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Recent research in neuroscience following on from the pioneering work of Benjamin Libet seems to point to the disconcerting conclusion that free will is an illusion. Adina Roskies of Dartmouth College is not convinced that this conclusion follows. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast she explains to David Edmonds why the conclusion that free will is an illusion is far stronger than the evidence warrants.
Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will - podcast - http://t.co/06c9AfD7
in list: Neuroethics
Here, I’ll explain why neuroscience is not the death of free will and does not “wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility,” extending a discussion begun in Gary Gutting’s recent Stone column. I’ll argue that the neuroscientific evidence does not undermine free will.
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free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements.
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a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires.
Gazzaniga's book
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Just as you cannot explain traffic patterns by studying car parts, neuroscience must abandon its tendency to reduce macro-level phenomena like free will to micro-level explanations.
Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
"Our bodies can be controlled by outside forces in the universe, discovers Tom Chivers. So where does that leave free will?"
Benjamin Libet’s experimental finding that decisions had in effect already been made before the conscious mind became aware of making them is both famous and controversial; now new research (published in a ‘Brief Communication’ in Nature Neuroscience by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes) goes beyond it. Whereas the delay between decision and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds. (Conscious Entities)
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Whereas the delay between decision and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds.
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rimary motor cortex and the Supplementary Motor Area (SMA)
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Neil is not actually all that worried by Libet: the impulses from the event of intention formation ought to be registered later than the event itself in any case, he says; so Libet's results are exactly what we should have expected. Again, I'm inclined to agree: making a conscious decision is one thing; the second-order business of being conscious of that conscious decision naturally follows slightly later.
in list: Neuroethics
There may be all sorts of other factors affecting and changing you. Determinism may be false: some changes in the way you are may come about as a result of the influence of indeterministic or random factors. But you obviously can’t be responsible for the effects of any random factors, so they can’t help you to become ultimately morally responsible for how you are.
When I mention that I am a free will specialist, they tell me that Libet showed there could be no such thing. Of course we all know that Libet did no such thing. They are a whole bunch of criticisms out there in the literature which are each sufficient on their own to show that Libet did not succeed in that.
...Self-control constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature. Yet there is reason to believe that human and nonhuman self-control processes rely on the same biological mechanism-the availability of glucose in the bloodstream. Two experiments tested this hypothesis by examining the effect of available blood glucose on the ability of dogs to exert self-control. Experiment 1 showed that dogs that were required to exert self-control on an initial task persisted for a shorter time on a subsequent unsolvable task than did dogs that were not previously required to exert self-control. Experiment 2 demonstrated that providing dogs with a boost of glucose eliminated the negative effects of prior exertion of self-control on persistence; this finding parallels a similar effect in humans. These findings provide the first evidence that self-control relies on the same limited energy resource among humans and nonhumans. Our results have broad implications for the study of self-control processes in human and nonhuman species. - Psychological Science
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