Chapman University philosopher Alessandra Batchera and experimental psychologist Tomáš Dominik provide interesting support for free will. Many commentators have interpreted Benjamin Libet’s experiments that showed that the brain is ready to make decisions. (responsiveness) It often preceded the subject’s conscious awareness of the choices made.
There! they said, prove Having no free will:
For many observers, these findings debunked the intuitive notion of free will. After all, if neuroscientists can infer the timing of your movements and choices long before you’re consciously aware of your decisions, then perhaps people are just puppets and have a threshold of consciousness. It is driven by the neural processes that unfold below.
Alessandra Batchera, Tomas Dominik“Free will is only an illusion. So are you.” Scientific American (January 16, 2023)
The problem is that the movements the researchers studied in these classic experiments were not personally important to the experimental subjects.
Most empirical research on free will, including Libet’s work, has focused on this kind of arbitrary action. In such behaviors, researchers can indeed “read” our brain activity and track information about our movements and choices before we even know we are about to do it. You can. The more important decisions, such as whether to
Alessandra Batchera, Tomas Dominik“Free will is only an illusion. So are you.” Scientific American (January 16, 2023)
Key decisions are a small but important subset of the decisions we make every day. But they’re also exactly what we think free will matters. discovered.
They gave participants a choice of two nonprofits to which they could donate $1,000. People could press the left or right button to indicate their preferred tissue. In some cases, the button determined which organization would receive her full $1,000, so participants knew their choices mattered. In other cases, people deliberately made nonsensical choices because they were told that both organizations would receive his $500 regardless of the choice.
Alessandra Batchera, Tomas Dominik“Free will is only an illusion. So are you.” Scientific American. (January 16, 2023) This paper is open access.
And researchers have found something surprising. But there was no meaningful choice. When we care about decisions and their consequences, our brains look different than when decisions are arbitrary. ”
Buccella and Dominik downplay the significance of the discovery by quickly changing the subject. A 2022 open-access study of 600 participants found that most participants understood how our brains make important decisions, such as changing jobs, differently than unimportant decisions, such as which socks to wear. It was shown that it did not think that it was processing with. It’s good to know, but not as thought-provoking as the 2019 findings.
Going back a little to that 2019 study, we found that our brains conduct Handle important decisions differently that is important to us? If there is no possibility of being ready for our important decisions, why don’t they need it? How are they made? Is another system intervening undetected when a critical decision is made?
Buccella and Dominique quickly reassure the reader that they are sailing in presumably dangerous waters. Scientific American That they are not proposing a non-materialistic interpretation:
“We” are our brains. Combined research reveals that humans have the power to make conscious choices. They occur in the brain, whether or not scientists see them as clearly as readiness potentials.
Therefore, there are no “ghosts” in the cerebral machinery. However, as researchers, we argue that the general concept of “free will” or “self” is still incredibly useful because this machine is so complex, enigmatic and mysterious. increase.
Alessandra Batchera, Tomas Dominik“Free will is only an illusion. So are you.” Scientific American(January 16, 2023)
In fact, the 2019 study they cite points in the direction of unimportant factors in decision making. That factor may be why we are consciously free to choose. But at the moment it can only be dealt with in an obfuscated way.
Summary: Likelihood of Readiness (RP)—an important ERP correlate of future behavior—is known to precede subjects’ reports of their decision to move. Some see this as evidence against the causal role of consciousness in human decision-making, and thus against free will. However, previous research has focused on arbitrary decisions. It was aimless, irrational, and without consequences. It remains unclear to what extent RP generalizes to more environmentally conscious and deliberate decisions. We directly compared the intentional and arbitrary decisions in giving $1,000 to nonprofits. We found the expected RP for arbitrary decisions, but surprisingly missing for intentional decisions. Our results and the drift-diffusion model are consistent with RP, which represents the accumulation of noisy random fluctuations that make arbitrary rather than intentional decisions. They further point to various neural mechanisms underlying intentional and arbitrary decisions and challenge the generalizability of research that argues that there is no causal role of consciousness in decision-making over real-world decisions. I’m here.
Uri Maoz, Gideon Yaffe, Christof Koch, Liad Mudrik (2019) Neural precursors of critical decision-making—an ERP study of intentional and arbitrary choices eLife 8:e39787.
You may also want to read: Does science disprove free will? Physicists say no. Marcelo Grizer notes that the mind is not a solar system with strict deterministic laws. It shows complex nonlinear dynamics, except for the simple laws that govern neurons, but we don’t know the laws that the mind follows. (Michael Egner)
