Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

by Dean Buonomano

perhaps we should define free will as exactly that: a feeling. As the psychologist Daniel Wegner defined it in the early aughts, free will “is merely a feeling that occurs to a person. It is to action as the experience of pain is to the bodily changes that result from painful stimulation.”19 Defining free will as the flavor of consciousness associated with the neural processes responsible for making decisions is not a new idea. Almost three hundred years ago the philosopher David Hume stated that “by the will, I mean nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.”20 Thomas Huxley also argued that “the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term.”21