After being a dualist for about 35 years, when I was a member of an Eastern religion that believed we humans have a mind and soul that are separable from the body, I’m now a contented monist — as it seems virtually certain that physical matter/energy is all that exists, the mind is just the brain in action, and soul doesn’t exist.
But I readily admit that this isn’t the way how mind and body relate feels to me. Or to other people.
For it seems that right now my bodily fingers are typing away on a keyboard, with the words appearing on my MacBook Pro’s screen having their origin in ethereal thoughts that are very different from the down-to-earth matter that comprises my body and computer.
Of course, that seems points to the familiar illusion that often is termed the mind-body problem. How is it that our consciousness feels so airy and light, while our body feels so dense and heavy (especially after a large meal)?
It isn’t surprising that for most of human history prior to the rise of modern science, there was a general consensus that mind and body inhabited separate realms of existence, with the soul being part of the immaterial aspect of reality, along with mind.
However, we humans also generally believed that the earth was the center of the universe, because that was how it seemed. Appearances can deceive. That’s why we need science to sort out what seems to be true from what is actually true.
This is the ground that physicist Alan Lightman, who has a poetic sensibility, treads in an essay in The Atlantic, “The Mind-Body Question.” (That’s a gift link from my subscription, so everyone should be able to read the thoughtful essay.)
Here’s some passages that will offer a feel for Lightman’s take on how mind and body relate.
Some years ago, I had a colonoscopy without being fully anesthetized, and was able to watch on a computer screen the shifting views of the insides of my colon. I was both fascinated and disturbed. There, revealed in digital detail, was the deep interior of my body, a realm I had always considered a mysterious and forbidden temple, fragile and secretive as it went about its important business of keeping me alive.
Surely that mystical place was separate from the world of tables and chairs, houses and mountains, even my own face in the mirror. But there it was, with no illusions. I was shocked to see membranes like jelly, with bumps and ridges and turns. I felt like a trespasser in my own body.
Modern neuroscience has largely overthrown the classical view that the mind and the body are fundamentally different substances, and it has shown that all of our thoughts and mental experiences are rooted in the material brain. But even granting that scientific view, there remains a profound disconnect between our conscious self-awareness—rooted in the three pounds of gooey stuff in our skulls—and the rest of our body.
After that unsettling medical adventure, I began mulling over why I was so disturbed to see the insides of my body. A number of issues come to mind. For starters, the experience struck me as a vivid demonstration of my materiality. Even though I am a scientist and have a materialist view of the world, I still harbor the belief that I am more than just a jumble of tissues and nerves. The experience of consciousness and life is so sublime that it is hard to imagine it all arising from mere atoms and molecules.
And with that unwelcome materiality of my person came a new revelation of my mortality. All material things eventually disintegrate and pass away. That is the unbending law of the material world. In time, wood rots, paint peels, mountains reduce to powder and stone. Despite my hopes and illusions, the view of my colon forced me to remember that I am just material stuff, doomed to disintegration and demise.
We live with and accept other invisible things on a daily basis, such as the insides of our cellphones and our automobile engines. But our bodies are different. They are part of us, are they not? From the moment I get up in the morning until the moment I close my eyes at night, my body is with me. I can’t go from one place to another without taking my body along. It follows me everywhere.
What is this thing that is always with me, yet whose interior is invisible? I depend on its proper functioning, yet I have practically no idea how it works. And what is the “I” in that sentence? Does the “I” include my body? Only above the neck? Were the “I” and the “me” present in that moist, curving tube on the screen? Or were the “I” and the “me” some disembodied mental apparitions, observing the object from afar?
…I must again confess that I am a materialist. I respect the belief in an immortal soul. I respect the belief in a nonphysical mind. But, despite my predilection for some transcendent element, I do not share those beliefs. Still, I am baffled by the disconnect I feel between body and mind.
