the village idiot

Hi Mark, that's fantastic to hear. The knowledge that negative thoughts are just noise generated by a dodgy computer in the head can set you on a fast trajectory to betterness. Internalise the only possible conclusion that these thoughts are in no real sense 'you'. If anything is a 'you' it is the unchanging space of conciousness hidden just below the thought stream. If enough focus can be trained up it is possible to watch these completely automatic and unsummoned thoughts arise and quickly vanish from conciousness. They have nothing to attach to, their ability to cause emotional suffering can ultimately be completely stripped away. This is hugely liberating, and can add fuel to a massive shift in perspective in regards to your relationship to thoughts, changing life's experience in a fundamentally beneficial way. Have you had any experience of meditation practice?

Hi Wes, It's a bit problematic using aeroplanes as an analogy. I see your point, but planes are machines designed by humans to be directed by humans. The aeroplane and everything it does was the intended outcome of the human designers. Our brains are very different. Unless you believe in a supernatural designer (those who do, dont worry, it's not your fault) our brains evolved through natural selection, a completely blind, unconcious, intentionless process. No thought was involed in the process, it happens automatically. We are actually quite close in our thinking on free will, but with one important difference. You think the brain has some kind of limited capacity pilot, a destination setter, a question asker. I do not. My argument is that the asking of the question is simply another automatic brain output. There is no asker. There is no control over what is asked. The question pops out of the unconcious brain as a direct result of all the influences the brain has been subjected to up to the point just before the question appears. The question that pops out is all that could possibly pop out. If a different group of neurons had automatically fired the instant before, a different question would have popped out. You cannot have had any control over this. There is no choice in attendance at any point in the whole history of life on Earth. I fully appreciate we experience the feeling of choice, but all there really can be is blind cause and effect. We are string puppets, the rest of the universe is the puppet master. This sounds terrifying, but it really isn't. It sounds bonkers, but it really isn't. In fact it can cause a perspective shift that is truly profoundly beneficial.

Hi Billhook, I pretty much agree with your first paragraph. The brain scanner experiments do not 100% totally prove that free will doesn't exist. There may be something weird going on there that we don't yet understand. They are however strongly suggestive of the fact that there is no free will in these particular choices. I think it is valid to keep them in the mix of evidence when trying to get to the bottom of it all. In actual fact, you don't need these experiments to prove logically that freedom of choice is not available. If you accept that the body acts in direct reponse to brain processes, and that these processes are all electrochemical firings of neurons that you are not aware of, inside a brain that you didn't conciously build (these are all facts) then there is absolutely no basis for free will. Even if all the neural firings converged in a single region of the brain we could call the 'choice centre' where options can be weighed up and picked, this still wouldn't equate to free will as it is still just excited neurons sending chemical messages to other neurons. We have no insight into this neural activity, there is no access into it to exert any influence or choice. The brain speaks in a language we can't even hear, let alone understand. Conciousness can translate a few words of this hidden language into english, but that is the full extent of it's powers. It sees but can't do. In terms of predicting the future, this is really a bit of a red herring. It is true to say that predicting the future is the brain's stock and trade, what it is programmed to do, but it is only guessing. It can only make predictions based on information it has at it's disposal (it's own past experiences and it's current environment communicated to it via the senses).It can make a pretty accurate prediction for the next brief moment in time, but not much further than that. As soon as anything new and not possible to forsee comes to the brains 'attention' all bets are off and any previous predictions are redundant. In reality the world is far too dynamic for the brain to be able to be an accurate fortune teller any further ahead than the very next moment in time. We notice and get excited when a brain prediction does correlate with an event further ahead in time. We are bound to come across uncanny feeling matches from time to time due to the mind bogglingly large number of predictions the brain is making every day. The fact that these matches are so rare really shows how unavoidably bad the brain is at predicting into the future any distance. Instead of being stunned when a past thought and a future occurance match up, we should be saying "about bloomin time brain"!

Apologies! I had the input of an English literature A level, and I don't appear to have the free will to squash it!

Yes, I think so. NASA tracks every single piece of junk. You can watch them in real time on the NASA website. They have to be very careful with the timings of rocket launches to avoid hitting items. The space junk is travelling very fast indeed. If even a tiny screw hit a shuttle it could be catastrophic.

