Posted: Mar 18, 2010 11:34 am
FBM wrote:Seems most likely to me that the sense of free will is closely related to the sense of agency that is produced in the parietal lobe (left, IIRC). I don't see any reason to think that it corresponds to anything in particular; it's just a sensation.
There's the work that Libet did that strongly suggests that decisions are made prior to conscious awareness of them. More recently, John-Dylan Haynes, et al, did some experiments that seem to show that decisions can happen unconsciously up to 10 seconds prior to conscious awareness of them. http://brainandlearning.blogspot.com/2008/04/do-we-have-freewill.html
That's interesting. The "power of the veto" is an intriguing concept. So the solution-seeking process would be unconsciouss (meaning that reliance on gut feeling or "intuition" is a perfectly reasonable strategy?), but "the conscious I" would still decide whether to act on the outcome or not. This would make free will very limited, yet still more than "just a sensation" as you suggest in the first paragraph. Thoughts?