The Oddness of Thoughts and The Illusion of Free Will

Recently, a colleague said that since I am "very experienced" in writing poems, I must find it "very easy" to write new poems. This is untrue. With more experience, I do find it easier to edit a poem. Editing is a technical skill and one gets better at it, with practice. But the creation of a new poem remains, for me at least, as difficult as it has ever been.

This is because to create a new poem, you need inspiration, which comes when it comes, and goes when it goes. It's extremely unpredictable. Inspiration is not a matter of skill or experience and it is beyond the poet's control. At best, you can spend more time waiting in front of a blank computer screen, so that when inspiration does come, you are ready to seize it, type fast and make a new poem.

Thoughts (not just poetic thoughts, or creative thoughts, but thoughts in general) are very odd things. Most people never realise this. That's because they have never really spent time observing their own thoughts. In fact, the only people I know who regularly observe their own thoughts are people who meditate (and they are a minority).

If you meditate, you will quickly learn that the human mind is one big mess. Most of the time, it does not function in any manner that can remotely be described as logical or systematic. Instead the mind hops randomly from topic to topic, sometimes operating in words, sometimes with images, often moving in circles, often contradicting itself, and easily getting pulled in different directions by sensory data.

On a 20-minute MRT ride, your mind can easily talk to itself about 10 different topics, without producing even one useful idea or one new conclusion. It can flit from past to present to future, from memory to imagination to fantasy, within the space of two seconds. You are not in control. The mind runs itself. It secretes thoughts, much like the way a gland secretes hormones. It's an invisible organic process. Most human beings have as much control over their own minds as they do over their own glands - that is to say, hardly any control at all.

What has all this got to do with free will?

There was a neuroscientist - his name was Benjamin Libet. He hooked people up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which showed what was happening in their brains. Libet's experiments revealed that a surge of brain activity took place before the person had the conscious intention to do something. This suggests that the intention was not consciously formulated, but rather came from the unconscious, and then entered conscious awareness, and that furthermore, by this time, the decision whether to carry out the intention was already made.

Libet's experiment means that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will plays no part in their initiation. There is no free will. The following excerpt from this article will help to explain:

Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice.

In the 1980s, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, caught people's brains jumping the gun on consciousness. A few hundred milliseconds before a person thought he or she decided to press a button, brain areas related to movement were already active. The result was hard for some to stomach because it suggested that the unconscious brain calls the shots, making free will an illusory afterthought.

In other words, you never have free will. You can put down your pen, wave your arms, sing a song or sell your shares. But you never get to decide to do these things. You only perceive yourself as making the decision. In truth, the decision was already made, even before you perceived yourself as making it.

By analogy, you are like a robot which falsely perceives itself as having artificial intelligence and decision-making ability. In fact, the robot is completely controlled by a secret software program which the robot does not even suspect exists.

More later, perhaps.