Choice

People have a desire to be in control of their lives. I think that as a species, we have this desire for control. We may desire to control people, personal actions, or simply a factor in our lives that impacts us. I think that when we cannot control an aspect of our lives, it feels like we have lost control. When we lose control, we look to blame some sort of a control: we look for people or things to blame. By saying that it was the fault of someone else, we can no longer say that it was in the control of ourselves.

 "The choices we think we are making, expressions of our freedom, are being made subconsciously, without our explicit control." 

The quote above was published by Marcelo Gleiser in a blog post published by NPR about the concept of The Fate of Free Will. He made this conclusion after observing the results of many scientific studies done regarding the decision making processes of the brain. The idea that the decisions that I make being out of my control makes me very scared of what could happen to our society if people buy into this scientific concept. If people begin to buy into this concept, they may begin to recognize that declared freedoms are being diminished by their own brain, I believe that people will think that the consequences of their decisions are inadequate. 

Philosophers all over believe that the choices that we make are the things that we latch to and take responsibility for. They also believe that anything that is done to stop us from a goal or from success (no matter how small or large), is generally presumed as something that is out of our control and something that is not our responsibility. Timothy O'Connor describes this in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he said that "The presence or absence of these conditions(external factors) and constraints are not (usually) our responsibility, it is plausible that the central loci of our responsibility are our choices."

If we lose the ability to make choices, we also lose the sense of control in our lives. In a study done by the University of Texas, Austin, researchers came to the realization that there is a predictable pattern of brain activity when we are faced with the opportunity to take a risk. Sarah Helfinstein, a postdoctoral researcher on this case sums their research up by suggesting that “We all have these desires [to take risks], but whether we act on them is a function of control.”

Whether the choices that we make are really being overturned by our brain activity or not, we must recognize the desires that we have and the choices that we make because of these desires. With new research being introduced about the brain, it is up to the general public to decide how we will react to this new information.