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Free will experiments reveal how little we know about our minds

34 points by scorchio 11y ago

dmfdmf 11y ago
Would the statement "Free will is an illusion" be less of a self-contradiction than when stated as a question? Hard to say.
scorchio 11y ago
Sam Harris' book on the same subject - http://www.samharris.org/free-will http://www.samharris.org/free-will
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  Yes, it's a brilliant book that proves what we see as free will is obviously not free and it's not even up for contention that we actually have the ability to decide, even though it feels as though we do.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
AdieuToLogic 11y ago
This appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience. First, the article states: He asked participants to report, using the clock, exactly the point when they made the decision to move. Then, it goes on to say: There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds. Well, this is quite the conundrum. Which is it? Report exactly when you do something or accept that we are not "reliable reporters?" Yet the author goes on to further say: Even supporters of Libet have to admit that the situation used in the experiment may be too artificial to be a direct model of real everyday choices. Given the delays in perception we all experience due to working at "chemical speed", as opposed to light speed, this experiment smacks of fast-twitch muscle measurement more so than exercising free will. Even the original premise of Libet's experiment negates a free will choice: “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act” How is this free will? Free will is a conscious choice to do something, not a subconscious act.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Really, the experiment seems to boil down to 'the decision happens before it is noticed' It seems a big jump to extrapolate this to 'there is no such thing as free will'
  - varjag 11y ago
    It can also be a case there's a cognitive delay associated with taking note of the time. The mechanism involved into decision making for muscular movements might be dramatically faster than cortical perception and verbalization of time.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    The experiment seems to boil down to, "Processing and propagating signals encoding decisions, to report them to the executive centers where the conscious mind will notice them, takes time." That's not really a wild statement about free will. It's just another paper showing that brains are made of atoms.
- carapat_virulat 11y ago
  Really I've seen so many terrible psychological experiments that spawned huge articles that I am not taking any of this seriously anymore. I don't doubt that we will get somewhere at some point, but it's very clear that at this point we are mostly bluffing. Just because you set some kind of experiment that turns up some kind of data shouldn't mean that you compare your studies with science on the level of physics or astronomy. Unless your experiments provide a model that has any kind of predictive power you are probably getting nowhere. The scientific method got where it got, because it started with people doing small experiments that turned up to generate incredible models with a great predictive power, and started building up from there. Just copying the method, disregarding the predictive aspects, and just bluffing from there to generate nice sounding headlines is hardly a similar path.
- return0 11y ago
  > appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience. Libet's experiments were carefully planned and are highly regarded. That's why they have never been refuted, and in fact spawned a lot of newer studies in the field.
cristianpascu 11y ago
Much of the confusion about free will and how much free is our will comes from experiments that study limit cases like our body reactions to external stimuli or something of the sort. But I don't think anyone can seriously state that we are absolutely free, specially when our bodies are involved. Extreme cases reveal that that there's much to say about how we (body+mind) work, and we're certainly not absolutely free. The simplest and, perhaps, best argument for our partial freedom is that we can ask questions. I don't think there is any kind of property in the physical world that would yield questions and truth-intuition about answers to those questions. Electrons just bump into each other. They don't ask questions about it. They move on like there's no tomorrow.
- Retric 11y ago
  Software which clearly does not have free will asked a question allowing you to enter that post. So, if you exclude the language part of asking questions as cruft the type of experiments that human baby's do is the same type of experemnts birds do when learning to fly. But, biological examples of this get really simple and plenty of people have built non biological examples. At a lower level you can argue that QM shows every time a wave function collapsed a question was asked and answered. Which is really the issue of free will, most definions boil down to either, 'humans' or include simple systems that clearly lack choice.
  - rrss1122 11y ago
    You could think of that software's question as an extension of the creator/owner of the software. Said person is asking for your opinion and delegating to the software the ability to receive your opinion and display it to other people.
    - cristianpascu 11y ago
      Exactly!
    - Retric 11y ago
      By that notion, by opening or closing a door or even standing on some sand I endow it with free will. Which is an odd way of looking at the world as more or less everything on the earth would then be endowed with free will. Honestly, I can see that what you are taking about being a property. But calling it free will just muddles the debate.
stefanix 11y ago
About the experiment, how can Libet conclusively derive the decision came after the initial EEG measurement. I mean how did he know the duration it takes to report the decision. The origin of the decision to being able to reflect on it may take a variable amount of time therefore invalidating the claim. Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness. Driving a car comes to mind. This also means when asking a subject to process something impulsively the vast majority of their actions may be subconscious. tl;dr People spacing out does not invalidate free will.
- return0 11y ago
  The subjects reported the position of the dot, that's how he knew the exact time point in which they were 'aware' of their impending action. There was a comfortable time difference between the two. More recent experiments have been able to "foresee" actions ~ 10 seconds earlier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18408715 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18408715 These studies do not invalidate free will, they just show that free will is not something ethereal, but a product of the specific makeup of ourselves, which is encoded in our brains.
nota_bene 11y ago
There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking: When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.). EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Sigh. Arm chair philosophy at its worst.
  - nota_bene 11y ago
    What's worst is when people leave worthless comments like these.
    - flycaliguy 11y ago
      You are right that it was an unnecessary comment, but declaring that "There is no need for these experiments" is a little armchairy. This is a debate that has been going on for a long time and a version which takes place on hacker news would be more useful if it wasn't immediately polarized.
