There’s an interesting article in the latest edge on free will and consciousness. Basically confirming what I already believed after reading lots of Dennett and others’ books on the mind. Most of our decision making occurs in the subconscious. Our conscious self either only does the difficult decisions, or is only told after the fact so that we feel that ‘we’ made the decision. This doesn’t mean we don’t have free will: our subconscious decisions are still made based on who we are, our genes, our lives, how we grew up, etc. And Bargh raises another interesting point, do we really know who we are if our decisions are made by our subconscious and not our conscious selves as we believe? Here are some highlights from the article:

All organisms are purposive and have reasons for what they do. We certainly have that of course. So it’s not that will doesn’t exist; it’s that the free part is problematic — a lot of people see free will and say, “Well, you’re showing there’s no free will; therefore, people have no intentions or will.” No.

There is will, and will can be shaped by a host of factors: your genetic background, your early experience with your home and your family, your caretakers, you playmates, cultural influences bombarding us through the media and through socializing with your peers (and, thus what they like and what they think and what they believe from their parents). All this is being soaked up like a sponge by little kids.

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But there is another question that is more pragmatic and I think it’s a wonderful question, “If all these things are going on without my knowledge, then I don’t really know why I’m doing what I’m doing, and I don’t really know myself that well apparently. So how can I make the right decisions or make the right choices for myself when all these biases are throwing my decisions all over the place?”

Microsoft recently demoed Project Natal at E3. It looks really impressive. Here’s a video. And here’s part of an article from Wired:

Later, Microsoft producer Kudo Tsunoda, who’d demoed this game to us, showed us what was going on “behind the scenes.” He brought up an image that showed what Natal’s two cameras could see. The standard RGB camera in the unit, he says, was watching the positions of our skeletons. Sure enough, crisp solid stick-figures appeared on screen, representing me and Baker. As we moved, the stick figures on screen matched our movements. It wasn’t picking up our individual finger movements, but it could tell when we bent our wrists, picked up our legs, tilted our heads, etc., not to mention tracking us as we moved around the room.

Meanwhile, an infrared camera was tracking our distance away from the television. As we moved forward, our outlines turned red, as we moved back they shimmered blue. By combining both of these sets of data, Natal knows exactly where you are and what you’re doing. And it knows when I step behind Baker, or if he walks in back of me, and it still tracks, separately, the parts of both of us that it can see.

Seriously, the motion capture we used at the hospital required you to wear a bunch of reflective balls, used 12 cameras placed around the room, needed constant calibration, and still would mess up, and miss markers sometimes. If this thing really works this well, it’s really impressive. I really want to see it in a room with lots of people and varying lighting conditions.