Free will and "The User Illusion"

[Chaos]

i'm hugely interested in free will and i'm currently reading a book about consciousness called "The User Illusion"..

 

this book also discusses the half second delay experiments many of you may know about.

 

anyway, the book mentions that all our thoughts come from our subconscious. i agree with this. the book also suggests that although our thoughts come from our subconscious, our conscious basically has a veto that allows us to act or not act on our subconscious thoughts.

 

although i have not finished reading the book, if this true, what determines if we act or don't act on a thought from our subconscious?

 

reading this book has helped me understand why people may commit crimes, etc. a person who steals may be bombarded with thoughts from his subconscious to steal. maybe his life experiences have made his subconscious suggest he steal rather than another option. if you grow up rich and always have money, your subconscious doesn't have many reasons to suggest to you that you steal. if you do have the thought to steal, it's easy for you to not do it because your subconscious will quickly come up with reasons why you don't need to steal. a poor person, on the other hand, will be bombarded by his subconscious to steal because he may not have learned that there are other reasonable options.

 

have you ever seen a video game where you create a character and you give it attributes? for example, speed +5, intelligence +7, etc. i think our genetics plus our entire life experiences is constantly giving our subconscious many complex attritbutes. a rich person with a good family may have a stealing attribute of 0.00001. a poor person that lives in a bad neighborhood may have a subconscious attribute to steal of like 90.9232. the person may be able to not act on his thoughts, but depending on his life experience, it may be difficult to keep saying no all the time.

[bartock]

1.holistic analysis=our ability to interprate data that has come in through the 5 senses.when the data is interprated it becomes infermation or experience and gets regestered in our mind as our total past learning history(TPLH).so based on our TPLH we make future decissions

2.we own our concousness,it does not own us,free will means that we decide what our hands pick up or put down.the reasons we give our selves to steal somthing or contribute somthing

eg. the movi A BEAUTIFUL MIND with russel crow. how does he gain his sanity is by giving(convincing)himself by logical reasoning.do watch that movi very insightful.