- interpol_p 11y ago
  Even if your simplified argument were correct, you still could not conclude that there is no free will. We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. Does it really matter if it is within a deterministic framework or not?
  - 11y ago
wbillingsley 11y ago
Libet's study is terrible -- as with many of these studies it's famous for its controversial conclusion, but its flaws are very obvious. He specifically asked his subjects to listen for an urge rather than applying free will ("let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”). That the urge is measurable before the decision, then, just means his subjects did what he asked them to -- to wait for a feeling of an urge. And frankly, it's most likely the urge was the tension of having sat there a while, knowing someone's expecting you to feel an urge to move your arm... 1. Ask subjects to wait for an urge to react to (and therefore not apply free will) 2. (Nice-sounding but actually irrelevant measurement set-up with dots, clocks and electrodes) 3. Observe subjects decided after a measurable urge 4. Conclude free will doesn't exist, rather than that your subjects did what you asked them to in step 1.
- return0 11y ago
  Thats a simplistic refutation. There is a long line of studies on the subject summarized in wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
  - wbillingsley 11y ago
    Yes, indeed it is a simple flaw. One of my criticisms of the paper, given how popular it is to write about it in the media, is quite how obvious the flaws are.
coldtea 11y ago
As stefanix writes: >Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness. This. The "unconscious" processing an answer/reaction belongs to the same entity that the conscious part belongs too. Implying we're some kind of automata because reactions can come pre-processed by the subconscious part misses the point. The subconscious part is the same "self" that the conscious part is, it's not just what we can think "out loud" in our head that counts as us taking a decision.
- evanpw 11y ago
  This is scientific evidence, not mathematical proof. One way to frame the concept of free will is that some subjective experiences cause rather than are caused by or are identical with, physical changes in the brain. One way to test for causation is to see which one happens first. If free will (at least as defined above) is true, we expect that some subjective experiences should precede the corresponding physical change in the brain. If free will is false, then we should expect subjective experiences to be simultaneous with or come after the corresponding brain change. Since the actual result of the experiment (brain change comes before subjective experience) is less likely under the "free will" hypothesis than it is under the alternative, by Bayes' rule, it should make you less confident of the existence of free will. If you believe that this result would be only slightly less likely even if free will were true (as you apparently do), then you should update your estimate only a little bit, but this is still the right kind of experiment to run if you want to test for free will.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >One way to test for causation is to see which one happens first. If free will (at least as defined above) is true, we expect that some subjective experiences should precede the corresponding physical change in the brain. If free will is false, then we should expect subjective experiences to be simultaneous with or come after the corresponding brain change. Only if you assume that "free will" implies only conscious decisions. Your subconscious brain is part of the same self as "you". So whatever you think as your "free will" is also part of that, just that part of it plays as "voice inside your brain" (conscious thoughts) and some of it does not. It's not like the subscoscious processing is done by some other entity and imposed upon you.
danbruc 11y ago
In my opinion it is almost trivial to see that something is fishy with the idea of free will - just try to formalize it. Assume you are sitting in a restaurant facing the decision to either order a steak or some pasta. One possibility is that your decision is a deterministic choice, a function of the current state of your body (What nutrients do you need?), your brain (What are your past experiences with steak and pasta?) and your environment (What does the steak on the neighboring table look like?). This does not resemble what I would call free will. The other extreme is that your decision is completely random and not influenced by anything. This assumes that there is real randomness in our universe which is, as far as I know, an open question. There is no real randomness in classical mechanics, only apparent randomness due to ignorance of microscopic degrees of freedom. Quantum mechanics seems to have probabilistic features but they are, as far as I can tell, at odds with the unitary evolution of quantum systems and it remains to be seen whether there is real randomness in quantum mechanics or not. But lets just assume there is real randomness, at worst, if there is only apparent randomness, this option becomes deterministic and degenerates into the first option. There is still some freedom in this option, namely the probability distribution over the different choices. This probability distribution may just be what it is for no deeper reason, a fundamental property of the source of randomness. In this case I wouldn't call it free will, too, because the choice is entirely random. It may also be the case that the probability distribution gets shaped in a deterministic way. The steak on the neighboring table looks really good making it more likely that you choose it but there is still some probability that you will choose pasta. This is kind of a middle ground between the first two options, the final choice is random but the probabilities reflect your current and past states and the state of the environment in a deterministic way. But again I would not call this free will. So what would free will have to look like? The choice must not entirely depend on the current state of you and your environment but it must also not be completely independent of it, i.e. be completely random. I spent quite some time thinking about this but I am completely unable to come up with something that is in some sense between deterministic and random (including deterministically shaped randomness). Am I - or even everyone - missing a (fundamental) third option? Is thinking about free will in terms of systems and states and state changes in some way inappropriate? For the moment I will side with the people denying the existence of free will, if someone can formalize what free will really means I will reconsider things.
robgibbons 11y ago
The law of causality is ultimately incompatible with free will. You cannot have truly autonomous agency within a physical framework ruled by cause and effect. To truly express freedom of will, without influence from any prior cause, you would literally need to exist in your own isolated vacuum of space and time (no outside influence from environment), having also created yourself (no outside influence from genetics). That is to say, if you believe you have free will, the burden is on you to prove that your body, and your brain itself, are not bound by the laws of the physically causal universe.
skwosh 11y ago
Our perception of time is an also at odds with our scientific understanding of the universe, but that doesn't mean that it isn't real...

