I want to start off by asking a ridiculous question: “How much of me is me?” My crazy question is prompted by a recent discovery in neuroscience that our freedom of choice in life could be an illusion. For an experiment they chose a subject to whom they gave two simple pushbuttons. He was to hold one in each hand. Now they told him “Just push the buttons, one after the other in any sequence you like, completely at random.” Then they put him in a (fMRI) Brain Scanner to do it. When he chose the left button a certain spot in the brain lit up, when he chose the right button a different spot lit up. But the time sequences were different. They found that six seconds before he made a choice the brain lit up the appropriate spot. In other words, his brain made the decision six seconds before he consciously chose. The experimenters could then predict which choice he would make six seconds before he consciously chose – every time without exception.
Consternation among the proponents of ‘free-will’ and those who claim we are responsible for our choices. The idea of responsibility and free-will rests on a simple proposition: that you could have chosen differently from the way you actually did. This is impossible to verify. As with any choice or decision there is no way you can go back to the time before you made a choice and choose differently. It is just impossible to know whether you ‘could have’. The claim is untestable in principle and is therefore meaningless. You may feel as though you ‘could have’, but there is no assurance in that at all.
The above experiment seems to validate determinism, that we are simply the effect of brain functioning over which we have no control. Freedom of choice is an illusion, in spite of it being a very convincing illusion. How can we possibly be so wrong about something so immediately obvious to our firsthand experience?
If you consider the brain is one thing and you are something else the implications are disastrous. It means that you are being controlled by a mechanism that is totally beyond your control. You are an automaton. Which brings me back to my crazy question in the beginning: how much of me is me? But if I consider the brain and all the complex process of the body as me, if I include them in what I mean by ‘me’, then the problem disappears. It simply means that there is more to ‘me’ than I thought.
There is no way I can be consciously aware of all the huge volume of computations that go on when any practical decision has to be made. All I need is the end result – I only need to be aware of what I have finally decided. All we know is that something is going on in the body that makes a decision before I am consciously aware of it.
But this is really nothing new. It is already obvious in focusing. Using the felt-sense is precisely feeling into that area that is active prior to conscious awareness. As a conscious being I am the recipient of answers; all the work goes on under the bonnet; I am more than just a conscious being. In focusing I attend to answers that are forthcoming from me. As in the experiment, I experience a choice after I have made it. To put it another way: ‘I make a choice subliminally, then, seconds later, I have the experience of making it. That’s the feeling of coming to a conclusion.
In Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex the god Apollo prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid any chance of this happening Oedipus moved away from his parents, right out of the district. What Oedipus didn’t know was that he was, in fact, an adopted orphan and that the town he moved to contained his real parents. So, in an effort to avoid his fate he moved right into the path of it. Later discovered to his horror that he had, in fact, killed his father and married his mother. But what has always puzzled scholars are the last words that Oedipus spoke in the play: ‘I am responsible, but the god made me do it’. This sounds like a contradiction until you realise that Apollo and Oedipus are two aspects of the same person.
In the play the delay between the subliminal decision and the conscious realisation of it was considerably longer than six seconds; but the principle is the same. Crediting the decision (prophecy) to the god Apollo is Oedipus projecting himself outside himself.
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