Why Free-will might be an illusion.
We like to believe that we’re free willed animals, we do what we “choose” to do & that whatever we believe in has a strong reasoning and rational thinking to back it up.
What you’re about to read will change all of that & for good.
Before we get started, here are a few basics that you need to grasp first. They’ve been explained briefly below.
- Epilepsy: It is a medical condition where the neurons in the patient’s brain start firing in an undesirable and an uncontrolled fashion. The person looses consciousness and may suffer seizures. Mild cases are treated with medications. The disease can be debilitating for some individuals.
- Corpus Callosum: It is a band of white fibres that connects the two hemisphere (the right and the left) of the brain and enables them to communicate to each other. It plays a crucial role in patients with epileptic episodes.
3. Corpus Callosotomy: A surgical procedure where the surgeon truncates the communication between the right and the left hemispheres of the brain by cutting the corpus callosum. Out of several indications for the procedure, one of them is epilepsy (only in very severe cases).
4. Broca’s Area: It is a part of the brain that is involved in speech synthesis and is present only on the left hemisphere of the brain.
5. The Cross-over: The human brain has a switch over at certain levels for certain faculties such as sight. That means that the right side of the brain interprets images from left eye and vice versa.
In the late 1950s an American psychiatrist named Roger Sperry began work on people with split brains, like the ones who had undergone Corpus Callosotomy due to recurrent debilitating epileptic episodes.
Below is an interesting experiment by Sperry that lead to even more interesting results.
In the experiment the patients were made to sit facing a screen with a partition in between their eyes so that the field of vision for both the eyes was seperate.
Now, when the patients were shown a picture, let’s say that of a chicken to the right side eye, the patient would recognise the image and say that he saw a chicken.
This happened because the image seen by the right eye was interpreted by the left side of the brain and the patient was able to communicate the same because his speech synthesis module “The Broca’s Area” was also on the left side of the brain.
In second setting, the patient was shown an image of the chicken on the left side of the screen, and this is where things get interesting.
When asked for what the patient saw, they said they didn’t see anything even though the image was there and they had normal vision.
This happened because even though they could see and interpret the image, they didn’t have a Broca’s Area on the right side of their brain to enable them to communicate what they saw.
However, afterwards when the patients were asked to draw what they saw, they all drew a chicken.
When asked for the reason for why they did that, they gave reasons such as “that’s because I had chicken for dinner last night” or “because I saw a poultry farm on my way here”.
Michael Gazzaniga, a psychologist tries to explain this by predicting a hypothetical module in the brain which he called the “Interpreter Module”.
The interpreter module has one job- To make sense of the world that we see and experience around us and to do that, it lies it’s ass off.
The patients in Roger Sperry’s experiment saw the chicken, they couldn’t speak it out though because they lacked the Broca’s Area, however when asked to draw or select out of many options they were able to pick the correct one out, now to make sense of their choice the interpreter module kicks in and makes up some bullshit to convince them that they had a solid rational reason to do so.
This experiment begs us to think about our conscious experience and our beliefs from ground above.
To quote Shakespeare:
“The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors. They have their exits and their entrances, and in his lifetime a man will play many parts, his life separated into seven acts.”
Many roles and acts to be played indeed but are we the writers of our own scripts and acts or are we living in a pre deterministic universe where we go along the roles we’ve been assigned to by some greater entity and the so called interpreter module makes up some explanation along the way to convince us that we came up with that choice on our own ?
Is everything predetermined ?
If you liked this article, chances are you'd like to widen your horizons even more with this article below in which I explore the locus of self identity through The Ship Of Theseus Paradox & the life a simpleton James Mello.
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