I look down at my bare feet and command my toes to wiggle. And they wiggle. But “I” am looking down at them from above. My toes are things that I gaze at from some distance. But what distance? The distance from the camera of my eyes? The distance from my conscious mind, which has these thoughts? And my toes are visible. The inside of my body is even more distant.
The way I see the mind-body question is akin to how I see free will: While I don’t believe free will exists, nor that the mind is separate from the body, it is very difficult for me to directly experience the reality of determinism and materialism. I can do this for brief periods, but it doesn’t take long for free will and dualism to return to being how I go about my everyday life.
As I’ve noted before, and surely will note again after this noting, evolution didn’t select for us humans to know the truth about reality. It selected for traits that had survival value, that enabled our genes to be passed on to the next generation. Every person alive today is here because of an unbroken line of evolutionary succession dating back billions of years.
So likely feeling that we have free will and a mind separate from body had survival benefits for early humans. Which is why it is so difficult to believe otherwise, even though modern science can point to persuasive evidence that free will and mind-body dualism are illusions.
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Hey Brian,
Thank you for this thoughtful note. This poses a very interesting question and something to ponder.
In terms of how everything truly works, I do believe this is beyond our full comprehension. Just as one is (almost blissfully) unaware of what happens under our skin, or within our cellphone, I believe there is more to how our body/mind and potential soul appear to work.
One question I have always sat with, even as an RSSB member for 20-odd years, is what is the actual point of it all? Sure we are told that our ‘souls’ came to this plane of creation to ‘experience’ life. But when we are supposedly destined to return to ‘the one’ – what happens then?
One may assume (and we’ve essentially been told) we simply cease to exist – we merge, drop becomes the ocean etc.
I do believe in transmigration, primarily because I know for a fact that I have lived other lives in other bodies. Having had a near death experience, I can also attest to the light and sound being genuine, and that one literally leaves the body behind. The body is simply a vessel. Returning to it once I’d left it, the feeling I described as a child when this happened, was that my body felt heavy – like concrete. That said, I also remember thinking “oh look, there’s my body, there’s my mom in the corridor outside”. I could see myself outside of the body, I could hear sound and there was brilliant light ahead of me, but I was still thinking.
If I was still thinking, then what of the notion that the body, mind and soul are separate?
Something else that is interesting is creativity – where does our ability to create come from?
As a writer, I know that at times I don’t know where the words come from. They just come. I’ve also experienced hearing music – songs that do not yet exist, which I have then jotted down the chords to and played. Other musicians, artists and writers report the same. Is that mind? What exactly are we picking up on? I know that half of what I do creatively, I cannot fully attribute to myself. It just comes – difficult to explain.
We’re told that mind and ego stand between us and our merging with the creator. But how does this really work?
As a side note quickly on the path of light and sound, I came across a path, not RSSB, where one is provided a mantra and one can meditate at will, with the aim to transcend this reality. It’s the same practice and same concept (light and sound meditation) just without dogma, an organisation and any stringent requirements. Long story – but it’s interesting.
Go well! Hope I’ve made any sense at all!
Read Bhagvad Gita. All your questions will be answered!🙏🏿
Sounds like a textbook case of LOCOSI ( low colon self image).
This is a good example of why most present usual rssb speakers should walk away now and not wait 35 years. Because we know who you really are.
Meaning? Also sounds like a subtle (or not so subtle) threat. Next you’ll tell people you know where they live!
Some thoughts I shared on my blog way back in 2014 might add some clarity to this discussion?
When Kardec asked Spirits just ‘WHERE’ in the physical body do they exist, the answer was, that they really exist, wrapped “AROUND’ the physical body, while incarnated, not INSIDE , locked up, like a bird in a cage. As I was trying to sort that thought out, was when I coined CONDOMS of the souls, as I tried to imagine the Perispirit described by Spirit wrapped around the physical body as a protective condom .
