
How Free Is Your Will? - robg
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-free-is-your-will
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maxharris
From the article:

 _But before reaching any sweeping conclusions, it is important to remember
that this study looked at a very rudimentary kind of action. The decision to
move a finger hardly ranks as the same kind of free will we exercise when we
make moral choices or major life decisions. To conclude that we aren’t fully
responsible for our actions, for example, would be extremely far-fetched.

And lets consider two more things. First, Fried and his colleagues used their
patients’ reports on decision-to-move times; it is possible that people are
just very bad at accurately remembering or reporting when they made such
decisions (although it is unlikely that they would be wrong to the tune of
over a second). Second, the decision to move a finger – especially when that’s
the only thing you are supposed to do – might develop gradually rather than
occurring at a single time. (Try it yourself: hold your finger against a
surface, and wait till the urge to tap it causes you to. You may find that
this urge isn’t an all-or-none thing, and you wait till it is strong enough to
actually go ahead.)_

