Free will does not exist.

"There is no such thing as free will and I will prove it to you in the next hour" argues neuroscientist Victor Lamme in front of a packed lecture room at the Tilburg University.

Many of the systems men put in place, assume that people have a free will.

Consider the law-system for instance. People can be trialed for breaking the law, but are not as heavy charged for the crimes they committed, when they cannot account for their actions. In these systems it is assumed that normal people act rational.

It is however very clear that people in emotional, ethical and moral dilemmas think with their hearts instead of their minds. People that make rational decisions in every scenario, often have brain damage. People need to be emotional. There is nothing wrong with being this way. It is what made us survive.

Now back to the topic of free will. People who are emotional, also can be influenced. Last few years there have been discussions about subliminal marketing and priming (consider the example in the movie below).

As you can see in the movie, it is fairly easy to predict how people will act like before they even know it their selves. People think they know what is going on in their minds, but they have no idea. This principle gives us the illusion that we are free beings. However, our actions prove otherwise.

Think for example of the MILGRAM-experiments. People, knowingly they would  kill someone, still take the action of chocking the person to an extent that actually surpasses the level of dying. It are our actions that say we are not free.

The last few years, a technique (called brain-reading) has been developed which allows us to actually look inside the brain of people and see which units of the brain are being activated at a given time. These studies show that our brains make decisions for us, far before we know anything about them. Researchers in neuroscience argue that with this technique people can be read like a book. The brain never lies, even if the person does, and even if the person does not know he is lying.

Brain-reading opens a new world of exploration, but also breaches our privacy. Think for instance the possibility that you can see who is a pedophile, just by reading his mind. The technique will allow us to get a better comprehension of what makes people tick, but at what cost?

Brain-reading...A blessing or a curse?