Before I carry on attempting to field your really interesting questions, and with Mortimer Firewood's heroic fortitude in mind, I thought it might be a good idea if I explain exactly why I keep blathering on about Mindfulness meditation and 'the self'. What has it done for me, and why I consider it to be so important? I am 40 years old and for all of my adult life I have suffered from depression. It crept up on me over a long period of time so I didn't really understand what was going on. I now understand that my brain neurons soak up seratonin more quickly than the average person. This means that it is not sloshing around between the cells for long enough to trigger the healthy number of happy and generally productive thoughts that most people experience. On average, my thinking is more negative than it could be. If this carries on for an extended period of time it slowly poisons all aspects of your life. I once heard someone say that depression robs you of the ability to appreciate sunsets. This is by far the best description of my version of the illness I have ever heard. It is spot on. Without wanting to bore you all with a bleeding heart story, the long and the short of it is that my inability to think positively a lot of the time, and my lack of insight into the mechanics of the condition very nearly ruined me. I had a wonderful partner for 22 years who I ended up telling to leave me to find someone else better. I really believed that I wasn't good enough for her. We split up, the house was sold and I moved into a rented room. I was thoroughly miserable. I had done a little bit of meditation a couple of years before after reading some books which sparked my interest. The practice seemed to help but I didn't understand why and I soon stopped doing it and fell back into my old patterns. I encountered Sam Harris around this time through his books on the dangers of religion (a topic I have always been interested in). He is unusual amongst the athiest community as although he is brutally secular he is also an experienced meditator and I moved onto reading what he had to say about this. Sam Harris is a brilliantly clear communicator and one short sentence in one his books jolted me into a different perspective. "You are not your thoughts" This was huge for me, and I started reading everything I could find online and in books on meditation, buddhism and the odd vaguely understandable book about neuroscience and psychology. Finding out more about how the brain functions and the implications of how it operates made a massive difference in my understanding of my own situation. Combining this with the theory that 'the self' is a mental construct caused everything to click into place. I can now pretty confidently say that I have depression but I very rarely suffer from it. Just being aware of the fact that the brain conjures up thoughts automatically implicitally implies that they can't necessarily be trusted, especially if coming from a brain that can't function normally. Internalising this simple fact alone was enough to revolutionise my outlook, this was the big breakthrough. Combining it with the concept that I could be automatically attributing my negative thoughts to an idea of an unchanging 'me' upped the ante even further. The proposal that I was not truly free to have done anything else made things even more interesting. I can appreciate that to another person this might sound like I have just bought into an idea and latched onto it in desperation because it offered me a lifeline. Hope and desire are very powerful drivers that can take people in very strange directions. It is certainly possible that this is what I've done, but I really don't think so. When you learn more about the brain, how we know it operates and how we think it might manifest itself, it is all pretty darn logical if rather brain bending to get to grips with. I restarted mindfulness meditation practice fairly recently, mainly as a means to see if these ideas hold up in direct experience. If we really want to know how the mind does it's thing it makes sense to watch it in action. Mindfulness meditation is tricky because if you engage in it with a particular goal in mind you corrupt the practice. You are thinking about the goal instead of merely watching what thinking appears naturally. I need to get better at the practice if possible, but if you can retain focus for long enough you quite quickly come to realise how insane the brain outputs are. It is really no wonder that we suffer if we let these bizzare brain belches guide us through life. My brain is seratonially compromised so it is probably particularly important for me not to identify with a lot of my thoughts too closely, but from what I have read it transpires that everyones brains are pretty much constantly putting thoughts out there, a lot of which are intrinsically unhelpful, and if they are allowed to fester and form the narrative of who you are, can cause considerable amounts of needless suffering. This really is the take home message here. If you feel that you have depressive tendencies, are critical of yourself and/or others, find life a bit unfulfilling, struggle in certain situations or just get a bit cross about things, mindfulness practice and an understanding of what your brain is up to can almost certainly help make your life better and may be transformational. The added bonus is that if you care to you can go on to explore the nether regions and start to spout crazy sounding nonsense like I have been over the last couple of days! Really hope this helps. TVI.

