The experiment suggests that consciousness has no causal efficacy. If consciousness has no causal efficacy then
a fortiori we have no free will. But I have already proven in my blog that consciousness necessarily has at least some causal efficacy.
The article contradicts itself:
Quote:
. . . the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand
. . . the predictions were not completely accurate
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It would be interesting to know what percentage success rate was obtained. There will be a natural proclivity for many people to use one particularly hand to press the button -- most probably the right hand for most people. The crucial question here is how are they choosing? What they
should be doing is attempting to curtail any natural proclivity on their part to use one hand or the other, and to attempt to approximate a random choice -- that is simulate a toss of a coin in their heads.
But what I suspect is that the participants have a natural, possibly unconscious, propensity to use one hand all along and they are failing to even
attempt to randomise their choice. In other words I suspect their choice is akin to, say, driving along in a car along a familiar route. Such a person driving along is on "autopilot". One makes the appropriate "choice" to turn right at a T junction, but they could well be thinking of something else entirely and not even recollect all the specifics of the journey afterwards. The conscious will doesn't kick in unless something unusual occurs where a conscious decision needs to be made.
So it is extremely important that the participants are instructed by the experimenter to make their choice in the 2 or 3 seconds before hitting the button
and to attempt to make their choice an arbitrary one.
The point in italics is important since mere prediction of someone's behaviour has no consequences for either free will or that consciousness is causally efficacious. One can predict with absolute confidence that a poor person, on spotting a £20 note on the pavement, will pick it up and put it in her pocket.
Indeed there is no obvious contradiction between free will and the complete predictability of ones behaviour. Otherwise the more someone comes to know me and is able to predict my behaviour under a variety of circumstances, the less and less free will I would have! Obviously this is absurd.
However there is an important caveat here in that I do believe that people have the ability to make an
arbitrary choice (although please note that arbitrary in this context need not necessarily mean random). What eventually convinced me is
Newcomb's paradox. There is a paradox if the alien can predict even apparently arbitrary choices. I think that Newcomb's Paradox actually
proves that we can make arbitrary choices and that a fortiori we have free will and our consciousness is therefore causally efficacious.
As you may gather I believe that philosophical reasoning and philosophical thought experiments trump scientific research!