A Famous Argument Against Free Will Debunked

[The alchemist]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

 

[Helios]

Good read

So it turns out that we have brain activity going on that ebbs and flows and it will sometimes reach a point where it will result in a decision to undertake a "spontaneous" action when we're stationary, not through prior anticipation or our conscious input.

So the "random" decision to move our fingers isn't by freewill but prior brain activity peaking, and creating the motor movement.

 

[The alchemist]

Good read

So it turns out that we have brain activity going on that ebbs and flows and it will sometimes reach a point where it will result in a decision to undertake a "spontaneous" action when we're stationary, not through prior anticipation or our conscious input.

So the "random" decision to move our fingers isn't by freewill but prior brain activity peaking, and creating the motor movement.

Scientists previously believed the brain, specifically pre-motor brain activity, anticipated the voluntary movements, and the experiments were used as an argument against free until it got debunked. Now we're sort of back to square one.

The German scientists first conducted research made people believe that conscious choice was just an illusion, but this was later debunked with better technology and more reliable control factors that observed measurements with fewer biases:

"In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment."

 

[Apollo]

Everything is a spectrum, probably free will as well.

 

[The alchemist]

Everything is a spectrum, probably free will as well.

Some people believe that the clock-work of cause and effect heavily constrains free will, what do you think about this?

 

[Apollo]

Some people believe that the clock-work of cause and effect heavily constrains free will, what do you think about this?

Hmm, never really thought about it. I do know that free will is a big debate among philosophers and people into consciousness, but I never really thought hard about it. Intuitively I always assumed that some aspect of free will is heavily pre-programmed (nature) and another portion is true free will (agency).

 

[Removed]

Everything is pre determined there is nothing random in this universe but yet I believe in free will to work within those constraints I dont believe we will ever come to understand the true natures of those two realities as contradictory as they are.

 

[Mehdi Hassan]

I'm aware this is a scientific discussion but Allah has pre-ordained even the most minute of details subhanallah. Although it may seem contradictory, I believe free will and fate can in theory and do in reality, co-exist.

 

[The alchemist]

Everything is pre determined there is nothing random in this universe but yet I believe in free will to work within those constraints I dont believe we will ever come to understand the true natures of those two realities as contradictory as they are.

I agree. The topic is very complicated, and a lot of assumptions are being made by extrapolating small findings, as we see in this article into broad, extremely complex issues. A good example would be the difference in the nature of the quantum world and the classical world.