Brilliant! I love the fact that you and others are willing to think so deeply on this. I'll try and give you my take on these observations tomorrow, or rather later today! And when I say 'I'll' or 'I', it is totally understandable that this creates apparent problems with the argument. Unfortunately it is a language conundrum that there is no good way around. If 'I' started refering to 'myself' as an entity instead it would probably be the end of the thread!

There is also the rather depressing but probably predictable fact that we have left so much space junk in orbit around our planet that before too much longer it will be too dangerous to try and fly any kind of rocket through it! We may find other life out there in time, but I bet we don't find any civilisations that are nearly as stupid as ours.

Yes, the universe is not only expanding, but the rate of expansion is speeding up. I think the astrophysisists generally think that there is literally nothing 'infront' of this expansion. Time and space expands as the universe expands. I know very little about this stuff unfortunately, I wish I knew more. I agree with you, the idea that there is no other life in the universe is inconceivable. If there is life beyond our solar system it is pretty unlikely that we will come into physical contact with it for a very, very long time if ever. The distances between solar systems is so incredibly vast, and the distances between galaxies? Forget it!

What a fantastic video Billhook, I hadn't seen that one, thanks hugely for posting it up. I am fairly open minded in terms of the origin of conciousness. I'm pretty sure that there are some very specific theories that we can rule out, but beyond that it is a fascinating mystery at the moment. It's got a bit late now, but I'll have a ponder on the rest of your post and try to give some thoughts tomorrow. Apologies, I have been working my way up the list from the bottom and you were at the top!

That is one heck of a theory Vesp, and there's no way for I can prove for definite whether you are right or wrong. It is certainly possible that the brain could predict certain events in the future using the information it has been exposed to in the past. The key phrase here is 'information it has been exposed to'. I see no way that the brain can make accurate specific predictions on outcomes necessitating information that it has not yet been exposed to, unless by chance. I think it's very likely that the two words event was an impressive coincidence. It is theoretically possible that the brain could have computed and predicted every tiny action in sequence leading up to you skipping the video to the exact point you did from it's inputs in the past, but this would be an astronomically gargantuan mental achievement. But again theoretically possible. It is well worth considering how many trillion times this 'clairvoyant' effect doesn't happen. This leads me to conclude the coincidence hypothesis, but who knows? It's a very interesting idea.

Fantastic Wes! That almost sounds too good to be possible! Next time you meditate try to pay really close attention to whether you are being carried off by your thoughts or whether you truly are able to just be aware of them without you being carried off. The distinction is very important. If you are truly able to do the latter (to be aware that you are thinking) you are a natural born meditator and that is a huge advantage. See if you are able to describe the nature of a thought to yourself as soon as it arises in conciousness, then observe what happens to the thought.

Hi Wes, From my persective, the reason why you are struggling with ironing out these issues (and they are bloody mind boggling) is because you are still occasionally holding onto the notion that there is a 'self' in the mix. Some sense of a chooser located in the head or brain that has the power to assess the brain's outputs and make some form of informed choice. Please correct me if I have misrepresented you. My argument is based around the premise that although it feels absolutely that there is a 'chooser' that is 'me' in the head, this is actually not the case in reality. The sensation/felt experience that there is a chooser muddies the waters when trying to get to grips with this stuff. I think the brain, from which all our thoughts, emotions, impulses and actions arise is a 100% automatic, identityless computer composed of neurons. It takes in unchosen inputs from the senses, processes them automatically, and automatically generates outputs based on its pattern recognition software. A small proportion of those outputs (the ones we call thoughts) appear in conciousness. Automatic thought outputs themselves become inputs back to the brain for the next phase of continuous processing. Conciousness is the only other facet to the autonomous brain. Conciousness or awareness is an identityless space where some brain outputs (thoughts) appear. Conciousness is 100% passive. It can do nothing to summon, choose or change it's contents. It is just aware of them. This is all there is, a fantastically capable, identityless automatic computer and a 100% 'hands off' state of awareness. Nothing else, no chooser, no locus of 'I'. Insights from mindfulness meditation practice strongly support this conclusion too. The automatic brain, sometime in early childhood, starts to attach 'I' files to thought emails and sends them to the conciousness inbox (which opens them but takes no action) From this point on humans begin to experience a contrived awareness that they are a 'me'. In other words, You are a figment of your computer's imagination! In terms of the coin toss. Even though it is 50/50, the brain doesn't delegate a choice to a 'you'. It will come up with its own answer based on hidden processing using some unfathomable blend of past experiences, neuro transmitter saturation, stored memories of consequences of similar past experiences and all manner of other factors. It will then alert your conciousness of the 'decision' and instruct your vocal chords, lungs and oral muscles to articulate it's commandment. This makes it sound like the brain has an agenda, but it all blind automation, producing the only result it can given everything that has happened to it up to that point in it's existence, the existence of all it's ancestors, and potentially (if you want to be exactly precise) anything that has happened anywhere to anything in the universe ever! Consider that next time you blurt out heads or tails. The brain is 'supposed' to develop the illusion of self. The tendancy for it to develop would have been naturally selected for (also automatically) way back when, because it helped us survive to reproductive age in more hazardous times.

