Brain Study Calls Free Will Into Question

siddster notes an account up at Wired of research indicating that brain scanners can see your decisions before you make them. "In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them... Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will... The experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions... Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."

Comments

Horrible summery

[wizardforce]

" Brain Study Calls Free Will Into Question"
what utter nonsense. The ability to predict an action by looking at what your brain is doing has nothing to do with whether or not free will exists. From TFA:

In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration.

sounds to me that the decision making is started before people think it is, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Predict the prediction.

[BungaDunga]

Conscious parts. Your muscles can't pull a trigger at the right moment without having input from your eyes. It may bypass conscious "areas" of the brain entirely, but something has to happen in the brain for you to do anything (even breathe).

Re:How does this eliminate Free Will?

[Anguirel]

Actually, you do. Free Will must be a conscious act for it to matter in all the senses that philosophy cares about -- if agency is to exist, it must exist in a conscious form. If some subconscious process is "making" your decisions prior to your "self" (where "self" is your conscious and self-conscious awareness), you don't really have Free Will, since conscious deliberation on possible actions has no effect on the resulting action you take.

If you haven't, I suggest looking into some Philosophy of Self and Philosophy of Mind books and essays, since I certainly don't have the time right now to get into it as deeply as a subject like this deserves.

Re:"Free will" is not part of the Christian faith.

[susano_otter]

Actually, the Christian faith, taken as a whole is much more complicated than that. It consistently asserts opposite and contradictory truths, often in its core doctrines: A god of infinite justice and infinite mercy. Total predetermination and total free will. Absolute obedience to the Law, and absolute freedom from the Law. Etc.