There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking:
When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.).
EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.
1) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surrounding and context, including the physical state of our body and brain
2) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surroundings and context, not including the physical state of our body and brain
Note: In both cases I'm assuming there is no soul, mind beyond the body, etc.
If you define free will as (1), then there is no free will, since any decision will always be subject to the physical state of my body and brain (except, of course, if there's something not physical in play as described in my note).
If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it.
The same could be applied to a state-machine (finite or not):
1) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's current internal states and the external inputs
2) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's external inputs
(1) means no state-machines have free will, (2) means they can have free will.
"And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables"
That's an opinion sprouting from a view on the world that states free will doesn't exist. It may be true, but goes counter to many people's intuition that there is a free will.
A good argument would explain how, from the assumption of 'no free will', we can arrive at such things as 'property' and 'crime'. Why would societies sprout up in which people get imprisoned for using stuff that they didn't make themselves, or that they didn't get permission to use for from those who made it?
My argument would be that this is just evolution: local optimization of the non-physical world, in the same way evolution gave us all kind of complex physical structures. On the one hand, I can't see much fault in that, but on the other, giving up the idea of free will means reintroducing predestination, accepting that no criminal can be blamed for their crimes, no Isaac Newton or Olympic champion can be praised for their accomplishments, that capital punishment and war are just things that happen, etc, and even accepting that there is no such thing as 'me'.
So, yes, if physics as we know it is correct, logically, I think you are right, but emotionally, I don't believe it. That might have to mean that somewhere in our bodies there is a part that can bend the laws of quantum physics as we know them.
This world view is a very 19th century clockwork universe one: if we know all the initial conditions in sufficient detail, we can predict the outcome. There are two problems with this: at a fundamental level, quantum mechanics says you can't know the initial conditions with infinite precision[0]. Second, even at a classical physics level non-linear systems with very similar starting points can have very different final states. As a practical matter that means even if the rules are deterministic, you cannot predict with 100% accuracy what the outcome will be.
So we have a complex non-linear system (your genes) and a very very complex non-linear system (the environment) that make a very complex non-linear system (your brain). Because we have all of these complex non-linear system interacting together, we cannot determine what will happen in any practical sense. We can probably make some observations that will generally hold about some decisions a human brain will make (e.g. it's been a few hours, it will be hungry and decide to eat), but these are more probabilistic rather than 100% concrete deterministic rules.
This assumes that you were capable of conscious decision making, or had free will, at birth. The assumption is the problem, I think. I would think that "free will" is developed, not de facto available from birth. In fact, I think free will in a baby could be a pretty bad evolutionary disadvantage, whereas it would be a great advantage for an adult.
Much of the confusion about free will and how much free is our will comes from experiments that study limit cases like our body reactions to external stimuli or something of the sort.
But I don't think anyone can seriously state that we are absolutely free, specially when our bodies are involved. Extreme cases reveal that that there's much to say about how we (body+mind) work, and we're certainly not absolutely free.
The simplest and, perhaps, best argument for our partial freedom is that we can ask questions. I don't think there is any kind of property in the physical world that would yield questions and truth-intuition about answers to those questions. Electrons just bump into each other. They don't ask questions about it. They move on like there's no tomorrow.
Software which clearly does not have free will asked a question allowing you to enter that post.
So, if you exclude the language part of asking questions as cruft the type of experiments that human baby's do is the same type of experemnts birds do when learning to fly. But, biological examples of this get really simple and plenty of people have built non biological examples.
At a lower level you can argue that QM shows every time a wave function collapsed a question was asked and answered.
Which is really the issue of free will, most definions boil down to either, 'humans' or include simple systems that clearly lack choice.
About the experiment, how can Libet conclusively derive the decision came after the initial EEG measurement. I mean how did he know the duration it takes to report the decision. The origin of the decision to being able to reflect on it may take a variable amount of time therefore invalidating the claim.
Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness. Driving a car comes to mind. This also means when asking a subject to process something impulsively the vast majority of their actions may be subconscious.
tl;dr
People spacing out does not invalidate free will.
The subjects reported the position of the dot, that's how he knew the exact time point in which they were 'aware' of their impending action. There was a comfortable time difference between the two.
These studies do not invalidate free will, they just show that free will is not something ethereal, but a product of the specific makeup of ourselves, which is encoded in our brains.
Yes, it's a brilliant book that proves what we see as free will is obviously not free and it's not even up for contention that we actually have the ability to decide, even though it feels as though we do.
