Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again

Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by dkimball on Friday July 02, 2010 @10:28AM (#1481201)

I looked at this article, but I don't think the experiment proves as much as Libet claims it does. Neither he nor subsequent researchers seem to have gone beyond toy problems (what EEG activity appears in someone writing or programming?).

Also, I find it hard to believe that free will "lives" in one or another part of the brain; neither determinism nor randomness is freedom, and a physical "organ of free will" would have to be either deterministic (from macro-scale physics) or random (from quantum-scale activity).

I agree that living without free will is probably psychologically insupportable; even Muslims and Calvinists, who believe in double predestination (and Marxists, who believe in historical determinism), live as if free will was true. (Read _The Pilgrim's Progress_ and tell me that Bunyan really believed Puritan doctrines...)

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Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by dasil003 on Friday July 02, 2010 @12:56PM (#1481606)

We get angry when theologians try to overstep their bounds into science, so we should also get angry when scientists overstep their bounds into philosophy with all kinds of hamfisted assumptions.

I mean just because an assumption is necessary and reasonable for exploring the mechanics of the universe does not mean you can simply extrapolate to something as mysterious as the nature of consciousness and free will.

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Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by a-priori on Friday July 02, 2010 @03:04PM (#1482004)

Philosophy ceases to be philosophy when its claims can be tested empirically. The major branches of science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc.) were once considered topics in philosophy, but are no longer. It appears that Philosophy of Mind is currently making this transition.

(Edit: Changed "Theory of Mind" to "Philosophy of Mind"... psychology lingo crept in there for a second)

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Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by dasil003 on Friday July 02, 2010 @03:32PM (#1482091)

Absolutely true, however it's a bit overzealous to jump from starting to understand how the brain works to materialistic assumptions about the nature of consciousness of free will.

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Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by a-priori on Friday July 02, 2010 @04:37PM (#1482271)

See, from my perspective it's overzealous to assume that the conscious mind is not materialistic in nature.

With a question as ill-posed as the nature of consciousness, what's reasonable and what's overzealous depends entirely on your perspective.

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Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by dasil003 on Friday July 02, 2010 @05:09PM (#1482378)

Yes it's overzealous to assume either way. That's why it's philosophy not science.

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Re:Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by dasil003 on Friday July 02, 2010 @02:56PM (#1481979)

Aside from the fact that people didn't talk that way back then, the converse argument also holds true. We always have believed ourselves to be at the apex of knowledge. In 1610 the hubris belonged to the church, today the hubris belongs to those who believe science has all the answers.

The nice thing about science is at least it is actively questioning itself all the time. However individual scientists can easily subscribe to a philosophically materialist viewpoint without adequate evidence simply because they've spent their whole lives devoted to physics. The study of the correlation between the brain and consciousness needs to go much much deeper before they even hope to come close to having a crack at the free will debate.

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