Free Will and Memory

Some neurological studies suggests that our choices occur milliseconds before we realise we make them. This leads many people to hard determinism.

Now Consider the scenario
A man woke up at night, conscious, wrote the letter A on a table. He fell asleep. He woke up. He looked at the letter A and could not remember writing it. He said to himself that he was not conscious when he wrote it, he sleepwalked.

Let we call the man's Self or consciousness during the first period of conscious actions (i.e. when he wrote the letter A) X and during the second period (i.e. when he looked at the letter A) Y.

We can say that Y is not conscious during the actions of X, therefore his statement that he was not conscious is right. The sets of beliefs that Y has makes up his Self, and memory affects his sets of beliefs. Y did not do the actions of X 'freely', he was 'determined' by the will of X. Y did it nevertheless because X and Y has the same shell of identity.

We can say that Y has not acted 'freely', but we cannot say that the man has not acted freely. The man acted consciously and 'freely' as X although he was not aware of it as Y. The man is the aggregate of X and Y and therefore the man is conscious and 'free' throughout.

This analogy can be applied to the information that our choices is determined milliseconds before we realise we are making the choices. Our memory and hence sets of beliefs say that we 'made' the choices after the choices are apparently determined, but that does not necessarily mean that we did not make the choices. There may be X and Y components of our consciousness. They need not be different temporal instances of our consciousness, although they may be, but they are elements of our Self nonetheless. We may make our choices while we are not aware, and we may be aware when we are not making the choices. This illustrates how we can still be free, but it is not a proof of us being free.