We Out of Body Travelers, or Lucid Dreamers, know, and have verified that our spirits are never sleeping when our heavy physical bodies are off line. Spiritually, and are sleeping while being recharged by our Perispirits, which are actually, our Astral bodies, with unknown Elasticity, able to be stretched so thin, and travel away from our physical bodies, that they are identified as “Silver Cords” in the Christian Bible. Many Out of body travelers have seen these cords tethering them, to their bodies, as I have, many times. In Brian’s article, it is easy to recognize our “heavy” physical bodies, because we do, when fully awake, have to drag these decaying forms of physical matter around with us when awake only, unless we know how to null it asleep, and go for a cruise! I know, at 84, after lunch, and when I feel really fat and happy, but tired, and feeing ready for a nap, instead of a cruise on my Harley Beast, I drag my fat bald wrinkled old tired body, or stumble, out to my garage, and fire up my Harley Beast, and back it out of the garage with 1600 CCs of Raw energy compressing to take my 175 lb. Mass of decaying meat, blood and bones for a cruise in the mountains, which serves as another Meditation Technique.
Monday, June 23, 2014
CONDOMS of the SOUL: PERISPIRIT/ASTRAL BODY
Prophylactics are used by humans to prevent the spread of physical diseases, where by Perispirits are used by souls who reincarnate into material bodies to experience life as humans, or to participate in the Play of Consciousness, in The Creator’s School House, with out becoming permanently bound to any material body by karmic diseases enticing incarnated spirits.
According to Spiritist teachings introduced to the late Allan Kardec by spirits, a Perispirit ” is the link which unites the soul and the body. It is semi-material–that is to say, of a nature intermediate between soul and body, as it must be in order that they may be able to communicate with each other. The soul is an incarnated spirit, where the soul was a spirit before being incarnated, or while out of a material body.
The spirits are protected by Perispirits while in the body as souls! ” page 108 of The Spirits’ Book, linked on this blog as a free download. Since The Spirits’ Book was written in the early 1800s, Astral Bodies, as introduced by Theosophy was not yet known by Kardec, and Perispirits were what dis incarnated spirits channeled by Mediums conveyed to Allan Kardec during his interviews with various spirits using hundreds of Psychic Mediums to answer Kardec’s metaphysical questions.
Of course, since the Internet has been available to all who care to research such Metaphysical Philosophies such as the relationship between the spirit and the body, there is an abundance of available Literature to either read on line, or to download, or purchase as published books. There are also many blogs, such as mine that you are presently reading, that offer unending critiques of each other’s opinions of present or past Author’s writings. I don’t want to even begin to venture into quoting other writers, because there are too many that could fill volumes and volumes of web pages that are already there, which may be accessed by key boarding in a single word and then searching, on Google or Yahoo. Wikapedia usually has the most extensive references, and the word “perispirit” may educate any wanting more information on what I coined ” spirit condoms of the soul.
The Internet also offers many Spiritual Planes Charts, showing various levels of how the Eternal soul interfaces with material bodies, some showing as many as 18 different levels or spiritual planes that the Eternal soul descends, from Source, through all the lower levels finally incarnating into material bodies.
Then, since birth into a material body becomes the temporary death of spirit, or the terminal disease of materialism, since all materialism is impermanent, the incarnated soul must ascend upwards or back out through all the spiritual planes or realms to return home where it once left, when it was initially created by our Creator.
These Charts may be accessed by running search words such as Sant Mat, Radhasoami, Eckankar, Theosophy, Rosicrucians, Martinists, etc. etc. The Agra Sect of Radhasoami Sect has the 18 levels of soul sheaths, resembling a seed in the core of an onion. As the soul ascends from the core of its sheaths, rising through each spiritual plane, the amount of residual materialism decreases in each Plane, as the spiritual portion of the spirit increases.
The purpose of this note is not to educate the reader to each different sect, but to introduce one to the idea of how souls animate individual material bodies.