34 points by scorchio 11y ago

Would the statement "Free will is an illusion" be less of a self-contradiction than when stated as a question? Hard to say.

scorchio 11y ago

Sam Harris' book on the same subject - http://www.samharris.org/free-will http://www.samharris.org/free-will

andy_ppp 11y ago
Yes, it's a brilliant book that proves what we see as free will is obviously not free and it's not even up for contention that we actually have the ability to decide, even though it feels as though we do.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

AdieuToLogic 11y ago

This appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience. First, the article states: He asked participants to report, using the clock, exactly the point when they made the decision to move. Then, it goes on to say: There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds. Well, this is quite the conundrum. Which is it? Report exactly when you do something or accept that we are not "reliable reporters?" Yet the author goes on to further say: Even supporters of Libet have to admit that the situation used in the experiment may be too artificial to be a direct model of real everyday choices. Given the delays in perception we all experience due to working at "chemical speed", as opposed to light speed, this experiment smacks of fast-twitch muscle measurement more so than exercising free will. Even the original premise of Libet's experiment negates a free will choice: “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act” How is this free will? Free will is a conscious choice to do something, not a subconscious act.

raverbashing 11y ago
Really, the experiment seems to boil down to 'the decision happens before it is noticed' It seems a big jump to extrapolate this to 'there is no such thing as free will'
- varjag 11y ago
  It can also be a case there's a cognitive delay associated with taking note of the time. The mechanism involved into decision making for muscular movements might be dramatically faster than cortical perception and verbalization of time.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  The experiment seems to boil down to, "Processing and propagating signals encoding decisions, to report them to the executive centers where the conscious mind will notice them, takes time." That's not really a wild statement about free will. It's just another paper showing that brains are made of atoms.
carapat_virulat 11y ago
Really I've seen so many terrible psychological experiments that spawned huge articles that I am not taking any of this seriously anymore. I don't doubt that we will get somewhere at some point, but it's very clear that at this point we are mostly bluffing. Just because you set some kind of experiment that turns up some kind of data shouldn't mean that you compare your studies with science on the level of physics or astronomy. Unless your experiments provide a model that has any kind of predictive power you are probably getting nowhere. The scientific method got where it got, because it started with people doing small experiments that turned up to generate incredible models with a great predictive power, and started building up from there. Just copying the method, disregarding the predictive aspects, and just bluffing from there to generate nice sounding headlines is hardly a similar path.
return0 11y ago
> appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience. Libet's experiments were carefully planned and are highly regarded. That's why they have never been refuted, and in fact spawned a lot of newer studies in the field.