The law of causality is ultimately incompatible with free will. You cannot have truly autonomous agency within a physical framework ruled by cause and effect. To truly express freedom of will, without influence from any prior cause, you would literally need to exist in your own isolated vacuum of space and time (no outside influence from environment), having also created yourself (no outside influence from genetics). That is to say, if you believe you have free will, the burden is on you to prove that your body, and your brain itself, are not bound by the laws of the physically causal universe.
>Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness.
This. The "unconscious" processing an answer/reaction belongs to the same entity that the conscious part belongs too.
Implying we're some kind of automata because reactions can come pre-processed by the subconscious part misses the point.
The subconscious part is the same "self" that the conscious part is, it's not just what we can think "out loud" in our head that counts as us taking a decision.
This is scientific evidence, not mathematical proof.
One way to frame the concept of free will is that some subjective experiences cause rather than are caused by or are identical with, physical changes in the brain.
One way to test for causation is to see which one happens first. If free will (at least as defined above) is true, we expect that some subjective experiences should precede the corresponding physical change in the brain. If free will is false, then we should expect subjective experiences to be simultaneous with or come after the corresponding brain change.
Since the actual result of the experiment (brain change comes before subjective experience) is less likely under the "free will" hypothesis than it is under the alternative, by Bayes' rule, it should make you less confident of the existence of free will. If you believe that this result would be only slightly less likely even if free will were true (as you apparently do), then you should update your estimate only a little bit, but this is still the right kind of experiment to run if you want to test for free will.
Libet's study is terrible -- as with many of these studies it's famous for its controversial conclusion, but its flaws are very obvious.
He specifically asked his subjects to listen for an urge rather than applying free will ("let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”). That the urge is measurable before the decision, then, just means his subjects did what he asked them to -- to wait for a feeling of an urge.
And frankly, it's most likely the urge was the tension of having sat there a while, knowing someone's expecting you to feel an urge to move your arm...
1. Ask subjects to wait for an urge to react to (and therefore not apply free will)
2. (Nice-sounding but actually irrelevant measurement set-up with dots, clocks and electrodes)
3. Observe subjects decided after a measurable urge
4. Conclude free will doesn't exist, rather than that your subjects did what you asked them to in step 1.
In my opinion it is almost trivial to see that something is fishy with the idea of free will - just try to formalize it.
Assume you are sitting in a restaurant facing the decision to either order a steak or some pasta. One possibility is that your decision is a deterministic choice, a function of the current state of your body (What nutrients do you need?), your brain (What are your past experiences with steak and pasta?) and your environment (What does the steak on the neighboring table look like?). This does not resemble what I would call free will.
The other extreme is that your decision is completely random and not influenced by anything. This assumes that there is real randomness in our universe which is, as far as I know, an open question. There is no real randomness in classical mechanics, only apparent randomness due to ignorance of microscopic degrees of freedom. Quantum mechanics seems to have probabilistic features but they are, as far as I can tell, at odds with the unitary evolution of quantum systems and it remains to be seen whether there is real randomness in quantum mechanics or not.
But lets just assume there is real randomness, at worst, if there is only apparent randomness, this option becomes deterministic and degenerates into the first option. There is still some freedom in this option, namely the probability distribution over the different choices. This probability distribution may just be what it is for no deeper reason, a fundamental property of the source of randomness. In this case I wouldn't call it free will, too, because the choice is entirely random.
It may also be the case that the probability distribution gets shaped in a deterministic way. The steak on the neighboring table looks really good making it more likely that you choose it but there is still some probability that you will choose pasta. This is kind of a middle ground between the first two options, the final choice is random but the probabilities reflect your current and past states and the state of the environment in a deterministic way. But again I would not call this free will.
So what would free will have to look like? The choice must not entirely depend on the current state of you and your environment but it must also not be completely independent of it, i.e. be completely random. I spent quite some time thinking about this but I am completely unable to come up with something that is in some sense between deterministic and random (including deterministically shaped randomness). Am I - or even everyone - missing a (fundamental) third option? Is thinking about free will in terms of systems and states and state changes in some way inappropriate? For the moment I will side with the people denying the existence of free will, if someone can formalize what free will really means I will reconsider things.
This appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience. First, the article states:
He asked participants to report, using the clock,
exactly the point when they made the decision to
move.
Then, it goes on to say:
There’s no reason to think that we are reliable
reporters of every aspect of our minds.
Well, this is quite the conundrum. Which is it? Report exactly when you do something or accept that we are not "reliable reporters?" Yet the author goes on to further say:
Even supporters of Libet have to admit that
the situation used in the experiment may be too
artificial to be a direct model of real everyday
choices.
Given the delays in perception we all experience due to working at "chemical speed", as opposed to light speed, this experiment smacks of fast-twitch muscle measurement more so than exercising free will.