One blog is the home of a Mystic who teaches that souls never reincarnate into new bodies once the body dies, but only Holographic projections of fragmented past life spiritual DNAs enter each new births by the interaction of male sperm penetrating the female ovum in the womb. forming the fetus, that allows the spiritual DNA of a fragmented past life projected from one of the many Mansions of the Beings of Light. Each Mansion, or Being of Light may encompass up to 144,000 possible fragmented past life spirits that failed to become acquainted with their own Soul-Self Being of Light. According to the Mystic, these past life failed spirits residing in each individual Mansion may be consulted by the Holographic projected spiritual DNA incarnated as present souls, by becoming complete, or whole, by following what the historical man, Jesus, taught his disciples practicing TheWay. Very confusing, and difficult for entry level spiritual seekers to understand, so, I will not continue to confuse, should the reader be interested in researching some of these interesting Web sites of blog, just run a search on the Long Island Mystic, and have a feast of more web pages of teachings than one could read in several life times,…..because this mystic claims to be the brother of Jesus, i.e. James, who walked and talked with Jesus, and has been writing Scripture since any was written! I know. Sounds insane, or heretical, but before the reader writes it off as insanity before reading even a sample of what the Mystic writes, one would be missing a very unusual opportunity! Enough said. Except, even more interesting is, the core members of his blog claim to also be reincarnated spiritual fragments of DNAs that incarnated with this Mystic during many of his past lives. It’s a spiritual jungle in Cyber Space, so let the Buyer Beware! “Caveat Emptor!”
Until we meet again, I remain,
Jim Sutherland
Now that we have graduated to the era of AI, Artificial Intelligence, it becomes much easier to understand our so called, individual Duality of Advaita Vedanta. Each of us, are nothing more than “sub files” of INTELLIGENCE , of which Creation, Who created, us, who are all, “artificial.” So, taking that to the next logical step, it becomes obvious, that our Meat suits do not have ANY Free Will, but are completely controlled, and operated, by ………..? “We” are predestinated, to either Election, or being marked, or to Reprobation, used as disposable filler, or refuse to use, abuse, and discard, at the Will of Intelligence!
Each Reader must figure it out for Its self. But just as certain as knowing none of we, Sub files of AI are not operating on Free Will, but by being programed by our Higher Self Intelligence, which actually, is our Inner Master, The Being of Light That is the Hard Drive contains all of Its Sub Files, which includes us!
J. Krishnamurti, Alan Watts and Robert Saltzman have all commented on our habit (or proclivity) of ‘splitting’ ourselves. I’d think that this habit of ‘splitting’ lies at the core of our questions about mind, self and also consciousness.
In his article, Alan Lightman exhibits classical ‘splitting’. He refers, quite naturally, to ‘my body’, ‘my person’, the ‘I’, and ‘me’ in the assumption that such are all separate. Saltzman makes the point that all the perceptions, feelings, thoughts, emotions, pains and pleasures are not separate things happening to me – they are me.
The awareness and thinking about these perceptions are said to be functions of the mind. But is perhaps the mind just a convenient name for the function of the brain processing this information? In this scenario, the mind is merely the flow of information. Inferred from this flow of information, the feeling of a separate ‘me’, ‘self ‘, or ’soul’ may arise, which is believed to be doing the watching unhindered by the material body/brain.
But I guess to see that ‘myself’ is one harmonious whole, the understanding that all that we experience arises in the present moment, and is then gone, invites us to conceptualise that the next thought or feeling is a permanent ‘me’ looking down on all this activity.
Brian adds: “As I’ve noted before, and surely will note again after this noting, evolution didn’t select for us humans to know the truth about reality. It selected for traits that had survival value, that enabled our genes to be passed on to the next generation.”
The natural reality of the world does not need any sort of metaphysical phenomenon to function. Minds, selves, consciousness, etc., are perfectly amenable to biological explanations. With a reasonable insight into the workings and grandeur of the natural world about us and the perfect interconnectedness of, not only organic species but also the interdependedness of inorganic processes, the issues that we weave into abstract, spiritual concepts are superfluous.
