Wrestle With This

Do we have free will or not. Of course, this question comes up from time to time in churches as a question of theology. Do we choose God or does He choose us? Are all of those that are going to heaven predetermined or is it still an unknown quantity? I don't want to get into all of that. I want to wrestle with a scientific article on the subject:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/81bc32e4-d5e3-11db-99b7-000b5df10621.html

You really will want to read this article, I think, but I'll do my best to accurately reflect the meat of it in this discussion. According to this article, an American neuroscientist has demonstrated that there is a distinctive build-up of electrical activity in the brain before your conscious "decision" to move your arm, for example. Basically, by the time you think that you want to move your arm, your body is already most of the way there. It seems to make the "decision" part of it a last-second add-on to the process. The example in the article is that it's like driving a car and then finding out that the steering wheel is not attached to anything and that the car has been driving itself.

Some neuroscientists in Australia, though, took the experiment one step further. They electronically stimulated the brains of their subjects to influence the decision. Basically, they would ask the subject to raise an arm then they would stimulate the brain to raise the subject's left arm. Amazingly, the subject reported that they chose to raise their left arm in spite of the fact that it was going to happen regardless. So not only is the steering wheel not attached to anything, but someone else is driving the car and anytime it turns right or left you think that's where you want to go.

Now, if all of these experiments are being interpreted correctly, the implications to our society are huge. Did that man choose to kill his neighbor or was it predetermined? Can he be held responsible for something that he couldn't control? The article talks about some of this, and I don't want to get into that. I just want to wrestle with the experiment itself and what does it really mean.

Is it possible that our free will is an illusion that just makes happy? We feel better when we think we are in control, so we tell ourselves that it was our choice.

Welcome Home Prank

While I was at work on Friday, I thought that it would be nice to play a joke on a coworker who was returning from Las Vegas. I wanted to be sure that she had something nice to welcome her back after a few days out of the office, and it just so happened that there were thunderstorms coming into the area.

I called her up on her cell phone and told her that we needed to get all the machines in the building shut down in case of lightning. Before I even had the statement out of my mouth, she was trying to give me her password. Sometimes it’s just too easy. Armed with her password, I logged in as her.

After logging in, I closed all of the open applications on her machine, moved the mouse pointer down to the bottom left corner (so it was all but invisible) and took a screen shot of her computer at rest. Then I hid all of the desktop icons (pretty easy in Windows XP – you just right click on the desktop and uncheck the “show desktop icons” option under “arrange icons”) and I set the taskbar to auto-hide. Finally, I changed her desktop wallpaper to the screenshot that I had taken of what her desktop looked like before I messed with it.

If you’re following all of those steps then you realize that at this point her screen looks just like her normal desktop complete with icons and a taskbar, but it’s just a picture of that stuff. It’s not actually icons and a taskbar. Nothing is really going to work unless she happens to pull the mouse all the way to bottom of the screen and bring up the real taskbar.

You should have been here this morning. It was really great! She was having a time trying to figure out why her application icons didn’t work. Why the right click menus didn’t work. When she finally did something running, why it kept disappearing from the taskbar. It was classic.

Now my only fear is what she might think up when I’m gone to Connecticut in a couple of weeks.