
Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned - badcede
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
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lordnacho
> He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to
> watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made
> a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started
> to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action,
> they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds
> beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate the act” before a
> person is even aware that decision has taken place, Libet concluded.

I don't get how people came to the original position. Why is this surprising?
A simple model would be that the decision causes both the awareness and the
action. Like when your program decides to move the robot arm and logs it, the
log arrives before the movement, but one is not the cause of the other.

Also there's a fair chance that whatever is taking in the external clock is
adding lag. So your eyes might have been in front of a clock that said a
certain time, but due to processing in wetware your awareness circuit has an
old value.

Also it seems like a leap to say this is connected to free will. Whatever is
causing the decision, how does the timing mean anything? It's only acausal if
you thought that awareness is what causes movement.

~~~
equanimitivity
“It’s only acausal if you thought that awareness is what causes movement”

Exactly, people believed that the thoughts they are aware of when making a
decision to move were actually how they decided to move.

~~~
pharke
Yes, I think the confusion of thoughts with the mind seems to be at the root
of much of the controversy surrounding free will. Narrativized thought is not
necessary for action although it often accompanies it. Too often we mistake
the verbal part of our mind for our whole mind, it is only a part though it
happens to be the loudest!

~~~
toasterlovin
Free will is the non-religious version of believing in souls.

When you examine what people actually mean when they use the term “free will”
in the vernacular, they essentially mean something which affects the mind, but
which is not the mind. It’s incoherent in light of the fact that the “it” that
they’re referring to ceases to exist once the brain in question ceases to
function.

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lootsauce
Our will power is like a muscle and can get tired. What if we have free will
that is not actually "exercised" all that often. Say 85% or more of our
actions are basically pre-ordained by decisions we have previously fully
internalized and so are basically automatic, but which still alighn with our
general will. Thats like an inexpensive (cached) result from the will banks.
Then actual "exercise" of free will comes about when the patterns for these
cache lookups fail and we must decide. But not only that, it is not exercised
unless our desire and our will diverge. If I desire a second slice of pie, but
my will is to not over-eat, it requires effort (will-power) to follow through
with my will. That is the exercise of free will and does not actually happen
as often as we might think.

~~~
lootsauce
This is basically a very simplified picture of free will described by Aquinas
[https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewi-m/#H4](https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewi-m/#H4)

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kazinator
If your brain made decisions outside of your free will which you become
conscious of after the fact, then that would manifest itself as a frequent
conflict: we would often disagree with the action that was taken. Because we
don't disagree, it must be something that is integrated with will.

Concretely, we are not surprised that our finger moved; we believe we wanted
to do that and we agree with that action.

Moreover, this readiness potential phenomenon works on short time scales. The
will operates on long time scales. I can plan at 11:55 that I will move my
finger at 12:00, five minutes ahead. And then when the time comes, do just
that. Still, the readiness potential will play out the same way: the commands
to move the finger precede the conscious awareness of the finger moving.

~~~
empath75
People frequently do things that they don't want to do or didn't plan to do --
most notably drug addicts and alcoholics.

~~~
kazinator
Note that regret isn't the same thing as "my hand moved without any intent
from me, WTF?".

~~~
friedman23
>my hand moved without any intent from me, WTF?

This is how addiction actually manifests. Put an alcoholic in front of a glass
of whisky and often they will grab and attempt to drink without conscious
thought.

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rpmisms
I don't see how the original experiment "debunked" free will. Wouldn't the
decision-making process spark neural activity?