Even the original premise of Libet's experiment negates a free will choice:
“let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”
How is this free will? Free will is a conscious choice to do something, not a subconscious act.
Really I've seen so many terrible psychological experiments that spawned huge articles that I am not taking any of this seriously anymore. I don't doubt that we will get somewhere at some point, but it's very clear that at this point we are mostly bluffing.
Just because you set some kind of experiment that turns up some kind of data shouldn't mean that you compare your studies with science on the level of physics or astronomy. Unless your experiments provide a model that has any kind of predictive power you are probably getting nowhere.
The scientific method got where it got, because it started with people doing small experiments that turned up to generate incredible models with a great predictive power, and started building up from there. Just copying the method, disregarding the predictive aspects, and just bluffing from there to generate nice sounding headlines is hardly a similar path.
Libet's experiments were carefully planned and are highly regarded. That's why they have never been refuted, and in fact spawned a lot of newer studies in the field.
[+] [-] nota_bene|10 years ago|reply
When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.).
EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.
[+] [-] ucaetano|10 years ago|reply
1) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surrounding and context, including the physical state of our body and brain
2) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surroundings and context, not including the physical state of our body and brain
Note: In both cases I'm assuming there is no soul, mind beyond the body, etc.
If you define free will as (1), then there is no free will, since any decision will always be subject to the physical state of my body and brain (except, of course, if there's something not physical in play as described in my note).
If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it.
The same could be applied to a state-machine (finite or not): 1) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's current internal states and the external inputs 2) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's external inputs
(1) means no state-machines have free will, (2) means they can have free will.
[+] [-] Someone|10 years ago|reply
That's an opinion sprouting from a view on the world that states free will doesn't exist. It may be true, but goes counter to many people's intuition that there is a free will.
A good argument would explain how, from the assumption of 'no free will', we can arrive at such things as 'property' and 'crime'. Why would societies sprout up in which people get imprisoned for using stuff that they didn't make themselves, or that they didn't get permission to use for from those who made it?
My argument would be that this is just evolution: local optimization of the non-physical world, in the same way evolution gave us all kind of complex physical structures. On the one hand, I can't see much fault in that, but on the other, giving up the idea of free will means reintroducing predestination, accepting that no criminal can be blamed for their crimes, no Isaac Newton or Olympic champion can be praised for their accomplishments, that capital punishment and war are just things that happen, etc, and even accepting that there is no such thing as 'me'.
So, yes, if physics as we know it is correct, logically, I think you are right, but emotionally, I don't believe it. That might have to mean that somewhere in our bodies there is a part that can bend the laws of quantum physics as we know them.
[+] [-] lawtguy|10 years ago|reply
So we have a complex non-linear system (your genes) and a very very complex non-linear system (the environment) that make a very complex non-linear system (your brain). Because we have all of these complex non-linear system interacting together, we cannot determine what will happen in any practical sense. We can probably make some observations that will generally hold about some decisions a human brain will make (e.g. it's been a few hours, it will be hungry and decide to eat), but these are more probabilistic rather than 100% concrete deterministic rules.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
[+] [-] chm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interpol_p|10 years ago|reply
We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. Does it really matter if it is within a deterministic framework or not?
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmanser|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cristianpascu|10 years ago|reply
But I don't think anyone can seriously state that we are absolutely free, specially when our bodies are involved. Extreme cases reveal that that there's much to say about how we (body+mind) work, and we're certainly not absolutely free.
The simplest and, perhaps, best argument for our partial freedom is that we can ask questions. I don't think there is any kind of property in the physical world that would yield questions and truth-intuition about answers to those questions. Electrons just bump into each other. They don't ask questions about it. They move on like there's no tomorrow.
[+] [-] Retric|10 years ago|reply
So, if you exclude the language part of asking questions as cruft the type of experiments that human baby's do is the same type of experemnts birds do when learning to fly. But, biological examples of this get really simple and plenty of people have built non biological examples.
At a lower level you can argue that QM shows every time a wave function collapsed a question was asked and answered.
Which is really the issue of free will, most definions boil down to either, 'humans' or include simple systems that clearly lack choice.
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefanix|10 years ago|reply
Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness. Driving a car comes to mind. This also means when asking a subject to process something impulsively the vast majority of their actions may be subconscious.
tl;dr People spacing out does not invalidate free will.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
More recent experiments have been able to "foresee" actions ~ 10 seconds earlier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18408715
These studies do not invalidate free will, they just show that free will is not something ethereal, but a product of the specific makeup of ourselves, which is encoded in our brains.
[+] [-] scorchio|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robgibbons|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
>Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness.
