Is free will a fallacy? Science and philosophy explain.

Neuroscience is a newcomer to the field of free will

What are exactly the kind of questions that are worth asking? What different kinds of experiments that can say something about conscious and unconscious decisions

could help us be more modest in what we realize we can control and what we can't

Generally humans have a sense that they control themselves and sometimes their environment more than they do

You don't try to control every contraction of every muscle in your hand. And if you did try to control that, well, good luck to you

Because if you try to concentrate exactly on how it is that you're walking, it's even hard to walk

So there are certain places in the brain that if you stimulate there, a person begins to laugh

You ask them, wait, why are you laughing? And they say, oh, I just remembered this really funny joke

The brain kind of puts together some reasons for something that you did

And while we think that they're under full conscious control, they are not

One day with a group of fellow graduate students, we got talking about what happens when your arm goes to sleep

Is it the nerves? Do they get pinched? Is it blood flow? What is it

And they thought it was bizarre that a philosopher would be interested in the physiological questions of what was going on

They thought I was abandoning philosophy. I went off to the medical library and tried to get myself

educated on how the nervous system works It suddenly hit me when I learned about neurons the cells of the brain that do the signaling that they could be the basis for an evolutionary process

in your brain, which was learning. And the more I learned, the more I thought

this is the key. Philosophy and science have to work together. We get rid of all the magic

and we have a bottom-up theory of meaning and learning and truth and consciousness

this. The most satisfying way of engaging life is not to be endlessly thinking about it. It's not

in understanding yourself conceptually or in telling yourself some story about your past or

future that you can most fully engage what it's like to be you in the present. It's a matter of

training attention such that you can really be here in the present and break the spell of your

your ceaseless identification with thought, it's possible to tap into a wellspring of patience and

equanimity, which really does transfigure your moment-to-moment experience of the world. And

meditation is a way of doing that. And just, you know, conceptually reframing experience is a way

of doing that. If we understand the interplay between conscious and unconscious, it might help

us realize what we can control and what we can't, and then also maybe be a bit more forgiving

towards ourselves about our decisions and our actions. Not everything is within our control

as much as we would think or maybe even would wish