Anubhav comments on Righting a Wrong Question - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 March 2008 01:00PM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 November 2010 04:05:52AM 35 points [-]

During the first month or so after my stroke, while my nervous system was busily rewiring itself, I experienced all sorts of transient proprioceptic illusions.

One of them amounted to the absence of the feeling of free will... I experienced my arm as doing things that seemed purposeful from the outside, but for which I was aware of no corresponding purpose.

For example, I ate breakfast one morning without experiencing control over my arm. It fed me, just like it always had, but I didn't feel like I was in control of it.

To give you an idea of how odd this was: at one point my arm put down the food item it was holding to my mouth, and I lay there somewhat puzzled... why wasn't my arm letting me finish it? Then it picked up a juice carton and brought it to my mouth, and I thought "Oh! It wants me to drink something... yeah, that makes sense."

It was a creepy experience, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I could "take control" if I chose to... letting my arm feed me breakfast was a deliberate choice, I was curious about what would happen.

I think that's what it feels like to not experience myself as having free will, which is I think close enough to your second question.

As for your first question... I think it would feel very much like the way I feel right now.

Comment author: Anubhav 22 February 2012 08:01:17AM 3 points [-]

Sounds to me like the left-brain interpreter experiencing lag.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 22 February 2012 04:00:35PM *  8 points [-]

Yeah, that's more or less how I interpreted it... not so much lag, precisely, as a failure to synchronize. There were lots of weird neural effects that turned up during that time that, on consideration, seemed to basically be timing/synchronization failures, whcih makese a lot of sense if various parts of my brain were changing the speed with which they did things as the brain damage healed and the swelling went down.

Of course, it's one thing to know intellectually that my superficially coherent worldview is the result of careful stitching together of outputs from independent modules operating at different rates on different inputs; it's quite another thing to actually experience that coherency breaking down.