But he that hath the steerage of my course

Today's text is taken from Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene IV, line 112. But the motivation is reading that the brain decides what to do before it get around to telling us. That is to say, lots of experiments have shown that the brain starts to do something, say shoot the lion, maybe half a second before it bothers to notify consciousness. So while we might think that we decide to shoot the lion and then pull the trigger, that is not really the way that the thing is.

I move onto free will, which I sometimes think of as the occasional opportunity to do something, unconstrained by person, circumstance or anything else. The set up might be that one is sitting in front of a chess board, a board on which there are a small number of coloured markers, perhaps the sort of thing that one uses for tiddlywinks, each one on one of the black squares. One then just sits there, from time to time moving one of the markers from one square to a new vacant square. One makes the effort not to have any plan or design. The thought just comes to one that one should move the blue marker from e5 to a3 and so one does. The point being that the actual decision is made and execution commenced before the thought just comes to mind.

A slightly different example involves tossing a coin. I am so free to act, I am so little constrained, that I can decide whether to turn left or right at the T-junction by the toss of a coin. This sequence can be expounded in the sense of the previous paragraph, but does not make the present point quite so neatly.

So where does this leave free will? If the brain is buzzing away under the covers and only gets around to telling the conscious self what it is up to as something of an afterthought, where does that leave the conscious self? At first blush, scarcely in charge - although it may well be true enough that no-one else is in charge, that I am free to that extent.

At which point I happened upon the phrase used at the title of this post in 'Romeo and Juliet'. Perhaps in 1600 or so when the play was written, self consciousness was not developed to the pitch that it is now, and people were accustomed, perhaps content, just to get occasional glimpses of themselves from within. An analogy might be riding a horse: one is intimately connected to the horse and to some extent directing it, but one is, nevertheless, more of an observer than a participant in the action.

Perhaps, a few thousand years before that, when Homeric heroes went into battle they were largely unconscious of what they were doing and if they survived they had to rely, to some extent at least, on the testimony of others for the tale of what they had done.

Going back to the chess board, suppose I allow myself to plan, suppose I have a design or pattern in mind. Perhaps I want to arrange things so that the blue markers are in a line across the middle of the board. Then, at least some of the thought process which leads up to deciding to move this or that marker in this or that way is brought into consciousness. But in this particular example, there is likely to be choice, there are likely to be many ways of accomplishing the task, and the business of choosing the one from among the many is probably still unconscious and still the subject of the timing difficulty.

Perhaps the conscious focusing on the chess board, or on the diagram on the white board, is sort of prop. A prop which makes it easier for the subconscious processing systems to stick to the point in question, and not to go wandering off somewhere else.

Further thought needed, out in the clear air of the Horton Clockwise.

PS: note that in 'at first blush' is nothing to do with the flushing sort of blushing. An adjacent rather than a coincident meaning.