Do you actually control your own mind? Three experts in philosophy and neuroscience explain: It’s not so simple.
Uri Maoz, PhD, Daniel C. Dennett, PhD, and Sam Harris, PhD explore how unconscious processes shape decisions we believe are conscious. From brain experiments that reveal the illusion of control, to mindfulness practices that reframe perception, they show how philosophy and neuroscience together unpack the truth about free will.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
URI MAOZ: 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 can 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. While we think that they're under our full conscious control, they are not.
DANIEL C. DENNETT: One day it was a group of fellow graduate students we got talking about what happens when your arm goes asleep. Is it the nerves? Do they get pinched? Is 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, trying 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.
SAM HARRIS: 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 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 as a way of doing that, and just, you know, conceptually reframing experience is a way of doing that.
URI MAOZ: 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.
