, but amazingly, not a single one of them has affected my own personal conscious experience. Per Descartes, as the existence of my own conscious experience is arguably the single thing I have the most confidence about, arguably the only thing I am 100% certain of, I find myself rather unimpressed with attempts to deny it. The fact that a certain subset of scientists are perturbed by their inability to wrap numbers around it is their problem, not mine. They are welcome to try to explain it; any attempts they make to explain it away can be discarded without further examination.
I think you’re missing the point. If you just define away “self” as whatever turns out to be making decisions, then sure, you can claim to never be surprised by anything. If we literally discovered that all your decisions are being made by a physical computer in a laboratory and instructions are sent to your body with radio waves, you could just say “well that’s what my ‘self’ is by definition, so this isn’t surprising at all.”
Of course, when I phrase it so baldly, you might be inclined to say "Well, of course", in which I would suggest, apparently you are agreeing with me. But this slight-of-hand occurs a lot, when you aren't so clear with the statements.
This is only a challenge to "anyone who places a lot of importance on that feeling of identity" if they placed all their importance on secondary opinions of what that identity is. Don't do that. Your identity should not be tied up in "I'm a conscious being because my neurons in my hemidimi cortex fires and directs my globocampus to plan how to start moving my finger", because then you have an identity crisis when it turns out "hemidimi" and "globocampus" are just made up concepts with no referents in reality. But there's a lot of people who will get very excited or try to get you very excited when it turns out they disprove the existence of hemidimis and globocampuses and declare this is all deep and profound and stuff. It's not. It was an error in the identity, that's all, but you're still a conscious being.
So, yes, I'm disagreeing. This isn't profound at all.
Or at least, it shouldn't be, if you aren't making fundamental category errors, if not outright reveling in fuzziness and uncertainty.
However, Skinner had some pretty specific ideas about what "behavior" meant and probably wouldn't have included stuff like playing a chess game against oneself in one's head.
I know an academic animal behaviorist who swears that his is the only predictive model of any use, and that includes human behavior.
I get that Skinner stopped being "cool" in the 70s when Chomsky et al appeared. But I have yet to see a Chomsky train a pigeon to play ping pong.
How do you think he was wrong? What model do you believe explains things better?
I won't spoil it too much because it's a fun short read, but it revolves around these little toys called "Predictors" which have a light that turns on exactly 1 second BEFORE you push the button. (no matter what you do to try to game it)
Ironically, the endangered species[1] the narrator belongs to has managed to outlive the giant human object discussed, but it’s still at high risk of being wiped out in the wild the next time a hurricane hits Puerto Rico.
The converse of it was quite interesting. If you force your body to behave a certain way then corresponding emotion will follow. Example; forcing your face to smile will lead to happy feeling. Goes to show mind-body connection is way stronger than what we imagine it to be.
In patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brain disconnected, two distinct consciousnesses become apparent. They perceive differently and have different capabilities. I think the theory was there in each of us are multiple consciousnesses and our experience of reality is the result of consensus among them.
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/the-science-studio/ent...
In the interview, he describes an experiment he did on himself. When he put a strong magnet on a certain spot on his head, his foot would turn outward. He was able to do this in a stable manner.
Then he repeated the experiment, but decided beforehand that he will turn his foot inward instead. When they did the experiment, his foot still turned outward. His assistant asked "what happened?" and Rodolfo Llinas said "I changed my mind". They repeated the experiment many times, and each time he changed his mind.
From this he concluded that he cannot differentiate when he decides to do something or when his body decides to do it, they both feel to him like he decided to do it.
Which arguably disproves mind-body dualism. "You" are your whole body, not a disconnected consciousness trapped in a physical form.
You are not a disconnected consciousness, but some body parts are more easily discarded than others, and I think the brain tops most (all?) of the others regarding survivability - and is irreplaceable regarding the "self".
