No Edges — Your Decisions Don’t Cause Your Actions

Cognitive neuroscientist Thomas James argues there is no decider in your brain. No little man behind your eyes reading the road and issuing orders. Your decisions and your actions come out of the same machinery.

Carlos puts that against twenty years of police work. Two in the morning, a traffic stop, a flashlight on a side-view mirror and a walk he took hundreds of times and still can't fully explain. Then a second stop, where he knew the driver had a gun.

Then Sam makes a confident claim the paper never made. Carlos catches her. What follows is less an argument about free will than a harder question about decision making, instinct and experience.

When you know what to do before you can explain why, what was it that knew?

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