This. The "unconscious" processing an answer/reaction belongs to the same entity that the conscious part belongs too.
Implying we're some kind of automata because reactions can come pre-processed by the subconscious part misses the point.
The subconscious part is the same "self" that the conscious part is, it's not just what we can think "out loud" in our head that counts as us taking a decision.
[+] [-] evanpw|10 years ago|reply
One way to frame the concept of free will is that some subjective experiences cause rather than are caused by or are identical with, physical changes in the brain.
One way to test for causation is to see which one happens first. If free will (at least as defined above) is true, we expect that some subjective experiences should precede the corresponding physical change in the brain. If free will is false, then we should expect subjective experiences to be simultaneous with or come after the corresponding brain change.
Since the actual result of the experiment (brain change comes before subjective experience) is less likely under the "free will" hypothesis than it is under the alternative, by Bayes' rule, it should make you less confident of the existence of free will. If you believe that this result would be only slightly less likely even if free will were true (as you apparently do), then you should update your estimate only a little bit, but this is still the right kind of experiment to run if you want to test for free will.
[+] [-] dmfdmf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wbillingsley|10 years ago|reply
He specifically asked his subjects to listen for an urge rather than applying free will ("let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”). That the urge is measurable before the decision, then, just means his subjects did what he asked them to -- to wait for a feeling of an urge.
And frankly, it's most likely the urge was the tension of having sat there a while, knowing someone's expecting you to feel an urge to move your arm...
1. Ask subjects to wait for an urge to react to (and therefore not apply free will)
2. (Nice-sounding but actually irrelevant measurement set-up with dots, clocks and electrodes)
3. Observe subjects decided after a measurable urge
4. Conclude free will doesn't exist, rather than that your subjects did what you asked them to in step 1.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skwosh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|10 years ago|reply
Assume you are sitting in a restaurant facing the decision to either order a steak or some pasta. One possibility is that your decision is a deterministic choice, a function of the current state of your body (What nutrients do you need?), your brain (What are your past experiences with steak and pasta?) and your environment (What does the steak on the neighboring table look like?). This does not resemble what I would call free will.
The other extreme is that your decision is completely random and not influenced by anything. This assumes that there is real randomness in our universe which is, as far as I know, an open question. There is no real randomness in classical mechanics, only apparent randomness due to ignorance of microscopic degrees of freedom. Quantum mechanics seems to have probabilistic features but they are, as far as I can tell, at odds with the unitary evolution of quantum systems and it remains to be seen whether there is real randomness in quantum mechanics or not.
But lets just assume there is real randomness, at worst, if there is only apparent randomness, this option becomes deterministic and degenerates into the first option. There is still some freedom in this option, namely the probability distribution over the different choices. This probability distribution may just be what it is for no deeper reason, a fundamental property of the source of randomness. In this case I wouldn't call it free will, too, because the choice is entirely random.
It may also be the case that the probability distribution gets shaped in a deterministic way. The steak on the neighboring table looks really good making it more likely that you choose it but there is still some probability that you will choose pasta. This is kind of a middle ground between the first two options, the final choice is random but the probabilities reflect your current and past states and the state of the environment in a deterministic way. But again I would not call this free will.
So what would free will have to look like? The choice must not entirely depend on the current state of you and your environment but it must also not be completely independent of it, i.e. be completely random. I spent quite some time thinking about this but I am completely unable to come up with something that is in some sense between deterministic and random (including deterministically shaped randomness). Am I - or even everyone - missing a (fundamental) third option? Is thinking about free will in terms of systems and states and state changes in some way inappropriate? For the moment I will side with the people denying the existence of free will, if someone can formalize what free will really means I will reconsider things.
[+] [-] vixen99|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdieuToLogic|10 years ago|reply
Even the original premise of Libet's experiment negates a free will choice:
How is this free will? Free will is a conscious choice to do something, not a subconscious act.[+] [-] raverbashing|10 years ago|reply
It seems a big jump to extrapolate this to 'there is no such thing as free will'
[+] [-] carapat_virulat|10 years ago|reply
Just because you set some kind of experiment that turns up some kind of data shouldn't mean that you compare your studies with science on the level of physics or astronomy. Unless your experiments provide a model that has any kind of predictive power you are probably getting nowhere.
The scientific method got where it got, because it started with people doing small experiments that turned up to generate incredible models with a great predictive power, and started building up from there. Just copying the method, disregarding the predictive aspects, and just bluffing from there to generate nice sounding headlines is hardly a similar path.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
Libet's experiments were carefully planned and are highly regarded. That's why they have never been refuted, and in fact spawned a lot of newer studies in the field.