Thursday, August 21, 2008

Uninformed Conclusions

I believe random behavior or free will to be conclusions processed and arrived at by an uninformed brain.

Say you are presented with two desserts, neither of which you have ever tasted.
Having no previous data on the desserts, your brain will begin to recognize patterns like typical dessert flavors such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and so on. These and other patterns in the desserts will be processed for previous experience.

Eventually your brain will help you decide on the dessert with the most patterns recognized for having had a pleasurable outcome.
For me this would mean having both desserts.

The trouble with free will is that when you inform someone they don't have it they'll change their actions to prove to you that they do.

"If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?"
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain

In the above sentence resides a truth much more sinister than dessert.

Psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler tested this question by giving participants passages from "The Astonishing Hypothesis." One group received a passage that talked candidly about free will, the others did not.

Afterwards the participants filled out a survey on free will and were then told to complete 20 arithmetic problems. It was explained that when the question appeared on the computer they would need to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen too.

At this point it is safe to assume the results, since I wouldn't have brought up the topic and the article wouldn't have been published had the participants reacted differently.

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