Free Will: requires a properly functioning brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 31, 2015, 22:36 (3403 days ago) @ David Turell

Clearly shown in this article:-https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-our-brains-toy-with-our-minds/2015/07/30/a979640e-299b-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html?wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1-"Central to the sense of self is the feeling of free will — the impression that you make decisions and conduct behavior of your own volition. You are not a pre-programmed or remote-controlled robot. But in schizophrenia, this experience can go haywire. Normally, your brain registers the decision to act, immediately followed by the feeling of actually acting, and it concludes that you must be responsible for initiating the action. But in schizophrenia, mistimed feedback mechanisms can make behavior and thought seem to appear out of nowhere. Suddenly your internal monologue becomes a foreign voice. In both ill and healthy brains, our explanations for much of what happens in the world — including our own behavior — are manufactured after the fact. This insight leads to a concise definition of the self. As Ananthaswamy puts it, “You may be your brain's best guess as to [the] causes of all your internal and external sensory signals.” Something is causing these thoughts and actions, and when the internal timing is tuned, that thing is what we call the “self.”-***
"A recent study found that explaining naive realism to people and showing them visual illusions reduced their certainty in their judgments of others' behavior — whether Donald is being hostile or just assertive. Maybe neuroscience education can help alleviate social strife. (Who knows how many wars the dress-color controversy has averted by highlighting the subjectivity of experience — not counting the ones it's sparked online?) One might start by explaining how the self is fabricated and that it is a fabrication, just like everything else we experience. “The man who wasn't there” is an evocative term for a particular pathological self-negation. But, according to neuroscience, none of us are here."-Comment: I disagree; of course a sick brain will change our thoughts. We depend upon an intact functional brain.