If you wanted to send a letter to the edge of the observable universe and you gave your letter to the ultimate Gary Boy postman who had souped up his peugeot to reach a top speed of 671 million mph, it will still take him 45 billion years to get there. The infuriating thing for the postman is that because the universe is expanding at the same speed or faster than he is driving, when he got there it would no longer be the edge, he would have to drive for another 45 billion years, and another and another.... Lets hope he took his thermos.

That would be a bit more like it. My calculator says there would be 12 trees on earth for every star in the milky way, or thereabouts.

Well spotted that man!

Mindfulness meditation is the opposite of daydreaming Peat. To be daydreaming is to be lost in thought. To be mindful is to be found in thought. I'm rather proud of that one!

Fascinating comments folks I'll have to get back to you this evening, but my subconcious can hopefully make some headway whilst I show my visiting family the Suffolk rain

Last point in this latest VI derail. The universe is literally unbelievably, incomprehensibly vast. I recommend watching that Andromeda video again and them imagine standing on a planet in Andromeda looking back at our own galaxy (the milky way) through a powerful telescope. It would look pretty much identical to the collection of pixels of light in the video. Our sun would be one of those pixels of light with our invisible planet revolving around it. The suns look incredibly close together but in actual fact, to travel from our sun to the nearest star in our galaxy (from one pixel to the next) in the fastest rocket we can currently build would involve a journey of 80,000 years!!! We recently received the light generated from the collision of two neutron stars in one of the other 200 billion galaxies in the universe. The collision happened 130 million light years ago and the light has only just reached Earth. This is astounding in itself. Then consider that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. In every year of those 130 million it took for the light to travel from this distant galaxy to our own, the light was covering a distance of 6 trillion miles!!! 6,000,000,000,000 miles per year for 130 million years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's big out there.

It's a funny one. On some levels it isn't important, on others it is. Some people who reject free will outright think that we should pretend it is real anyway. Some think that by rejecting it totally we can improve society. Still others think that civilisation will fall apart. I usually take a stance with things like this that we should always accept what is true (if we can find out what is) and adjust in the best way possible to the implications. Others may differ!

By suggesting to others that they could try meditation I am putting the thought in their heads. I can't predict, and nor can they, whether it will result in them actually starting to meditate, but without being exposed to the premise they will certainly never meditate. It would not be an outcome available to them. Outcomes are determined by inputs and the state of the brain right up to just before the action. The individual had no control over whether I told them about meditation and they have no control over the exact state of their brain at any moment. They have no control and therefore (I believe) no free will.

We have gone down a bit of a side alley with the hallucinogenic drug thing, but thinking about it, it does raise some issues regarding free will. DMT is a drug which when inputted to the brain causes a change in it's chemistry and neural firings, resulting in an outcome that is similar in nature between individuals but wildly unpedictable in it's specifics. Once you are tripping you have no free will to stop it, you just have to ride it out. The brain just does it's thing. The brain is a drug factory. In normal everday life you are constantly under the influence of drugs in exactly the same manner as with DMT. Seratonin is a drug, Dopamine is a drug, hormones are drugs. These are all produced automatically in the brain and body. They influence thoughts, bodily functions and many actions completely automatically and you can't will them into being released. Where is the free will in that?

I've watched the Andromeda video many times and it blows my mind every single time!

No worries Mark, glad you are interested!