While watching the BBC video on the human mind called The Secret You, Marcus de Sautoy delves into the question of whether our conscious self is responsible for our decisions or if it is our unconscious mind that makes decisions for us. He starts with a simple experiment that explores the source and timing of his choices. It involves Sautoy pressing either a right or left button while lying in a brain scanner that monitors when his brain actually made the decision. After the test, it is revealed that the brain knew what button he would press an astonishing six seconds before he actually pressed it. In other words, Sautoy's conscious decision is secondary to his unconscious brain activity. This leads to the question of whether or not we as human beings are making our own choices, or if this "gray matter" of our brain is. Some questions I have after watching this discovery revolves around those convicted of crimes. Is it possible that people could blame their bad decisions, say murder, on the unconscious activity of the brain? Or do we still have enough control to decide right from wrong, and good from bad? Overall, I found the discoveries of Marcus Sautoy to be very interesting.
Is It Really Your Decision?
I definitely agree that in the case of crime making decisions, we as humans always have control of our decision to act and are conscious when doing so. Although our brain may unconsciously know what decision we will make before even performing the actions, that does not necessarily influence how good or bad, or right or wrong our final decision to act is. This matter, coupling crime and consciousness, can get very tricky because it can lead to many other questions such as whether or not many of our wrongful actions could be justified by the way in which our mind works,or weather on not theses initial decisions are out of our hands.
If we talk about criminal activity and the ability to blame it on your subconscious is for the large majority false. However, people do have the option to plead insanity which doesn't punish them like a jail will, but will be sent to the "loony bin" if you will. A very low percentage of people that plead insanity are actually insane. I do think our subconscious has a lot to do with how we function, but this test was only measuring an option of two choices. With crime there is so much more that your brain has to process. For example morals, and at this point your consciousness would have the ability to distinguish the positives and negatives of partaking in such events. Overall the subconscious may have a bit to do with decision making, but when emotion and reason is put into play I think the conscious is the one to blame.
The writing gives rise to an interesting topic. Despite the fact that I think decision making is a process contributed by both consciousness and unconsciousness, I don’t think committing a crime is an unconscious activity. The reason people make wrong decisions partially due to their misunderstanding of the world, so committing a crime is not innate. People indeed make decisions unconscious and subconsciously but people do not have the ability to differentiate right and wrong. What are roles of morality and personal interpretation if crimes are unconscious activities?
This post is eye opening. I have always believed our choices were controlled by us, the essence of free will. Although reading this post it is hard to believe murder and crime are not from our own actions. That is why someone people are capable of intense crimes and some people could not hurt a fly. It all comes down to the choices we make. However I would like some more research on this topic and to really test the boundaries.
This is very interesting. In the case of criminal activity, one main difference would be its ethical questioning and the effect of one's conscience. You could think of your conscience as part of the unconscious since it appears to be ingrained in humans. In which, it is definitely swaying your ultimate decisions, or your conscience could be an outside influence on the unconscious. I personally don't think anyone could rightly blame a crime on their unconscious brain activity. People are not constantly having their brains scanned, so they could claim that any crime was the fault of their unconscious and claim no responsibility. When in a sound state of mind, we always have an ultimate choice whether or not to act on our inner desires.