~~~
jobigoud
The thesis was that taking the action or not taking the action resulted in
different EEG patterns, Bereitschaftspotential or not, and that the spike was
visible _before_ the person was consciously taking the decision. So it's not
just the neural activity from the _decision-making_ process, it's the neural
activity from taking a specific decision, seen before the decision is taken by
the person. As if the decision was taken by a deeper sub-system.

~~~
cortesoft
Isn't this an inherent problem with looking at brain activity for this sort of
thing?

Suppose free will is real, and a person makes the decision and then takes the
action. The brain waves marking that the decision was made HAVE to show up
before the person is aware that they have made a decision, because both their
awareness has to be 'signaled' by a brain wave coming from a decision. The
deciding process, the decision, the awareness of the decision, and the actual
brain signal to move the muscle ALL come from the brain, and will all feedback
to each other. Any awareness that you have made a decision would show up in
brainwaves BEFORE you are able to articulate it, since you can't articulate
something that hasn't been experienced by your brain yet.

The only thing this sort of experiment could disprove is the idea that free
will comes from something OUTSIDE your brain. If we believe your brain
represents everything that you are (in terms of thoughts and consciousness),
then anything the brain signals can't come BEFORE you have exercised free
will, since the signal IS your free will.

I am very confused as to how anyone could think your brain waves could
disprove free will.

~~~
armitron
You are mixing up definitions. You use "you" to mean "brain". Under that
model, of course you can't disprove free will. But the model you are using is
not at all useful, as you illustrate in your confusion.

The idea of free will is typically assigned to a "conscious self-model", not
just a brain. The self-model generally accepted to be an emergent construct of
the brain.

Thus, in the "conscious free will" model, if the brain makes a decision and
hands it over to the "self-model", there is -obviously- no free will. The
conscious self-model is simply an observer after the fact. Any notion of
agency that it experiences is an illusion.

~~~
cortesoft
I don't think I follow... even if we think of the "conscious free will" as
being an emergent property of the brain, it would still be made up of brain
waves within the brain.

What else would free will be but an aspect of your brain? There is nothing
else for it to be?

~~~
armitron
Think in terms of a layered system (subsumption architecture is useful [1]).

Sure the substrate is the brain and is common to all layers, but the layers
are functionally different.

The self-model, "you" is a high-level circuit. The low-level circuits make all
decisions and relay the results to the higher levels.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture)

[2]
[https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=9000](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=9000)

~~~
cortesoft
From your second link: "Will and perception do not cause the firing of
neurons; they result from it. By definition, everything we are conscious of
has to be preceded by neuronal activity that we are not conscious of. That’s
just cause/effect. That’s physics."

I guess that is the part that I have trouble with... especially the first
sentence: ""Will and perception do not cause the firing of neurons; they
result from it"

They don't cause it OR result from it... they ARE it. Everything that is us
(including our free will) is made up of those neurons. Our thoughts are
neurons firing. Everything we think and believe and experience and decide is
contained in those neurons, their state, and their connections.

I always thought the question of free will (at least since I was a philosophy
undergrad) was about whether our brains (and the universe) are deterministic
or not. I feel like the more we learn about quantum mechanics and physics, the
more it seems like the world is NOT deterministic. The uncertainty of the
universe means the neuron behavior is NOT deterministic, and that non-
determinism is where free will lies.

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k2xl
Would love for someone to describe effectively what free will means. Because
to me the concept itself doesn't make much sense to me and never has.

I don't have free will over my breathing, in one definition (since it can be
consider "involuntary"). In another definition I could say I have free will
over my breathing because I could hold my breath.

What is an example of free will? And what is hypothetical experiment that
would actually prove or disprove it?

