Free Will; highly trained author feels it exists (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 17:39 (1501 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 17:46

A careful even-handed discussion:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-neuroscience-of-free-will-a-q-...

"I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Iona College where I also serve as a faculty member for the Iona Neuroscience program. I have previously worked in the Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind program at Franklin and Marshall College as well as previous appointments as a Lecturer at King’s College London and University of Alabama.

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"...it seems to me that at least at times I could have decided to and done something else than what I did. I decided to go for a run this afternoon, but no one made me and I wasn’t subject to any compulsion; I could have gone for a coffee instead, at least it seems to me.

"Philosophers take these starting points and work to construct plausible accounts of free will. Broadly speaking, there is a lot of disagreement as to the right view of free will, but most philosophers believe that a person has free will if they have the ability to act freely, and that this kind of control is linked to whether it would be appropriate to hold that person responsible (e.g., blame or praise them) for what they do. For instance, we don’t typically hold people responsible for what they do if they were acting under severe threat or inner compulsion.

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"The current neuroscience of free will traces its lineage back to an influential experiment by Benjamin Libet and his colleagues.

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"It was known since the 1960’s from work by Kornhuber and Deecke that there is slow buildup of negative brain activity in the supplementary motor area (SMA) and pre-SMA measurable by electoencephalography (EEG) just prior to voluntary (i.e., movement initiated by the participant) bodily movement. This brain activity, called the readiness potential (RP), was taken to be neural preparation to move for spontaneous movements and starts about a half second before time of the movement

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"One shouldn’t jump to the depressing conclusion, though, that we don’t act freely or don’t really deserve any of the moral reactions others have to our actions; there is a healthy discussion on how the original Libet results can be interpreted as consistent with that picture of us humans as self-governing and free and moral persons.

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"Libet argued that W-time within a reasonable range was reliable since we can see how accurately participants in the lab estimate the time of other events, such as skin shocks. The reliability of W-time has recently been challenged yet again with a new study that concludes that depending on the order in which participants complete certain tasks in the experiment, W-time can be strikingly different (i.e., there is an order effect.

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"Two of the hottest topics seem to be, first, what exactly the RP, that negative build-up of brain activity pre-movement, really signifies and, second, how we can make our voluntary actions in the lab more ecologically valid. As to the first, the past decade has seen researchers investigating if we have evidence that the RP really does stand for a decision to move or, alternatively, if the RP just is the brain’s being biased to move in some way (say, left, instead of right) without the commitment to do so.

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"But many, myself included, have voiced concern that when to press a button or whether to press a left or right button, just isn’t the right kind of action to stake a claim that we as agents don’t initiate our actions via our conscious intentions to act. Hence, some of the ongoing work involves making the choice of which button to press or when to press it meaningful via rewards or penalties for skipping ahead or value-laden options, such as charity donations.

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"...one of the aspects of our lives that seems the most undeniable is that we really do experience ourselves as in control of our movements and their effects in the world. There is a large body of work in cognitive neuroscience which focuses on this sense of agency"

Comment: Long and complex discussion in which it appears that the form of the experimental design definitely affects the time interval of the readiness potential. The author favors free will but admits the experiments have not been totally definitive