Is free will a fallacy? Science and philosophy explain.

Neuroscience is a newcomer to the field

of free will. What are exactly the kind

of questions that are worth asking? What

different kinds of experiments that can

say something about conscious and

unconscious decisions can help us be

more modest in what we realize we can

control and what we can't.

Generally, humans have a sense that they

control themselves and sometimes their

environment more than they do. You don't

try to control every contraction of

every muscle in your hand. And if you

did try to control that, well, good luck

to you because if you try to concentrate

exactly on how it is that you're

walking, it's even hard to walk. So,

there are certain places in the brain

that if you stimulate there, a person

begins to laugh. You ask them, "Wait,

why are you laughing?" And they say,

"Oh, I just remember this really funny

joke." The brain kind of puts together

some reasons for something that you did.

While we think that they're under full

conscious control, they are not.

>> One day with a group of fellow graduate

students, we got talking about what

happens when your arm goes asleep. Is it

the nerves? Do they get pinched? Is it

blood flow? What is it? And they thought

it was bizarre that a philosopher would

be interested in the physiological

questions of what was going on. They

thought I was abandoning philosophy. I

went off to the medical library and

tried to get myself educated on how the

nervous system works. It suddenly hit me

when I learned about neurons, the cells

of the brain that do the signaling, that

they could be the basis for an

evolutionary process in your brain,

which was learning. And the more I

learned, the more I thought this is the

key. Philosophy and science have to work

together. We get rid of all the magic

and we have a bottomup theory of meaning

and learning and truth and

consciousness.

The most satisfying way of engaging life

is not to be endlessly thinking about

it. It's not in understanding yourself

conceptually or in telling yourself some

story about your past or future that you

can most fully engage what it's like to

be you in the present.

It's a matter of training attention such

that you can really be here in the

present and break the spell of your your

ceaseless identification with thought.

It's possible to tap into a a a

wellspring of patience and equinimity uh

which really does transfigure your

moment to moment experience of the world

and meditation is a way of doing that

and just you know conceptually reframing

experience is a way of doing that. If we

understand the interplay between

conscious and unconscious, it might help

us realize what we can control and what

we can't. And then also maybe be a bit

more forgiving towards ourselves about

our decisions and our actions. Not

everything is within our control as much

as we would think or maybe even would

wish.