Another interesting example is the octopus. If you cut a tentacle off from the octopus, the tentacle sometimes still continues to feed the head of the octopus. So the tentacle appears to have a "brain".
for example, your inner voice could simply have some lag from the processing loop where you first need to perceive your inner voice which is a process that takes time, just like perceiving anything else.
another example, your inner voice or however you experience your own consciousness could be a sort of separate process that just 1:1 outputs what your consciousness produces, but as a separate process just takes some time.
There's a delay between your signal to move a muscle, and the movement of the muscle, but that is a discrepancy our brains tend to edit out of the experience. It's more noticeable with the legs where the signal needs to move farther.
But if you tell your foot to curl its toes, there's like a quarter second delay that if you aren't paying very close attention to things feels like you're immediately moving the toes, even though that's clearly not it.
> “They reported that just as they were ‘about to’ push the button, but before they had actually decided to do so, the projector would advance the slide—and they would find themselves pressing the button with the worry that it was going to advance the slide twice!” The commonsense view of consciousness tells us that the conscious decision to act precedes and causes the action itself. How do we explain this strange phenomenon in which motor actions occur before the conscious decisions to take these actions? How could the effect precede the cause? What advanced the slides was actually a signal from the implanted electrodes.
https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/9900/Consci...
I don't get it. The effect (the advancing of the slide) doesn't precede the cause (you deciding to advance it). The thing here is only that they dispensed with the middle step of physically pushing the button.
It seems to me it's just a matter of definition. Clearly it was a conscious decision, since they are able to talk about it. They even say they were "just about to push the button". The only confusion is that they also claim they hadn't "decided" to do so. So clearly there is no issue with the "conscious" part, but perhaps some confusion about what constitutes a "decision"?
I mean, what does it mean to be "about to push", if not that they had infact decided to?
Our brains are already known to lie to themselves to make things appear synchronous that aren't actually synchronous. For example, syncing sound in a TV broadcast makes use of this. And I believe it's the same story with limb motion and tactile feedback. If you touch your finger, then it seems to feel like you touched it immediately despite this feeling requiring some time to work its way to your brain.
One interpretation of the experiment is that your unconscious brain decides to push the button and then tells your conscious brain to make up a story about how it was the one who made the decision.
Another interpretation of the experiment is that your conscious brain decides to push the button, but then your unconscious brain messes with your conscious brain's perception of time such that you'll believe that the button press is happening simultaneously to when you make the decision. The end result being that you "feel" like the slide changes happens before you decide to do it.
All "conscious" decisions necessarily have to be made by unconscious processes in the brain, because consciousness itself is a result of unconscious processes. Every conscious decision is thus made by unconscious processes. How could it be any other way?
However, people mistakenly take this experiment to mean that we don't actually have conscious control of our actions. That's incorrect. Think of conscious decision making like a two step algorithm, "conscious" decision making by unconscious processes + store decision in short-term memory = conscious awareness (this is one possible model, not necessarily the model). If the system in the experiment can read the output of the decision making step faster than it gets stored in our memory, then it will produce the results described.
This is incorrect. Libertarian Free Will, the type you seem to think humans have is an illusion and does not mesh with reality. No serious Neuroscientists or Philosophers of Mind believe it exists.
Note: this has nothing to with the political bent of Libertarianism.
Lots of free-will-stans here mad at reality.
However, this also isn't just taking out the middle step. If it were, the advance of the slider would feel like it happened instantaneously as soon as we are aware of making the choice consciously. This is showing that our conscious awareness of making a choice lags the choice actually being made at a level we are not conscious of.
Surely it equally supports the less controversial 'your brain signals [as measured] the body to do something [push the button]'? How does it support adding 'your body signals the brain' to the front of that (roughly)?
(1) Subjects are told to push a button to advance a slide projector carousel, but not told that the button is inert
(2) The carousel advances based on electrical signals measured by wires on the subjects' scalp.
(3) Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.
I read about this a long time ago in a since-deleted post on an old timey internet forum (everything2).
The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.