“Modern science” does not say that free will is an illusion.
“Articles in Scientific American (2023–2025) and other sources note that neuroscience has not disproven conscious free will; earlier claims were often overstated or misinterpreted. Public perception lags behind, with headlines still claiming “free will is dead,” but many neuroscientists now say the evidence is dubious or neutral.” Grok
What early humans believed about free will is unknown. However, we do have archaeological evidence from burial plots that the earliest people apparently had concepts of an afterlife.
Rather than Grok, which is Elon Musk’s plaything, I find Claude a more reliable and ethical AI model. Here’s what Claude has to say about “Is free will an illusion according to neuroscience?” Basically, yes, in the sense that free will normally is viewed — as the ability to act without being constrained by prior causes. Meaning, someone could have done differently than what they actually did. So I stand by my statement.
————-
The deeper philosophical issue
Neuroscience can show that decisions have prior neural causes — but this doesn’t automatically eliminate free will. It depends on what you mean by free will:
Libertarian free will (decisions uncaused by prior physical events) — this does look hard to defend given neuroscience and physics
Compatibilist free will (the ability to act according to your own reasons and values, without external coercion) — neuroscience doesn’t touch this at all. Most philosophers (~60%, per surveys) are compatibilists
The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues strongly that free will is illusory, while philosophers like Daniel Dennett argue neuroscience is simply describing how free will works mechanistically, not debunking it.
The honest bottom line
Neuroscience has made libertarian, contra-causal free will very difficult to defend. But it hasn’t resolved the question of whether the kind of agency we actually care about — reasoning, reflecting, acting on values — is real. That remains an open philosophical question that empirical data alone can’t settle, because it hinges on definitions and values, not just facts.
The most accurate summary: neuroscience has constrained our concept of free will, not eliminated it.
We don’t think fast enough to say that human thinking in the brain encompasses all of consciousness. It can’t. Unless you understand we aren’t so conscious. The brain has other ways, largely unconscious, to handle that. And that includes how it handles perception and it’s connections to reality. Connections we can measure today, same those we will discover tomorrow. The body is pretty of a much larger system, like a glove is just the visible part of the hand that wears it.
So if your brain constrains thinking to the speed of morse code, how can you call that glacial processing ‘consciousness’ or ‘thinking’? Thinking is just a small part of consciousness. Don’t put it on a pedestal. It’s overrated.
https://www.zmescience.com/future/thought-processing-is-slow/#:~:text=The%20human%20brain%20can%20pass,according%20to%20a%20new%20study.
If you can distinguish body, mind and emotions, why not soul, to? We are an amalgamation of parts, though scientists and philosophers attempt to defined these. Certainly there area elements we use to distinguish them, even if they are all parts of the same reality. Can a human being really be separated from their environment and remain the same? Science doesn’t support that.
Soul like mind, body and emotions, is part of a whole. And these past of a place and time.
Oops
“and these part of a place and time.”
When Freud identified ego and brilliantly defined defense mechanisms, these definitions precisely reflect human behavior and states of mind. They are incredibly useful in helping people see what they are doing, and becoming more aware, responding more honestly, and reconnecting with parts of themselves people often bury, entirely unaware of how such denial handicaps our own awareness, understanding, compassion and capability.
But you won’t find projection, denial, reaction formation, or transference as physical parts of the brain.
Soul is very much like that. It’s a way to understand something transcendent, that allows us to rise above limitations of time, space and culture upon our capacity to understand. To free the soul of these limitations, to free ourselves of the prejudices of the age is a matter of valuing things well beyond body, mind and emotions, and the environments that shape these.
We are far more than the elements that define us.
Dualism is actually attempting to limit people and things to their elements.
But people and things have a way of disrupting such Dualism just by being all they actually are.
Ask any r*pe survivor (man, woman, child) about free will, and how it was taken from them.
