Researchers: Neuroscience has not “disproved” free will
| March 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
the open door/ William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877)
From ScienceDaily:
For several decades, some researchers have argued that neuroscience studies prove human actions are driven by external stimuli — that the brain is reactive and free will is an illusion. But a new analysis of these studies shows that many contained methodological inconsistencies and conflicting results.
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And this isn’t a problem solely within the neuroscience community. Earlier work by Dubljevic and his collaborators found challenges in how this area of research has been covered by the press and consumed by the public.
“To be clear, we’re not taking a position on free will,” Dubljevic says. “We’re just saying neuroscience hasn’t definitively proven anything one way or the other.” Paper. (paywall) – Victoria Saigle, Veljko Dubljević, Eric Racine. The Impact of a Landmark Neuroscience Study on Free Will: A Qualitative Analysis of Articles Using Libet and Colleagues’ Methods. AJOB Neuroscience, 2018; 9 (1): 29 DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425756 (paywall) More.
The presumption that there is no free will (so decisions don’t really matter) has nothing to do with neuroscience. But it is central for naturalist plans for our global future. Therefore, studies that disprove free will (and therefore, the legitimacy of voter choice) will always be funded. In today;s w on evidence, reliance on facts may cause us to be treated with suspicion.
And if you vote for the consequences, you own them. So, unfortunately does everyone else, if you are part of a majority. You voted us all off the island.
See also: GP, Mike Pence and Free Will
At Physics Central: How human beings can have free will as complex, purely physical systems
Do the defects of real numbers open the door to free will in physics?
and
How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice?
20 Responses to Researchers: Neuroscience has not “disproved” free will
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Neuroscience, or science in general, will never “disprove” free will, or the existence of a soul, or any other metaphysical speculation about a possible non-material aspect of our nature.
If we have a soul, and free will, it interfaces with our material self in some undetectable and unmiraculous way (in the sense of not violating known natural laws), so studying how our material body works is not going to illuminate the presence, or absence, of such a non-material aspect of ourself.
The findings of science, in significant ways, are open to different metaphysical speculations about the immaterial that can’t be investigated, much less resolved, by science itself.
What one believes about such things is a philosophical choice, subject to critical examination and the sharing of perspectives, but not subject to “disproof”.
What should be the default view on Free Will?
We talk about Free Will because we feel it in us and in the actions of all other. Even those attempting to disprove Free Will instead prove its existence by trying to persuade us when in its absence there would not be a need or urge to disprove Free Will. We can also demonstrate that dead matter is only moved by external forces hence does not have Free Will, and that the living act upon external forces and also what appears to be internally determination, aka Free Will. Therefore, we all have Free Will unless one can demonstrate otherwise.
Free Will is the belief that at least some our actions are not completely determined by agencies beyond our power. “Some” is more than “none”, but it doesn’t have to be “most” or even “many”. Thus, the burden of proof against Free Will is impossibly high as all – not just some – of our actions would have to be entirely – not just partly – determined by external forces to disprove Free Will. This proof has not been provided.
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http://nonlin.org/free-will
I think that the entire argument over free will is pointless. We can’t control all of the factors necessary to be able to effectively test whether or no it exists.
AK,
Not pointless at all. Goes to show that Darwinistas make illogical claims left and right – some more than others. It’s very informative.
NonLin,
We either have free will, or we have something that is effectively indistinguishable from free will. In either case, we can’t confirm this one way or the other. Any arguments are purely philosophical and not substantive, on either side of the argument.
AK,
More than that. Are you trying to prove Free Will? Because I am not. But they are illogically trying to disprove Free Will and even worse, trying to shift the burden onto FW supporters.
This belongs in the same category as “Nothing in biology makes sense…”. NOTHING? What kind of nonsense is this? Also “blind, mindless, and purposeless environmental process”. Really? How the heck would you (Dawkins, etc.) even know this? Also “natural selection”. Really? Total nonsense “mechanism”: http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/
And let’s not forget “science vs religion” brought to you by the knights of “science”: http://nonlin.org/philosophy-religion-and-science/
The reality of free will has far more experimental evidence going for it than is apparently realized in the paper:
Specifically, Libet himself was a strong defender of free will, and he interpreted his own experiments as validating free will.
Moreover, despite the widespread disinformation on the internet about what Libet’s experiments actually indicate, it is now found that “A person’s decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. (People) are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement,”,,, “Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought.”
