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.
Exactly, people believed that the thoughts they are aware of when making a decision to move were actually how they decided to move.
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.
It's not that uncommon
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.
Or does that just mean that our ability to measure when a decision is made is flawed?
(Dualism!)
The first thing that is needed or this to work, is for the part of universe representing the human to be separable from the rest of the universe (this is not true with superdeterminism, which requires choices that experimenters make to be correlated with the quantum states of particles they are studying, but then almost no one takes superdeterminism seriously).
This separability would allow to talk about choice, as it allows to modify or swap the human in question and recompute the future in the same universe where the human may make another choice.
The second thing is the conjecture of computational irreducibility: that is for sufficiently complex systems like humans and for sufficiently long timeframes, the only way to predict future state is to evaluate the system. This conjecture seems plausible because even cellular automata in chaotic state, do not appear to have any simplified method of evaluation
If this is true, you may be able to easily predict some of the choices human will make based on his state several seconds before that, but for longer time intervals the only way is to let the human live and make the choice (even if it lives in your computer simulation).
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?
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)?
In other words, The Atlantic should be ashamed to run a headline like this because it is antithetical to rational discussion.
Edit: given the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486117 I suppose we can say "questioned".
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.
Seems to be used all the time for things that aren't a scam, a hoax, a lie or something like that.
This is one of the example sentences Mirriam-Webster gives for the word debunk:
> The results of the study debunk his theory.
HN sometimes changes headlines to be more correct. Propose one.
"The topic is immensely complicated, and Schurger's valiant debunking underscores the need for more precise and better-informed questions."
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.
As for being edgy, you are taking a condescending position using broad and vague claims that are impossible to refute ("looking at you game theory").
I agree that by itself "free will" is meaningless to talk about unless the term is defined. I'm sure most if not all authors on the subject do define what they mean by free will, eg, Dennett and Harris, but I'm sure there are many others who do.
Woa, woa. Symbolic reasoning _has_ been claimed to model the way the brain works (the original Pitts and McCulloch neuron was a propositional logic circuit that purported to model the way actual neurons work) but that sort of thing is much more common in connectionism. In fact, it's basically the whole story of connectionism ("let's copy the brain").
In any case first order logic was originally proposed as the foundation of maths, and nothing to do with how the human brain works.
Free will is a proxy argument in the debate about physical determinism, which is a component when talking about metaphysical and spiritual reality, which comes up in discussions about the existence of God - whom the modern zeitgeist doesn't believe and/or wishes to disprove.
