Let’s remember the human neuronal action process (decision making) descended from all other species. So any brain process directing behavior has to be found in them as well. For example, why/how would nature evolve one process for a rats to get food and humans to engage in verbal-logical-conscious evaluation to get food?

The second aspect is way more interesting — it is the ability of a human brain to consciously override instinct. Think hunger strike, and stuff like that. This ability is (mostly) unique to humans, and this is what religions usually consider to be “free will”. The human brain definitely does have the ability to enforce conscious self-control, unlike most animal brains. I can feel an “urge” to eat something, but I also have a *choice* whether to proceed with or refrain from eating. Or, I can feel an “urge” to kill someone, but I also have the possibility to refrain myself from doing it.

The process of *choosing* is conceptually possible because of the above first property of the brain — it is not a deterministic system, and its behavior is not predetermined. There is always an element of randomness involved. On the other hand, the choices we all make in such situations are almost never random, but are typically a result of some decision making, pain/gain estimating, train of thoughts, etc.

So when someone is annoying me a lot, I may feel the “urge” to slap him in the face. And then I have the ability to follow that instinct, to resist it, or to flip a coin over the decision what to do, etc. If I choose to follow the instinct and do the slapping, I may be held accountable for that action, since I *could* have chosen to do otherwise, in a nonrandom fashion. An animal can not be held accountable for inflicting pain to someone, since the behavior of the animal is completely dominated by instinct, and consequently its “will” is not “free”. Despite having random unpredictable behavior, the animal brain is not powerful enough to contemplate morality and justice while determining the action, but just blindly follows the dictate of the instinct.

The instinct is an old product of evolution, which ensures self-preservation style of behavior. As all other animals, humans have it built-in. But unlike animals, a human brain is powerful enough to also grasp the concepts of right and wrong, moral and immoral, just and unjust, etc. In addition, it is powerful enough to override instinctive actions, based on a decision about these higher abstract concepts. That is what “freedom of will” is all about, really.

In fact, the individual, country, planet, solar system, galaxy and likely universe is completely inconsequential, infinitesimally tiny and meaningless. Completely meaningless.

Now, those paid by the word will reach back to the Middle Ages and old books, words and ideas to deny the facts — and Templeton will fund most of them. Denial always feels good – for the moment. But the facts remain and we are just uncovering more of them everyday.

The great victory of modern science, aside from throwing things really far or very tiny things real fast, (space probes and atom smashers) and a drop in infant mortality, which is really due to increased sanitation, is the gradual realization that we know effectively nothing. That is real progress.

We know very, very, very little. So there is a lot of potential upside! lol

Now telling someone that they, and you also, know pretty much nothing is a very bad sales tactic and social discourse is always all about selling something to others so we make junk up – and lie. Bench lab work/”science” is just another ideology called reductionism, extreme physics can tell us something about our brains making us put the trash out, Brittany Spears and pop culture is as determined evolutionarily as hair color, etc. – we make up and swap lots of silly stuff. We’re a hyper-social species and we like to chatter, on and on….

Lying and deception seems a fundamental core of social behavior, thank you Robert Trivers, but actually believing lies can be hazardous to our health. So apparently we need to be good at lying and good at detecting and rejecting lies. Hard to do.

This get together mainly seemed to involve telling lies/falsehoods to each other and pretending — aka any normal human social get together.

The go/no go changes in neurons that triggers and directs behavior occurs in 150 ms. There is literally no time for thought, self-talk, decision-making, choice, emotions or any other higher order concepts. This is also a continual feedback process.

Think of all the “decisions” and micro movements needed to type or drink a cup of coffee. There is no deciding.

If free will, philosophy-ideology-religion-magical thinking were at all valuable to life — why don’t other animals have it?

The main impetus for free will-magical thinking is to justify threatening to punish people who don’t act “morally” according to our definitions. Revenge seems to drive the interest in free will.

To actually learn something look up the Turing Consciousness conference. Listen to all those videos, get the papers and THEN let your beliefs jibe with those facts. Especially useful are the presentations by LeDoux and Cisek. Now philosophers and ideologues can continue to remain ignorant of the facts of brain research and deny them — but the facts remain.

Facts that made no appearance at this recent meeting and that seem to be purposefully excluded.

What you are saying is that we have free will because here are some examples of free will so how is there not free will. Well, you might think you have free will, but what you don’t have is an argument.