from Hacker News

Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned

by badcede on 11/8/19, 5:16 PM with 80 comments

• by lordnacho on 11/8/19, 8:49 PM

  > 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.

• by lootsauce on 11/8/19, 9:32 PM

  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.

• by kazinator on 11/8/19, 8:25 PM

  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.

• by rpmisms on 11/8/19, 7:14 PM

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

• by k2xl on 11/8/19, 8:34 PM

  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?

• by buboard on 11/8/19, 8:21 PM

  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

• by pmoriarty on 11/8/19, 7:39 PM

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

• by raindeer3 on 11/9/19, 8:18 AM

  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

• by downerending on 11/8/19, 10:16 PM

  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.

• by skissane on 11/8/19, 8:28 PM

  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.

• by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 11/8/19, 7:16 PM

  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.

• by rubbingalcohol on 11/8/19, 7:13 PM

  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.

• by jknoepfler on 11/8/19, 9:23 PM

  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.