But besides that, the Theist can now also appeal to evidence from quantum mechanics to support his belief in free will. For instance, at the 7 minute mark of the following video, Anton Zeilinger, a leading experimentalist in quantum mechanics, weighs in on free will in quantum mechanics and states “we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement.”,,, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
In the following article Steven Weinberg, an atheist, expresses his unease with quantum mechanics since humans, (via free will), “are therefore brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”. Weinberg further objects to the instrumentalist approach in that “the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Since our free will choices are now experimentally shown, via Zeilinger and others, to matter at even “the most fundamental level” of the laws of nature, then it is important to realize that although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options in the end. Eternal life, (infinity if you will), with God, or Eternal life, (infinity again if you will), without God.
C.S. Lewis states the two ultimate options that we all ultimately have to face as such:
And just as is presupposed Christian Theism, we now have fairly compelling scientific evidence for a heavenly dimension and for a hellish dimension. Specifically, Christians can appeal directly to Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity to support their belief that God upholds this universe in its continual existence, as well as to support their belief in a heavenly dimension and in a hellish dimension.
In fact, when the Agent causality of God is rightly let back into modern physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned (Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, and Planck to name a few), then an empirically backed reconciliation between Quantum Theory and General Relativity is found in Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Specifically, the fact that Christ dealt with both quantum mechanics and gravity in his resurrection from the dead is evidenced in the Shroud of Turin:
Verse:
Folks, without responsible rational freedom of thought and action not even the discussion we term neuroscience has any credibility. Freedom is a presumption of rational mind. KF
Nonlin,
I am not trying to prove free will nor disprove it. I am just pointing out that without the ability to effectively test for it, any discussion on either side of the argument is nothing more than navel gazing. Besides, whether or not it exists is neither evidence for nor evidence against ID.
The false claim,,
,,, vs the evidence,,, “Creating new axioms and free will are shown to be different aspects of the same phenomena: the creation of new information.”
i.e. No Mind with free will, i.e. purposeful intent, then no creation of new information.
The preceding is a falsifiable statement.
I am troubled by the idea that Free Will, in order to be considered reality, must be falsifiable somehow. I agree that any test for this would be difficult.
The test would need to be designed to determine if actions were not completely determined by agencies beyond the control of those being tested. In other words, you would test to see if some actions or choices were beyond personal control.
This has been done with canines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iTTNRE-njM
Clearly some dogs have free will while others are merely creatures of instinct/habit.
Our belief that at some moments there really is more than one possible future, that we are genuinely free to choose either A or B, is a properly basic belief. There’s no reason to give it up unless we’re presented with a compelling defeater, and in the nature of the case there are no such defeaters out there.
Nice. 🙂
Obviously the first dog’s behavior is driven by the habits created by his training, and the second dog is doing whatever he damn well pleases.
LoneCycler,
Whatever test we design would have to do more than this. It would have to demonstrate that under identical conditions, the same person could make a different choice. That is where the difficulty lies. How can you ensure that all other conditions are identical? The brain would have to start with the identical configuration, with the identical chemical makeup, with identical input, etc. An impossible task given the sheer complexity of the brain.
AK @ 15:
And then you’d just have confirmed mind mechanics lying outside of the brain; mechanics whose causal basis and rules would still have to be discovered, if at all possible.
AK @ 10:
So you think this is just a discussion about religious views (beliefs)? This is not how FW opponents see it.
Furthermore, it’s not a toss-up. The simple test is that we feel and act as if we have FW. Why be neutral when the default view should be “FW is true”?
If no FW, then we’re just biologic machines as the materialists claim. You don’t want that.
What we want does not dictate what is true.
Folks, not everything we can or do know — even to self-evident certainty — is known by scientific or empirical investigations. Scientism fails as an account of knowledge, warrant or reason. Ponder Mathematics i/l/o Godel’s incompleteness, which is an inherently abstract discipline. We can know ourselves to be responsibly and rationally significantly free as that is the premise of reason, which one must presume even in trying to doubt or dismiss such freedom as an unstated but real premise. Were that not the case, we would not be exerting rational insight and choice on reasoning but just blindly playing out some computational, causal chain by chance and/or equally blind mechanical necessity. That reduces to instant absurdity. The evidence of the rational discourse, reflection and knowledge we experience — including in this thread — is decisive evidence of significant rational, responsible freedom. KF
AK @ 18:
Absolutely true. Meanwhile we live in a materialistic world where the Darwinist pig flies because too many are neutral between sense and nonsense.