Free will might be an illusion created by our brain, scientists might
have proved. Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as
they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just
convinces itself that it made a free choice from the available options
after the decision is made.
The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the test, people were made to believe they had taken a decision using free will -even though that was impossible.
The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was laid out in a paper by psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley nearly 20 years ago. They proposed that the feeling of wanting to do something was real, but there may be no connection between the feeling and actually doing it.
The new study builds on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.
The idea of free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished for wrongdoing. But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists wrote in the Scientific American magazine. It may be important for people to feel they are in control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.
The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the test, people were made to believe they had taken a decision using free will -even though that was impossible.
The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was laid out in a paper by psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley nearly 20 years ago. They proposed that the feeling of wanting to do something was real, but there may be no connection between the feeling and actually doing it.
The new study builds on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.
The idea of free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished for wrongdoing. But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists wrote in the Scientific American magazine. It may be important for people to feel they are in control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.
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