Free will is real and you don’t know how important it is until it’s gone.
Brain is of the physical body.
Mind is the subtle body.
Beyond is the intellect, the causality of both.
The attachment or identification to the intellect is the cause of transmigration and the duality.
Always in the process of becoming.
If something was easy it wouldn’t be labeled as a practice.
Lightman writes
“Despite my hopes and illusions, the view of my colon forced me to remember that I am just material stuff, doomed to disintegration and demise.”
You have a colon. You are not your colon.
You are so much more than that colon!
Do not, in fear, in terror, in panic, in a moment of reality, constrain your whole identity to your colon. It doesn’t define you. And elevating it to define you is an insult to you.
The ‘You’ you hardly are aware of is far greater than that. Though the ‘you’ you know has a very short lifespan, far shorter than you sacred Colon, brother.
” I am just material stuff, doomed to disintegration and demise.”
That is true for your colon, dear Lightman, but not for you. You will go on, and transform.
As for the demise of the little ‘you’ living in fear and panic, that has already happened and happens many times a second. Your material body is actually much more stable, though it is just a bag of chemicals, than your identity and persona. Those aren’t material. They aren’t even natural. They are the artificial creation of your mind, and as your mind blacks out and reconnects with reality several times every second, so your sense of “I”, “Me”, and “Mine” undergoes anhillation and regeneration more often than you know. You hardly have time to grieve the death of one clone when another arrives in its place, and you, dear Lightman, haven’t a clue that this one isn’t the same as the last.
You aren’t the same person you were 5 minutes ago. But you aren’t consciously aware of the death and rebirth happening all the time as your brain works to regenerate the illusion you live in called “Me”.
“No one ever crosses the same stream twice”
Don’t get too caught up in your colon, dear Lightman, and be even less interested in your current thinking.
If your memory tells you you were alive five minutes ago, you believe it. But the ‘you’ that believes this fiction just came into being, and before you know it has transferred all its memories to the next guy, and expires. No ‘you’ are not immortal. But Don’t take pride in what your earlier ‘you’s accomplished. You are just a memory clone of them.
So when you worry about your mortality, that is an inherited memory. Discard it. It never was ‘You’. But Don’t get caught up in ‘you’ now, because that’s just baggage you will hand over to the next clone in line. Give them some breathing space please! They might capture some other experience, and maybe “YOU” that is not a reprint stamped out faster than you can blink, can have a moment please.
@ Brian Hines:
The issue that motivated my posting is your ongoing claim that “science” has proven free will to be an illusion. As per your essay:
“That’s why we need science to sort out what seems to be true from what is actually true.”
“Even though modern science can point to persuasive evidence that free will and mind-body dualism are illusions.”
The feeling we have free will is counter to “The truth about reality.”
As I keep pointing out, science has not declared free will to be false or an illusion, not in the absolute hard determinist terms you subscribe to. The terms “false,” “illusion,” and “reality” are absolute in their purport.
That’s why your Claude AI qualified its answer about free will being an illusion with “Basically, yes, in the sense that….” In other words, relatively, but not absolutely.
The response I posted from Grok cites not Elon Musk but Scientific American on the status quo opinion on free will from the neuroscience community. If you reject Scientific American as propaganda, it may mean you have another subscription to cancel.
Our soul has previously left many dead bodies behind but it hasn’t left the present one yet. That’s how you know. This body might know death from a traumatic out of body experience or meditation but meditation is easier. Other than that your body has not ever died but just suffering insults to injuries.
People speak about the multiverse and traversing these, slipping from one universe to another almost identical one.
And they speak about transmigrating from one lifetime to another. That happens faster than you can possibly know.
That actually is how the brain works. What you see, hear and believe, the brain has processed, and it reconstructs that process many times a second. You are literally slipping from one version of reality to another, and the only difference is what your brain chooses to focus on. When a thought changes that focus, and you now see something in the world around you you had not seen before, or come to understand something in that nearly identical reality you had not understood before, then, as far as you are concerned, you have just slipped into an alternate reality. Just one that is a tiny bit different, as your brain interprets it.