~~~
benlivengood
For me, free will is the feeling and belief that if I want my body to do
something I have a pretty good chance of making it do that. Additionally, I
can decide to train some reflexive behavior and tailor it to be more of what I
want my automatic responses to be. It's a feeling of integration between my
desires and my actions that doesn't feel like it's driven from outside my
body. For example, if I get a muscle twitch or spasm or a limb falls asleep
and I can't move my digits then my sense of free will is lessened. When I
walk, talk, etc. then the feeling is reinforced.

~~~
sixplusone
>integration between my desires and my actions

how did you decide to have these desires? if it's a good feeling, then you
didn't decide that such a desire will give you this feeling; if it's based on
a computed most-advantageous outcome, then you didn't decide that either. If
it's a choice between the two, then who decides and how (infinite regression)?

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buboard
Let's say the question is not settled. There are experiments showing how one
can predict a choice 7 seconds before.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112](https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112)

------
pmoriarty
What's the "reverse averaging" that the article talks about?

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raindeer3
Would recommend everyone interested in the topic of Free will to listen to
this episode of BBCs In our time:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z)

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downerending
Interesting science, but it's not possible even principle that such
experiments could determine the presence or absence of free will. It's kind of
like a child trying to figure out how Big Bird walks by studying the guts of a
TV.

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skissane
How can you discuss free will and completely ignore the most basic philosophy
on the topic, the distinction between compatibilist and incompatibilist
definitions of it? Libet’s argument is an argument against incompatibilist
free will (aka metaphysical libertarianism), not compatibilist free will.
Whether or not it succeeds at that, it doesn’t disprove compatibilist free
will in any way, it doesn’t even try to.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think basically you can disregard any study or article that purports to say
that "science" has found why humans behave in a certain manner or that
attempts to answer philosophical or social questions using fMRI or EEG.

~~~
buboard
Sure, if you are a dualist.

------
rubbingalcohol
To say an argument has been "debunked" implies that the argument holds no
credibility, or the rhetorical equivalent of "I'm right, you're wrong." It is
an attempt to shut down a discussion and provide fodder for ad-hominem attacks
against those who dare to disagree.

In other words, The Atlantic should be ashamed to run a headline like this
because it is antithetical to rational discussion.

~~~
dang
Ok, but what's a better word? Refuted? The article makes clear that Schurger's
counterargument has been generally accepted.

Edit: given the link in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486117)
I suppose we can say "questioned".

~~~
empath75
I don't think it's even refuted. It's just redefining what 'decision' is and
using that to somehow make the case for free will.

Previously they were saying that the start of the neural activity was when a
decision was made, and now they are saying that the decision is only made when
a particular threshold is reached, but either way the decision is a result of
neural activity that began before the person was consciously aware of it.
They're just redefining terms to reach the result they wanted.

~~~
naasking
The assumption that conscious awareness is necessary for an exertion of free
will is also a mistake. The original conclusion was chock full of assumptions.
No one debated the specifics of the observed data, what is debatable is the
meaning of that data.

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jknoepfler
Ah, the hallmark of 20th century pseudo-intellectualism: operationalize an
ill-defined concept (e.g. "free will," "rationality," "empathy"), produce a
dubiously reproducible experiment, maybe write a controversial paperback
making ridiculously hyperbolic claims, let the press go apeshit, $$$.

Other flavors include: Pluck a plausible, edgy explanation out of a vast
hypothesis space (e.g. evolutionary psychology), over-reductively apply a
catchy theorem to a vastly complicated domain (looking at you, game theory).
Take a thin, ecologically invalid model and claim "that's how the brain
works!" (both neural networks and sybolic reasoning systems).

I feel like in this century, we've realized that all of this was maybe useful
as a reference point to formulate hypotheses, but become less stupid about the
conclusions we're willing to draw (as a population).

The wonderful reality is that we don't really have strong opinions about free
will, because we're not sure we really know what that could mean or why
precisely it seemed so important a century ago.

~~~
Gibbon1
A good question to ask does the answer to any of these nebulous ill defined
questions have any non socio-politcial consequences? If the answer is no, be
very very dubious.

~~~
sutterbomb
The concept of free will has tremendous implications for oursocio-policial
world, such as in criminal justice or even taxation.

~~~
naasking
Not really. Presumably a criminal justice system ought to be designed to be
effective at rehabilitating and deterring crime. That's a strictly empirical
enterprise that needn't concern itself with abstract notions of free will.

The law could of course codify its own definition of free will, which it
typically does, but again this need not be affected by outside notions.

