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

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.