But it may turn out to be entirely different in major ways as your own consciousness awakens and develops. Did you change reality? Or did reality change? The first happens all the time, friends. The brain struggles to cover up the gaps, but they are there. And so functionally, the second happens.
And what a show it is to see it happening!
That’s what meditation unveils!
And how sad to watch someone with dementia now living in a world void of the people they thought they knew, who are very much alive, or repopulated with those they loved who are, in a more objective version, long gone.
You will travel there too, in one way or another. And you may come to realize that everyone suffers a form of dementia. It’s the only way the human brain can cope. And it is working hard, like a steam engine, to cope all the time, but a leaky one.
So enjoy your passages through these multi verses, don’t be frightened by time and change, and may God bless you with the ability to see these subtle changes in your own reality moment by moment, the reality created and recreated as projections upon your consciousness.
The life you hold so tightly to left and was reborn many times already. Who really knows what or who you were a moment ago? Not you. Were you even human? Or did you just become human?Or not quite there yet?
But you, the you that has no identifiable qualities, except to be aware, is here. Rejoice in that, and watch how your own chosen focus brings to you awareness of miracles or only disasters, or even miracles in the midst of disasters. Our very persistence from one moment to the next is an unspeakably awesome miracle. And our impermanence from moment to moment, as our brain navigates jumping from a nearly invisible tightrope to another and another without slipping, is a cause for celebration.
Recent Scientific American articles by neuroscientists on whether free will is an absolute illusion.
Elon Musk I mean Grok’s analysis:
Scientific American has published several articles over the years exploring the debate on free will, particularly in light of neuroscientific evidence. Many of these argue that science, despite popular misconceptions, has not definitively disproven the existence of free will—often critiquing early studies like Benjamin Libet’s and emphasizing the role of conscious decision-making in meaningful choices.
Here are the most recent ones (focusing on the last decade or so) in reverse chronological order, with key takeaways from each.
1. “Neuroscientists Should Set a High Bar for Evidence against Free Will” (March 4, 2025)
This opinion piece, part of a special edition on consciousness, addresses public concerns about neuroscience supposedly debunking free will. The authors argue that claims from the 1980s onward—based on brain activity predicting decisions before conscious awareness—have been overstated and misinterpreted. Recent computational modeling shows these findings don’t undermine conscious free will, as unconscious processes don’t negate volition. They conclude neuroscience hasn’t disproved it, and many experts now agree the evidence against it is weak.
2. “Free Will Is Only an Illusion if You Are, Too” (January 16, 2023)
The authors contend that free will remains intact when properly defined, especially for decisions that matter personally (e.g., life choices) rather than arbitrary ones. They review evidence like readiness potentials and brain scans predicting actions seconds ahead but note a 2019 study where such precursors didn’t appear for meaningful decisions, like charitable donations. Science hasn’t eliminated free will; it operates through integrated brain processes, and dismissing it overlooks how humans are their neural activity.
3. “Why We Have Free Will” (January 1, 2015)
This article pushes back against interpretations of studies (e.g., Libet’s and John-Dylan Haynes’ fMRI work) claiming unconscious brain signals predetermine choices, making free will illusory. The author argues these experiments focus on simple, habitual actions and ignore how conscious planning and intentions shape behavior over time, as supported by psychological research on self-control. Evolutionarily, consciousness influences actions, so science supports a compatibilist view where free will exists within physical determinism.
Ask any r*pe survivor (man, woman, child) about free will, and how it was taken from them. Happens to 1 in 4.
Free will is real and you don’t know how important it is until it’s gone.
Look , bad stuff happens just lay back and enjoy it. It’s okay to laugh at somebody’s body but only God can laugh at their mind. I hope this helps.