cristianpascu 11y ago

Much of the confusion about free will and how much free is our will comes from experiments that study limit cases like our body reactions to external stimuli or something of the sort. But I don't think anyone can seriously state that we are absolutely free, specially when our bodies are involved. Extreme cases reveal that that there's much to say about how we (body+mind) work, and we're certainly not absolutely free. The simplest and, perhaps, best argument for our partial freedom is that we can ask questions. I don't think there is any kind of property in the physical world that would yield questions and truth-intuition about answers to those questions. Electrons just bump into each other. They don't ask questions about it. They move on like there's no tomorrow.

Retric 11y ago
Software which clearly does not have free will asked a question allowing you to enter that post. So, if you exclude the language part of asking questions as cruft the type of experiments that human baby's do is the same type of experemnts birds do when learning to fly. But, biological examples of this get really simple and plenty of people have built non biological examples. At a lower level you can argue that QM shows every time a wave function collapsed a question was asked and answered. Which is really the issue of free will, most definions boil down to either, 'humans' or include simple systems that clearly lack choice.
- rrss1122 11y ago
  You could think of that software's question as an extension of the creator/owner of the software. Said person is asking for your opinion and delegating to the software the ability to receive your opinion and display it to other people.
  - cristianpascu 11y ago
    Exactly!
  - Retric 11y ago
    By that notion, by opening or closing a door or even standing on some sand I endow it with free will. Which is an odd way of looking at the world as more or less everything on the earth would then be endowed with free will. Honestly, I can see that what you are taking about being a property. But calling it free will just muddles the debate.

stefanix 11y ago

About the experiment, how can Libet conclusively derive the decision came after the initial EEG measurement. I mean how did he know the duration it takes to report the decision. The origin of the decision to being able to reflect on it may take a variable amount of time therefore invalidating the claim. Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness. Driving a car comes to mind. This also means when asking a subject to process something impulsively the vast majority of their actions may be subconscious. tl;dr People spacing out does not invalidate free will.

return0 11y ago
The subjects reported the position of the dot, that's how he knew the exact time point in which they were 'aware' of their impending action. There was a comfortable time difference between the two. More recent experiments have been able to "foresee" actions ~ 10 seconds earlier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18408715 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18408715 These studies do not invalidate free will, they just show that free will is not something ethereal, but a product of the specific makeup of ourselves, which is encoded in our brains.

nota_bene 11y ago

There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking: When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.). EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.

mattmanser 11y ago
Sigh. Arm chair philosophy at its worst.
- nota_bene 11y ago
  What's worst is when people leave worthless comments like these.
  - flycaliguy 11y ago
    You are right that it was an unnecessary comment, but declaring that "There is no need for these experiments" is a little armchairy. This is a debate that has been going on for a long time and a version which takes place on hacker news would be more useful if it wasn't immediately polarized.
interpol_p 11y ago
Even if your simplified argument were correct, you still could not conclude that there is no free will. We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. Does it really matter if it is within a deterministic framework or not?
- 11y ago

wbillingsley 11y ago

Libet's study is terrible -- as with many of these studies it's famous for its controversial conclusion, but its flaws are very obvious. He specifically asked his subjects to listen for an urge rather than applying free will ("let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”). That the urge is measurable before the decision, then, just means his subjects did what he asked them to -- to wait for a feeling of an urge. And frankly, it's most likely the urge was the tension of having sat there a while, knowing someone's expecting you to feel an urge to move your arm... 1. Ask subjects to wait for an urge to react to (and therefore not apply free will) 2. (Nice-sounding but actually irrelevant measurement set-up with dots, clocks and electrodes) 3. Observe subjects decided after a measurable urge 4. Conclude free will doesn't exist, rather than that your subjects did what you asked them to in step 1.

return0 11y ago
Thats a simplistic refutation. There is a long line of studies on the subject summarized in wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
- wbillingsley 11y ago
  Yes, indeed it is a simple flaw. One of my criticisms of the paper, given how popular it is to write about it in the media, is quite how obvious the flaws are.

