Is free-will an illusion?

Says Moliere's Tartuffe:

Quote:

"Some joys, it's true, are wrong in Heaven's eyes;
Yet Heaven's not averse to compromise;
There is a science, lately formulated,
Whereby one's conscience may be liberated,
And any wrongful act you care to mention
May be redeemed by purity of intention." (4.5.13)

Besides, we have no choice in the matter.

In the real world, subconscious and conscious minds interact and share duties. Subconscious mind governs simple or well-learned tasks, like habits or ingrained prejudices, while conscious mind deals with tasks that are complex or novel, like first learning to ride a bike or play sheet music.

Most deliberate new learning has to be mediated by free will, because subconscious mind has not yet had a chance to learn.

Beware that Tartuffe is a liar and manipulator.

But a more delightfully insightful one would be hard to find.

In a paper in the current issue of Advances in Cognitive Psychology (Vol. 6, page 47-65), I challenge the whole series of experiments performed since the 1980s pur-ported to show that intentions, choices, and decisions are made subconsciously, with conscious mind being informed after the fact. These experiments do not test what they are intended to test and are misinterpreted to support the view of illusory free will.

Though the neuroscientific findings are somewhat unsettling, they appear to fit nicely with the general scientific worldview whose primary aim is to break down an object of inquiry into reductive parts within a deterministic system of causal mechanisms

How Unconscious Mechanisms Affect Thought
Clever experiments root out nooks and crannies in the brain that are hidden from your conscious awareness
By Christof Koch | Oct 1, 2008
...
Unconscious Influences
As I write these lines, I am flying back from the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness that took place, this year, in Taipei, Taiwan. It’s a gathering of hard-nosed philosophers, neurologists, psychologists and neuroscientists concerned with consciousness. One of its high points is an annual award, named in honor of the father of American psychology. The 2008 William James Prize for Contributions to the Study of Consciousness went to Nao­tsugu Tsuchiya, a young neurobiologist from the California Institute of Technology. What had he done that caught the attention of the prize committee?

In 2005 Tsuchiya invented a technique, continuous flash suppression, which renders a picture invisible, hiding it from your conscious sight. Yet some part of your brain has access to the image and influences your behavior in untold ways. The way it works is simple. Say Tsuchiya wants to camouflage a picture of an angry male face. With the help of a split computer screen, Tsuchiya projects a faint image of this snarling guy into your left eye. Your right eye sees a rapidly changing set of colored rectangles, one on top of another. If you keep both eyes open, all you see are the ever changing series of colored patches but no angry face. The constantly flickering colors attract your attention in a way that the static portrait does not. As soon as you close your right eye, the face becomes visible. But otherwise you have no inkling that the face is there, even though your left eye has been staring at it for many minutes. You simply do not see it. So what is the big deal?

Subconsciously Active
Functional brain imaging shows that this angry face still activates a part of your brain that is concerned with fear, the amygdala. That is, at least some sector of your brain knows about the face—as it ought to because an angry male face in front of you might spell big trouble. This brain activity remains unconscious but may influence your behavior or generate a subtle feeling of unease.

Using this technique, psychologist Sheng He, with his student Yi Jiang and their colleagues at the University of Minnesota, made an intriguing discovery. They projected to one eye a photograph of a naked person on one side of the gaze and a scrambled version of the same image on the other side. They then hid both using continuous flash suppression. The paid volunteers who participated in the experiment never saw anything but flashes of color. The psychologists asked the volunteers to guess whether the naked person was in the left or the right part of the image. But they couldn’t. Their guesses were no better than chance.

He and Jiang demonstrated that the observers attended to the naked picture but not to its scrambled counterpart. Even more interesting, straight males attended to pictures of naked women but were slightly repelled by pictures of naked men. Straight women were attracted to pictures of naked men without showing a consistent repulsion for pictures of naked women. Gay men behaved much like straight women; they unconsciously paid attention to the pictures of the naked men but not to those of women. What is disconcerting about this experiment is that this all took place outside the pale of consciousness. Because the observers never actually saw the naked images, they had no idea they were attracted or repelled by them. This experiment is scary because it seems as if people’s sexual orientation could be inferred (statistically) from their unconscious attentional biases. An example of the unconscious mind at work. Freud would have loved it.

He and Jiang demonstrated that the observers attended to the naked picture but not to its scrambled counterpart. Even more interesting, straight males attended to pictures of naked women but were slightly repelled by pictures of naked men. Straight women were attracted to pictures of naked men without showing a consistent repulsion for pictures of naked women

The paid volunteers who participated in the experiment never saw anything but flashes of color

...consciousness does not provide us with transparent and infallible knowledge of our own minds. We may consciously think we are doing something because of reason X, when in reality we are doing it because of reason Y.

What does this mean for the introspective argument for free will?
I believe it shows that we cannot rely on our conscious experience alone
to determine what the true causes of our actions are. We are often unaware of important causal determinates. The fact that we do not feel causally determined, or that we are not consciously aware of the various (internal and external) influences on our behavior, does not mean such determinates do not exist. Worse still, if consciousness can confabulate and/or misrepresent the causes for our choices and/or actions, then to rely on such conscious data to infer our own freedom would be a mistake. Whatever persuasiveness the introspective argument originally had depended on the assumption that we had direct, infallible access to our own decision-making process. The argument assumes that consciousness reveals everything about our mental functioning, or at least everything relevant to the issue at hand. If what I’ve argued here is correct, this is not the case. What we are conscious of—and hence, what we can report on—is not always in line with what is otherwise going on mentally. If it turns out, as recent research suggests, that a great deal of mental activity is controlled by unconscious mental states, and that we can also misrepresent and confabulate the states we are in, the libertarian argument from introspection loses all its force.

Whatever persuasiveness the introspective argument originally had depended on the assumption that we had direct, infallible access to our own decision-making process. The argument assumes that consciousness reveals everything about our mental functioning, or at least everything relevant to the issue at hand.

Consciousness does NOT have to be infallible in order to be reliable or to provide relevant information

evidence of confabulation does call into question reliability.

What evidence is there that would lead one to so confidently assume that these are highly reliable phenomena?