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Is free will illusion? --读后感（新鲜出炉）

There is an interesting essay on May 14 issue of Nature talking about “free will”--Is it just an illusion? And I love this essay. I dare not to interpret it with many of my opinion--mostly because I do not have many of my own. However, I think it would be of fun if I can share what I have read and what I have merely think about free will.

The author showed an enormous desire to defense our bestowed freedom, insisting that we are free to choose of our behaviors. This idea does not sounds so crazy that it needs scientific support for common people to believe.

However, free will is challenged as some scientists argue with recent findings in neuroscience---for instance our brain make decisions seconds before our consciousness realize-- that we, our consciousness do not decide what we do. Free will is merely a illusion, a consolation! Any action must be made depends on preceding causes (to generate the correct response to it).

The challenges of determinism are always repercussive. The first challenge (that I know) took place at a more fundamental level. In quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg uncovered an inherent unpredictability in nature. People, including Albert Einstein, were freaked out. Partially because our consciousnesses can not accept a world with chaos. They need to make plans for the future (according to their memories of the past). They want themselves to be rational, rather than random. However, if the nature of outside world is full of randomness that the past do not decide the future, what our conscious brain is always proud of itself (the rational planing) is based on none.

The author, who by the way is the son of Werner Heisenberg, choose to believe that our action is free from the past. Free will is not an illusion. It happens not only in human, but also in basic forms of lives (though they are not credited with anything like consciousness in human).

Then how come we have a vivid feeling that our brain controls our action based on precedents? Most of the time, we know we decide to do something. Additionally, scientists put a lot of effort to find caustic reasons for various animal behaviors. Paradox exists where we both want a free will and want us to be rational (that we make rational decisions rather than take chances.)

One solution is that our brain does not make clear-cut orders. (He is so rational in the sense that the outside world is full of randomness and he do not have a clear-cut answer of what is the next.) Insufficiently equipped (Limits set up by the genes), insufficiently informed (Uncertainty Nature) and short of time. brain have to find a module that is adaptive to uncertainties.

Human have free will. We are considered to be free in our behavior as long as our behavior module is adaptive, self-initiated. This is consistent with our adventurous nature of our behavior and our curiosity. We could be out of control, doing things that does not seem to benefit in the future (according to the present situation). One mystery was why evolution keeps this aimlessness in our behavior. Why we are endowed in free will so that people would choose to suicide? The random walk our brain takes would be given evolutionary explanations, if Charles Darwin knew Heisenberg’s Uncertainty.

The author said conscious awareness may help improve our behavior, but it does not necessarily do. Our behavior is adaptive (so that consciousness need to make a clear-cut plan for it). Meanwhile, the fact that our action if free from one moment to the next will not change just because we are aware of it.

The last question is what consciousness do for us. Is it just generating all kinds of feelings that it controls everything, make rational decisions for us? It is a speaking hitchhiker or it is a central commender? Jinfei