Why Scientists Now Believe That Free Will is an Illusion

A great man once said that "Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will." But a recent study offers a different view.

Scientists have come to believe that free will might be an illusion after all. It is but a trick created by the brain. The study proves that even the most apparently ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be totally wrong.

Most people are firmly convinced that they truly make conscious choices as they live their lives. However, it could only be the case that the human brain simply convinces itself that it makes a free choice from an array of options after a decision is made according to an article on Scientific American.

To prove this theory, a test was conducted that involves tricking subjects into believing that they had really made a choice before the outcomes of such choice could truly be seen. The participants of the test were really made to believe that they had made a decision with their free will-although this was actually impossible.

Almost twenty years ago, psychologists Thalia Wheatley and Dan Wegner published a paper which proposed the idea that the feeling of wanting to do something was certainly real, nevertheless there may not be a connection between the feeling and the actual doing of it as cited in an article on Independent.

The aforementioned research builds on Wheatley and Wegner's work. The study claims that the human brain does rewrite history whenever it makes choices. This changes a person's memory so that he believes he would have wanted to do something even before it happens.

A study authored by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom and conducted at the Princeton University involved participants being shown 5 white circles on a pc. The subjects were instructed to select one of the five circles before one of them lit up red. The subjects were then required to tell if they had chosen the correct circle, or if they had not enough time to choose.

People, statistically speaking, should have chosen the correct circle about one out of every 5 times. However, the researchers found out that getting it correct takes much more than twenty percent of the time, and going over thirty percent if the circle turned red very fast.

The minds of the test subjects, according to the findings, were actually swapping around the order of events. Thus, it appeared that they chose the right circle even if they had not actually had the time to do so. The notion of free will may have come into existence because such is a useful thing to possess because it gives an individual a sense of control over his life.

The scientists, furthermore, warned that the illusion of decision-making may only apply to choices which are done quickly without much thought. However, it might also be ubiquitous and pervasive, which may govern all other aspects of human behavior: from the minutest to the most important decisions.

"Whatever the case may be, our studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong," the researchers concluded. Their work is published in the journal Psychological Science.