Article on free will in Wired. Based on research.

[jacob]

From Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them

You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.
In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.
The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?

More in the article itself.
Your thoughts on the experiment, the results and the conclusion?

[David Bailey]

I wish they would try the presentiment experiment with the same setup - my guess is that they would see a strong signal.

'Deciding' which button to press seems a pretty artificial task. Coincidentally, I had my eyes tested recently, and one of the gadgets that they use over here is a thing a bit like a rather boring video game. The idea is to measure your field of view. You track a red dot with one eye and then press a button n times if you see n green dots. n ranges from 0-4. The decision time is quite short to avoid the eya simply scanning the field of view - so it might be fun to run that inside the scanner. Again, presentiment might show up.

The idea that people do not have free will has always seemed to me utterly preposterous - far more so than presentiment or Ψ!

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

What does this have to do with free will? Just because the decision is made before you are aware of it does not mean you do not have libertarian free will. Who said libertarian free will requires conscious decisions?

~~ Paul

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

What does this have to do with free will? Just because the decision is made before you are aware of it does not mean you do not have libertarian free will. Who said libertarian free will requires conscious decisions?

~~ Paul

Well the conventional logic is that if the decision got made some time earlier - before you thought you made the decision - your consciousness simply acted as a rubber stamp. To me, it is another example of the way that the concept of consciousness gets progressively weakened to fit into conventional science. If you take the physicalist approach, it seems to me that it is very hard to avoid falling into the pit of no free will, no responsibility, no real values, etc.

I wish he would use his setup for presentiment - my guess is that it would show an effect, indicating that the mental-physical link that we have talked about is real and somehow delocalised a bit in time.

David

[Interesting Ian]

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:

. . . the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand

. . . the predictions were not completely accurate

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!

[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Interesting Ian

It would be interesting to know what percentage success rate was obtained.

I've just been reading the comments on that page. Somebody notes that they only got a success rate of 60% when 50% is expected by chance!! (I never really looked at the chart).

Eh? This is supposed to prove we don't have free will . . .

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

Well the conventional logic is that if the decision got made some time earlier - before you thought you made the decision - your consciousness simply acted as a rubber stamp. To me, it is another example of the way that the concept of consciousness gets progressively weakened to fit into conventional science. If you take the physicalist approach, it seems to me that it is very hard to avoid falling into the pit of no free will, no responsibility, no real values, etc.

Perhaps your consciousness acted as a rubber stamp, but that does not mean that the nonconscious decision wasn't a libertarian one. Perhaps the definition of free will requires an act of free will to be conscious, but I do not see why that has to be the case. In particular, if we require that, then the vast majority of your decisions are not free.

~~ Paul

[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Perhaps your consciousness acted as a rubber stamp, but that does not mean that the nonconscious decision wasn't a libertarian one. Perhaps the definition of free will requires an act of free will to be conscious, but I do not see why that has to be the case. In particular, if we require that, then the vast majority of your decisions are not free.

~~ Paul

A non-conscious decision is surely an oxymoron. Does the spherical boulder decide to roll down the hill?

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Interesting Ian

I've just been reading the comments on that page. Somebody notes that they only got a success rate of 60% when 50% is expected by chance!! (I never really looked at the chart).

Eh? This is supposed to prove we don't have free will . . .

If only 60% figure is true ...... it suggrsts the opposite of what this article is suggesting.

[Open Mind]

Take your pick .....

(1) Consciousness is an illusion, with the illusion of having freewill, a complex process that evolved through evolution for no purpose whatsoever since exactly the same can supposedly be achieved by unconscious processes..

(2) Consciousness allows freewill but often utilizes subconscious habits that were the result of prior freewill choices, offering the evolutionary advantage of trusting a prior pattern with the consciousness only intervening when required.

Which sounds more reasonable?

The problem with these type of experiments (assuming this is just the same result as Libet's with larger time gap) is that the person knows in advance they have to make a choice in future. This unavoidably leads to contemplation which isn't necessarily the same thing as the moment of choice!

Here is a hypothetical process ...
Contemplation (type of freewill) -> prior habitual unconscious responses -> pattern subconsciously selected -> option to intervene (another type of freewill) - > action -> full conscious experience of process result

If so, precisely what are those scientist measuring?... from what to what? Do they know?

Libet used the term 'Readiness Potential' , that sounds a contemplative process, the knowing an activity is going to occur. Libet also claimed people could veto a choice at very short notice, often without any clear proceeding electrical activity.... this, if true, puts a spanner in the works of materialism.....does this paper look for these?

"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.

And seen though the eyes of a materialist ...... this could equally be worded.....
....Your contemplations are strongly correlated with brain activity. By the time full conscious awareness of these occur, most habitual responses are unlikely to be consciously aborted'

Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has.
In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine.

Call it contemplation instead? The idea the mind/brain is always 7 seconds ahead or requires such time to make decisions is absurd. If the brain needed to be 7 seconds ahead, we couldn't hold a normal conversation without 7 second gaps.

Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions.

Consistently ???% of the time....only 60%? Did freewill abort the unconscious pattern 40% of the time?

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.

Of course .....

"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."

Why not? Because you can't clearly measure it?

"It's not like you're a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate," he said.

How did it evolve? Why aren't we unconscious biological zombies, if the processes are all unconsciously decided? What was the evolutionary advantage of the illusion freewill if it actually unconsciously predetermined?

The unease people feel at the potential unreality of free will, said National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self as separate from the brain.

Misconception? It may be Mark Hallet is the one with misconception.

"That's the same notion as the mind being separate from the body -- and I don't think anyone really believes that," said Hallett.

Consider it Dr Hallett, just consider it, you have freewill to consider contrary viewpoints

"A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing."
Hallett doubts that free will exists as a separate, independent force.

This can never explain why consciousness evolved from unconscious processes, complex evolution without any evolutionary advantage.

"If it is, we haven't put our finger on it," he said.

Correct, try again