| Wh1pL4shL1ve_007 said: A hard decision can be differentiated from "easy" decisions because unlike easy decisions, no sensory input can achieve majority. If you are saying that we make our decisions are based on sensory input, then what about "hard" decisions then? Dont your "sensors" conflict against each other in a hard decision? Often achieving equal consequences for all options that was though of? Then there must be an "X" factor in the equation. Which is free will. |
I don't think so. First of all, I believe that perfectly equal preference for all options is a very rare case, given the incredible large number of neurons and synapses in the brain. It's oversimplified, but I'd compare the brain's decision-making process to a voting with, say, 1000000000 voters and two options. An "easy" decision would be if, say, 90% of the votes were in favor of one option. A hard decision would be if votes were close to 50% : 50%, but in practice the chance of the result being exactly 500000000:500000000 votes would be very small.
And in such "hard decision" situations at some point the brain probably simply "rolls the dice". But I wouldn't consider that free will, I'd rather compare it to the way computers generate pseudo-random numbers.
On the Wikipedia page, they mention an experiment from the 90s, where participants were asked to randomly choose one of their hands and move it. In a way this can be considered a "hard decision" according to your definition, since there is no obvious preferable choice, and one might expect a 50:50 result. But as it turned out, right-handed people chose their right hand with a 60% probability. If, however, the right side of their brain was stimulated by a magnetic field, the probability of right-handed people chosing their right hand dropped to just 20%, and yet the participants were still convinced they made their decision purely based on free will.
