[Sunstone]

It's a quiet four in the morning, Mountain Time, where I'm at. My Acme Latex Love Doll has long ago gone to bed. There is no one awake in my apartment building but me. So, quite naturally, I am thinking about the role consciousness plays in decision making.

I can recall an experiment done many years ago in which two sets of electrodes were used to reveal where a simple decision was NOT made in the human nervous system.

One set of electrodes was placed in the muscles of a person's arm. Another set of electrodes was placed in that part of the brain most associated with consciousness, the frontal cortex.

To make this brief: It was revealed that when a person "decided" to reach for something with his arm, the muscles of his arm began reaching before the conscious brain could make the decision to reach out. This is what would happen: Someone's arm would begin reaching for something, say an apple. Only after the arm was already reaching for the apple would the conscious brain "decide" to reach for the apple. In short, consciousness was more a commentator on what was going on than it was an instigator of what was going on. It didn't make the decisions: it only interpreted them.

On the other hand, there is evidence that consciousness does play a role in making decisions. That is, it makes negative or inhibitory decisions. It doesn't decide to reach for the apple, but it can and does decide to NOT reach for the apple. Consciousness is the great censor. It does not make positive decisions (let's do something), but only negative ones (let's not do something).

There seem to me at four in the morning to be many implications of this research. For instance: What does this say about Free Will? Does it suggest that to whatever extent our will is free, it is free only to inhibit our actions? We do not have a will free to reach for the apple, but we have a will free to prevent us from reaching for the apple?