Free Will Increasingly Debunked By Science

By Daniel Miessler on March 31st, 2007: Tagged as Culture | Philosophy | Religion | Science

Wow. I just saw a link to an amazing article over at Scott Adams’ blog. The article’s about how science is learning more and more about the mechanics that go into “decision making”. They also explore the implications to society. I wrote a piece on the concept of free will recently as well, and this latest bit is in sync with it completely.

Check out this excerpt from the article: it’s pretty compelling stuff:

Two neuroscientists working in Australia have taken Libet’s discovery one step further. They found that, when asking people to choose to move either their left or right hands, it was possible to influence their choice by electronically stimulating certain parts of their brains. So, for example, the scientists could force the subjects always to choose to move their left hands. But despite their choice being electronically directed, these patients continued to report that they were freely choosing which hand to move.

Read that again if you believe in free will. They still thought they were choosing.:

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View Comments

  • Christine

    Do you think that this experiment was really carried out? It sounds very plausible at first glance but alternate situations bring up questions. For instance, take a person who knows the exact details of this experiment. If he, perhaps, is determined to raise his right hand all the time to counter this experiment, I cannot conceptualize the experiment being done on him and he somehow "forced" to raise his left hand. It seems illogical, and I don't see how this experiment could have been conceived in real life.


    A possible explanation to that would be to say that the past factors of the person (i.e. the knowledge that they had) influenced the person to the extent that he would raise his right hand instead, rather than fall back on the notion of free will? The idea's hard to conceptualize though, and it would be interesting seeing said experiment being tested.

  • Are you from the future?

    j/k

    Anyway, yeah, it does depend on what we define as free will. But the point is that most will agree that one is exercising it (whatever it is) when they elect to raise either their right or left hand as in the experiment.

    I think it does directly contradict that notion if it can be shown that scientists can influence that decision directly while the person still THINKS they're acting independently.
  • Time Traveller
    The most you can make of this experiment is that it is incosistent with a popular understanding of what free will is. Just because the subject thinks ( incorrectly )he has free will in one instance doesn't exactly prove the whole idea wrong..but maybe I just wrote this note because someone forced me to.
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