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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."
So how does this affect anything? Last I heard, what we called "choosing" to do an act was very specific and has nothing at all to do with brain states. That these states correlate with decisions are... accidental. I may be Wittgensteinizing here, but what it means for me to choose to do something is not the same as what it means for some sort of activity to be present in my brain. That both situations are called "choosing" may present some confusion, but they don't appear to have much to do with one another otherwise. This kind of article seems to be much hype over absolutely nothing...
welcome our new inner overlords.
I wasn't gonna post anything, but my cat gave me a freaky look, and now I'm posting...
I think this phewy, free will definatly still exists.... But I'm in the mood for tuna now, so I'll have to come back and explore this topic more after a snack.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
But philosophy isn't a science. It's jacking-off-with-words. Very few of what philosophy does has much to do with the real world. That's the difference to metaphysics (philosophies predecessor) which actually understood itself as part of science.
The problem is that philosophy writes a lot of words about other words. You can write a lot about free will and consciousness and self without ever actually defining those terms in a non-circular way. Most importantly: Without ever making your claims falsifiable.
If it can't be disproven, it's not science.
Also, if it can't be disproven, why should I care?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org