Name: 【我並不存在】Annaka Harris 哈里斯 - 神經科學作家證明佛學是對的 | 早晚會思考的問題
Uploaded: 2025-07-16T21:26:51.000Z
Duration: 6 min 17 s
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It is this feeling that my conscious experience is this self that is somehow living somewhere inside my body.

If your memories weren't strung together, there'd be much less of a sense of a self.

Free will, for the most part, is an illusion.

There's no self or free will making decisions behind the scenes.

So I think that free will, for the most part, is an illusion.

So I use the term free will to talk about decision-making processes in nature.

If you look at something like a pea tendril, when it senses that it's close to a branch, that it can wrap itself around, it starts growing more quickly in that direction, and then it changes the growth so that it wraps itself around a branch.

Most of us wouldn't consider that to be a free decision-making process.

It's a cause-and-effect process that occurs in nature.

And as you move up in complexity to the level of brains and then human brains, the number of factors that come into play are so expansive that it would be impossible for us to try and track them all.

It's a process by which the brain is interacting with the exterior world, measuring the different outcomes of the different possible futures, and then ultimately making a decision.

This is something that I think what many people mean by free will.

The problem with having free in the title is that it's not free in the way we feel it is.

We begin with this illusion of self, of being this solid, concrete entity that is somehow living somewhere inside my body.

It's my body, it's my brain, and therefore somehow separate from the physical world that could somehow freely make a decision.

And because everything we experience, everything we know takes place within this felt experience of consciousness, we often equate this feeling of self with consciousness.

And that, I think, is clearly an illusion.

It is this feeling that my conscious experience is this self and is the thing that has this freedom.

And this is how the illusion of self and the illusion of free will are related.

There was a very interesting study done in 2013 in which they put participants in an MRI machine and showed them a screen and presented two numbers on that screen.

And they gave them the option of either adding or subtracting these two numbers.

And they were scanning the activity of these participants' brains while they were doing this calculation.

And the result of this study was that the experimenters could tell up to four seconds not only when this person was going to make the decision, but whether they decided to add or subtract.

And so you get the sense viscerally that there's no self or free will making decisions behind the scenes, but that in terms of your conscious experience, a decision really arises.

So when I talk about the illusion of self, this is often very hard for people to grasp what that could even mean.

We all understand that a wave is not a static thing in nature, it's a process.

And our brains are very much the same thing.

They are processes in nature that are ever-changing, ever-evolving, that we are in constant communication with the external world.

So the neuroscience is really still in its infancy, but we're starting to learn more and more about how this illusion of self gets created.

We also know that memory plays a role in creating this experience of self as well.

There's a sense in which all of the memories that we have access to over time were being experienced by the same subject.

And you can imagine if your memories weren't strung together and your experience was just of each present moment, there'd be much less of a sense of a self moving through time.

We're also learning a little bit more about what neuroscientists refer to as the default mode network.

So we know that when the default mode network is active, we are highly aware of this illusion of self.

And it tends to quiet down when we're experiencing what people talk about as a flow state.

So when we're very immersed in our work, if we're very immersed in a sport, when people are under the influence of some psychedelic substances or various meditation techniques, that quiet down the default mode network, we're not so aware of self versus other or self versus world, which is actually closer to the underlying reality.

There are moments where realizing there's an experience of conscious will taking place can be quite liberating.

Many people get stuck in feeling responsible for their psychological state.

And there's a way in which simply being with whatever uncomfortable emotions you're experiencing, whether it's sadness or frustration or anger, being with them rather than believing that you're controlling them can be extremely beneficial for psychological well-being.