coldtea 11y ago

As stefanix writes: >Also the strict separation of conscious/unconsciousness seems simplistic. Most actions may very well be processed subconsciously with very little decision making bubbling up to consciousness. This. The "unconscious" processing an answer/reaction belongs to the same entity that the conscious part belongs too. Implying we're some kind of automata because reactions can come pre-processed by the subconscious part misses the point. The subconscious part is the same "self" that the conscious part is, it's not just what we can think "out loud" in our head that counts as us taking a decision.

evanpw 11y ago
This is scientific evidence, not mathematical proof. One way to frame the concept of free will is that some subjective experiences cause rather than are caused by or are identical with, physical changes in the brain. One way to test for causation is to see which one happens first. If free will (at least as defined above) is true, we expect that some subjective experiences should precede the corresponding physical change in the brain. If free will is false, then we should expect subjective experiences to be simultaneous with or come after the corresponding brain change. Since the actual result of the experiment (brain change comes before subjective experience) is less likely under the "free will" hypothesis than it is under the alternative, by Bayes' rule, it should make you less confident of the existence of free will. If you believe that this result would be only slightly less likely even if free will were true (as you apparently do), then you should update your estimate only a little bit, but this is still the right kind of experiment to run if you want to test for free will.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >One way to test for causation is to see which one happens first. If free will (at least as defined above) is true, we expect that some subjective experiences should precede the corresponding physical change in the brain. If free will is false, then we should expect subjective experiences to be simultaneous with or come after the corresponding brain change. Only if you assume that "free will" implies only conscious decisions. Your subconscious brain is part of the same self as "you". So whatever you think as your "free will" is also part of that, just that part of it plays as "voice inside your brain" (conscious thoughts) and some of it does not. It's not like the subscoscious processing is done by some other entity and imposed upon you.

danbruc 11y ago

In my opinion it is almost trivial to see that something is fishy with the idea of free will - just try to formalize it. Assume you are sitting in a restaurant facing the decision to either order a steak or some pasta. One possibility is that your decision is a deterministic choice, a function of the current state of your body (What nutrients do you need?), your brain (What are your past experiences with steak and pasta?) and your environment (What does the steak on the neighboring table look like?). This does not resemble what I would call free will. The other extreme is that your decision is completely random and not influenced by anything. This assumes that there is real randomness in our universe which is, as far as I know, an open question. There is no real randomness in classical mechanics, only apparent randomness due to ignorance of microscopic degrees of freedom. Quantum mechanics seems to have probabilistic features but they are, as far as I can tell, at odds with the unitary evolution of quantum systems and it remains to be seen whether there is real randomness in quantum mechanics or not. But lets just assume there is real randomness, at worst, if there is only apparent randomness, this option becomes deterministic and degenerates into the first option. There is still some freedom in this option, namely the probability distribution over the different choices. This probability distribution may just be what it is for no deeper reason, a fundamental property of the source of randomness. In this case I wouldn't call it free will, too, because the choice is entirely random. It may also be the case that the probability distribution gets shaped in a deterministic way. The steak on the neighboring table looks really good making it more likely that you choose it but there is still some probability that you will choose pasta. This is kind of a middle ground between the first two options, the final choice is random but the probabilities reflect your current and past states and the state of the environment in a deterministic way. But again I would not call this free will. So what would free will have to look like? The choice must not entirely depend on the current state of you and your environment but it must also not be completely independent of it, i.e. be completely random. I spent quite some time thinking about this but I am completely unable to come up with something that is in some sense between deterministic and random (including deterministically shaped randomness). Am I - or even everyone - missing a (fundamental) third option? Is thinking about free will in terms of systems and states and state changes in some way inappropriate? For the moment I will side with the people denying the existence of free will, if someone can formalize what free will really means I will reconsider things.

robgibbons 11y ago

The law of causality is ultimately incompatible with free will. You cannot have truly autonomous agency within a physical framework ruled by cause and effect. To truly express freedom of will, without influence from any prior cause, you would literally need to exist in your own isolated vacuum of space and time (no outside influence from environment), having also created yourself (no outside influence from genetics). That is to say, if you believe you have free will, the burden is on you to prove that your body, and your brain itself, are not bound by the laws of the physically causal universe.

skwosh 11y ago

Our perception of time is an also at odds with our scientific understanding of the universe, but that doesn't mean that it isn't real...