[HN Gopher] The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)
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The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)
Author : Bluestein
Score : 11 points
Date : 2021-02-15 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
| joefourier wrote:
| Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart
| from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions
| without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any
| other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some
| external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with
| some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather
| illogical concept.
|
| It seems it is just a nebulous, ill-defined concept used to
| soothe discomfort with the idea that people's decisions are
| caused by physical processes, governed by the same laws as the
| rest of the universe.
| mcguire wrote:
| This kind of research shows how deeply dualism is ingrained in
| philosophy and the cognitive sciences.
|
| Picture this: You decide to move your hand, then you move your
| hand. An observer using fMRI or somesuch notes that they observe
| neural activity before you report making the decision, and they
| can even predict where and how you are going to move from
| observations of neural behavior.
|
| If you are a materialist, _how is this surprising?_ Of course
| neural activity precedes you being conscious of making a decision
| and taking an action---that is the mechanism by which you make a
| decision and take the action. What does it have to do with free
| will? Not very much, if anything. It only becomes a problem if
| you are a dualist and believe any conscious, free-will-iferous
| activity must come from an a-material, imperceptible "soul".
| Bluestein wrote:
| "free-will-iferous". (New fav word :)
| dvt wrote:
| > how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the
| cognitive sciences.
|
| It's not, though. Dualism has been a dying breed for at least a
| century now. Academics like Chalmers are rare outliers.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think a modern dualist would view this as hardware vs
| software.
|
| If all were able to measure were voltage levels on a CPU, you
| would say all computing is inevitably bound to changing
| electrical voltages/currents. However, you would miss out on
| all the math and algorithms and the beauty and richness that is
| software.
|
| A dualist might see the "soul" as the software that the
| physical brain executes. Of course, if all you have access to
| is brain electrical measurements, you see no distinction.
| However, if you look inside yourself with introspection, you
| will see a richness of ideas, thoughts, motivations that
| actually drive the physical brain.
| rslonik wrote:
| How one can prove a choice? Once you acted on this or that you
| simply cannot go back in time and choose something else.
|
| If you cannot change what you choose, there was never a choice.
| There was only one path (previously defined OR randomly defined),
| the one that you "chose".
|
| "I've could chose different" is only fiction at this point.
|
| Choice would be so hard to describe. All animals have can choose?
| (what brain function makes choice available for a being?) Are we
| "special" animals? (even worse)
|
| Free will is an ilusion and I think believing otherwise is like
| believing in god. An attempt to justify our lives.
|
| But yes, the experiment in question seems totally flawed.
| twodave wrote:
| This sort of debate always struck me as nonsense. If our actions
| are not derived of our own free will, but just exist as a small
| part of nature, then if you follow that thread far enough you'll
| understand that all reason and truth would also be invalid, being
| just the effect to some coincidental cause. This incidentally
| would render theories about the subject of free will invalid as
| well.
|
| Thus if there is no free will there is no way for us to know it.
| wruza wrote:
| I'm interested in topic. Can you please expand a little or
| point to a book/idea that does? The "reason and truth" part
| specifically. Why truth would be invalid if there exist only
| complex finite automata? Can't complex enough entities reason
| about this system while being a part of it, coincidentally
| being able to do that without contradiction?
| [deleted]
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| The brain is a deterministic system. We understand the dynamics
| of deterministic systems from the study of physics, so what is
| free will in terms of a system with an already decided outcome?
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Suppose an all powerful god controls everything that happens to
| us. Could not such a God give us the knowledge that we have no
| free will?
| cardanome wrote:
| A deterministic machine is still able to react based on
| external stimulus and able to reason about the world and
| itself.
|
| And we don't even need to go the full determinism route to
| disprove free will. What can free will be other than an
| illusion? Am I really deciding to be hungry, to want
| companionship, and so on? Am I simply doing what needs to be
| done to fulfill my needs while my brain is inventing reasons?
| What am I other that environmental factor, genetics, and maybe
| random noise? Nothing.
|
| Objective truth and reality exists independent of any person
| having a free will or not.
| Bluestein wrote:
| "Many people believe that evidence for a lack of free will was
| found when, in the 1980s, scientist Benjamin Libet conducted
| experiments that seemed to show that the brain "registers" the
| decision to make movements before a person consciously decides to
| move. In Libet's experiments, participants were asked to perform
| a simple task such as pressing a button or flexing their wrist.
| Sitting in front of a timer, they were asked to note the moment
| at which they were consciously aware of the decision to move,
| while EEG electrodes attached to their head monitored their brain
| activity."
| laszlokorte wrote:
| I guess free will just means that making a decision is a chaotic
| process that can broadly be influenced from the outside but in
| the end can not be preditected up to the moment the result is
| observed. This then in turn is observed as in that the decision
| was not completely determined by an outside signal so it is
| concluded that it must have been free.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I find attempts to disprove free will incredibly boring. If there
| is no free will, then everything the investigators wrote and did
| is the result of some deterministic (or random) process which
| doesn't have anything to do with logic or evidence and whether or
| not people accept the conclusion is also independent of reason
| and logic.
|
| Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be any
| discussion or argument, as that presupposes free will and an
| ability to change one's mind in response to evidence.
|
| By arguing against free will, you are cutting off the branch on
| which argument itself depends on.
| dvt wrote:
| > Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be
| any discussion or argument, as that presupposes free will and
| an ability to change one's mind in response to evidence.
|
| I don't think this follows, as logic (i.e. the "rules" of
| argument) aren't predicated on any notion of free will. You can
| still have good arguments, bad arguments, right arguments, and
| wrong arguments, in a perfectly deterministic universe.
| [deleted]
| ThalesX wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand this counter argument. Surely we can
| rationalize in a deterministic universe without having free
| will to make independent decisions based on objective
| rationalizations.
|
| What about understanding the clock structure? Does that limit
| my ability to reason about time? Or about digital clocks? Or to
| be upset at someone for not showing up when I was expecting
| them to.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| What do you mean by "rationalize"?
|
| What is the difference between rational and irrational in a
| deterministic universe?
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| Related from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484321
| cortesoft wrote:
| The idea that this experiment would disprove free will seems to
| rely on thinking that the 'conscious' mind is somehow separate
| from your physical brain, and free will is the act of your non-
| physical consciousness telling your body to move.
|
| This seems like nonsense to me. Your brain waves are the not
| caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts. Of course they are
| present before you are conscious of your decision to move,
| because they ARE your consciousness.
|
| Free will does not mean it has to be separate from your physics
| brain.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This article seems kind of like noting that a web server
| returns a response to the caller before logging it.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I would say it is more like "we noticed the data was present
| in memory before the server started sending its response"
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| That may be true, but I think our current conception of free
| will necessitates some sort of nondeterministic mechanism. Our
| brains, being physical systems, appear to be entirely
| deterministic.
| rory wrote:
| I think some _would_ define free will as necessarily separate
| from physical processes in the brain. Absent the existence some
| kind of magical soul-like concept, the free will debate in
| general seems like more of a semantic argument than a real
| philosophical one.
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