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Do you believe in free will? Some researchers doubt it, and they point to evidence from neuroscience to support their view. Some people find it deeply unsettling to give up the idea of control over their choices and actions. As experts in the field, we know that this is how they feel, because we regularly receive emails from them asking, often in desperation, about neuroscience research that they believe casts doubt on the possibility of free will. Most of these claims rely on scientists’ findings that they can predict choices based on brain activity recorded before the person in the experiment is conscious of their own choice. Free will skeptics argue that unconscious processes in the brain can initiate actions that a person later mistakenly believes to be the result of their own free will.
But what if these studies have been misinterpreted and the problem lies in small details that most people don't notice or understand?
Neuroscience research dating back to the early 1980s argued that conscious free will is an illusion (“conscious free will” refers to our conscious decisions that determine our actions). These findings piled up like nails in the coffin of free will as proposed by neuroscientists and hammered into the mainstream media, until in 2016 the Atlantic declared, “Free Will as a Concept Doesn’t Exist.”
But not so fast. More recent studies, combining empirical data and computational modeling, show that the previous research was misinterpreted, and neither disproves the existence of conscious free will. We conclude that neuroscience has not disproved conscious free will.
Many cognitive neuroscientists in the field, including former proponents of the “no free will” idea, now acknowledge that the supposed neurobiological evidence against it is dubious. Unfortunately, the public has not yet gotten this information, and the idea that neuroscience has disproved conscious free will, or even free will in general, remains widespread.
Once the exclusive domain of philosophers, free will and consciousness are increasingly being studied by neuroscientists. These questions are different from other areas of neuroscience in that they have profound implications for most, if not all, humanity. In contrast, few would worry about the relative importance of other human qualities, such as whether humans can sense magnetic fields directly (magnetoreception).
Science often moves forward by proposing hypotheses that are later revised or rejected. However, given the deeply existential nature of will research, we are faced with two important questions: What bar should we set for evidence that purports to link free will? And how should we evaluate and interpret such evidence to understand whether or when it has been met?
Given what philosophers of science call “inductive risk,” or the costs of potential errors, we must set the bar high. The costs of incorrectly denying free will are significant, as the challenge letters we receive show. And there are good reasons to doubt the oft-cited evidence. The neuroscience of will typically focuses on immediate (or proximal) and meaningless decisions (e.g., “Press a button every now and then, whenever you feel like it, for no reason at all”). Yet the decisions we care about in the context of free will and responsibility matter, and often have longer time horizons. Perhaps many or even most of our everyday decisions—such as when to take our next sip from a glass of water, or which foot to put forward—are not acts of conscious free will. But perhaps some decisions are. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is these more consequential decisions that are the hardest to study.
What neuroscience needs to refute conscious freedom in
Sourse: www.livescience.com
