I have always been a firm believer that everyone has free will, and that they can choose what they would like on their own accord. Marcus de Sautoy has led me to question this. He underwent a fMRI in a BBC video called "The Secret You" which showed him that they were able to predict his actions up to 6 seconds before he did them. To me, this seems to derail the idea of freewill. If someone else can tell him what he was going to do before he knew (consciously) what he was going to do himself, what could this lead to?
I wonder if someday they will be able to predict things more complex than pushing buttons, and further ahead of time. What do you think? Also, what are the implications of being able to tell someones actions before they even occur? When it comes to being able to predict a button that will be pushed based on brain activity prior to the push of the button (activity image is shown below), it doesn't seem as eerie, but knowing this could someday lead to something more is a scary thought in my opinion. If our minds our made before we even "know" they are, does this mean we don't have free will, but rather a mass of neurons and connections decides what we are going to do for us?
This Oxford Mathematician, Marcus, has really made me think if every action we do is already decided by our brain before we do it, why, then am I so indecisive? I can never pick what to by at the store, what to order on a menu, or what to have for a meal. Regardless, the technology we have today is amazing, and its hard to "determine" what technology we may have in the future, and what more we can find out about consciousness and decision making!
