

Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will - ColinWright
http://m.io9.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-probably-dont-have-free-will

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dmfdmf
Evidence _presupposes_ a mind capable of making a choice. All these attacks on
free will are self-contradictory, free will is an axiom that you can't escape;
you must use it even to deny it. Whatever the neuro-scientists are measuring
it is not "proving" that free will does not exist or is an illusion. They are
demonstrating that our understanding of the relation between the mind and the
brain is inadequate and that we don't understand how the subconscious works
and its relation to the conscious mind.

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nerdfiles
You !== Your Brain. This is not the kind of thing that science can "discover"
and "more evidence" doesn't change that. Freedom of the will is a concept that
also is embedded within our cultural gestalt/framework.

We may _decide_ that such neuroscientific conditions, as evidenced by fMRI for
instance, say that our will is not active in certain circumstances, but
deciding that isn't so clear cut. We may not have free will under most
conditions, but the onus is on the neuroscientist to demonstrate what those
conditions are. That said, most personal agency is a feature of systems much
more higher order than the brain. "Luck" is a prime example where we often
attribute agency regardless of any physical conditions having taken place.

>His experiment showed that the neurons lit up with activity as much as 1.5
seconds before the participant made a conscious decision to press a button.

Hume's skeptical argument applies here as well. Correlation doesn't imply
causation, etc. And you need at least to prove this much before one can get an
identity claim. But again: You !== Your Brain.

Even if true, as I said earlier about the cultural gestalt: The idea that one
does not have free will entails that one is reducible to one's brain; and this
is absurd, on its face. Moreover, natural language itself does not suggest
this at all, and in fact suggests the opposite.

~~~
lewispollard
> The idea that one does not have free will entails that one is reducible to
> one's brain; and this is absurd, on its face.

I'm intrigued. Why is this the case?

~~~
nerdfiles
1\. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RiztsaCSds>

2\. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZx93eov5i4>

They may add clarity and precision where I have made a gloss.

PMS Hacker and most Wittgensteinians come to this conclusion; it is largely
the reason why they find any value in Freudian/Gestalt psychology: for the
fact that these brands of psychology avoid, as much as they can, reductionist,
and this is for the fact that their theories depend on building metanarratives
_on top of_ "folk psychology" rather than attempting to undercut folk
psychology with some more primitive theory. The whole debate turns on which
theories have better "explanatory power" while preserving our intuitive
notions of the brain. Wittgenstein criticized Freudians for mistaking
"decision" for "discovery"; and this is exactly what "Crypto-Cartesians" do
except what is discover is not a psychological law à la Freud, but rather a
neurological law. Now, of course, in their own worlds, these laws make sense;
there are law like relations between, say, joy and pain; their are laws
between synaptic path/subsystems and the behavior of neurons. However, talking
about those laws does not give us direct insight into the _organism for which
those laws have constituted_.

It should be clear that if free will is not possible, then we must wonder why
we decided to look inside the brain, rather than the foot, to discover why it
is not possible. The problem, like with the Freudians, is that identity claims
like You === Your Brain are a matter of decision, not discovery. We might
decide and agree such identity claims, but not without doing severe damage to
the common language which we use to identify correlations and criteria which
support as evidence those claims.

What these scientists are trying to do is make their position _compelling_;
that is the fundamental problem here since engaging in such "justificatory"
activity is a feature of science itself (i.e., peer review). This feature of
the structure of scientific practice, by and large, makes it "absurd, on its
face." These scientists attempt to pass off as discovery what can, by the
nature of science itself, only be suggestion, persuasion, justification.

Please also review "[The Philosophical Foundations of
Neuroscience]([http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foun...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foundations_of_Neuroscience))."

