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To be clear, there are other types of experiments providing evidence for the absence of deliberate free will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_fre

To be clear, there are other types of experiments providing evidence for the absence of deliberate free will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unconscious_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unco...

ekianjo 7y ago
You can't prove that something does not exist if you can't directly inspect it. "Free will" falls into this pit where it has a fuzzy definition in the first place and can't be directly looked at in any way. Plus, we already know that much of human functions are not based on Free will (how most of our organs function for one), but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior (which we constantly need to study to understand its complexity). If there was no such thing akin to Free Will we would have cracked human psychology for centuries already.
- acqq 7y ago
  > but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior Where do you draw the line between a "very simple animal" and "non-simple animal"? Because there enough animals that have the behavioral patterns completely matching these of humans. Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    > Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction. Most human behavior is not particularly exceptional. The tiny sliver that is exceptional is really exceptional though.
- buboard 7y ago
  Biology is driven by complex but precisely known rules (from molecular dynamics down to quark-gluon interactions). That doesn't mean we know how biology works , not even for a single person, because it's complex. Psychology attempts to do something much harder, understand the behavior of entire populations of nervous systems. Both are complex, but in principle not uncomputable. And there's a definition of free will: that actions of humans axiomatically cannot be precomputed.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Honestly, "free will" is the least interesting aspect of this comment thread. What's more interesting is the original experiment "proving" subconscious decision making found its way to pop-psychology, and for years now, we're being bombarded with assertions that every justification of a decision is a post-hoc rationalization invented by the brain, and it has nothing to do with the real reasons for that decision. It feels really dumb, and I'd be glad if it turned out to be just an artifact of bad data processing.
- buboard 7y ago
  It's not the only experiment. In fact there is no experiment showing the opposite.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Anytime anyone makes a claim about how neuroscience tell us X, just remind yourself, no one can explain how memories are stored. That’s the current state of neuroscience. We think maybe there are different kinds of memory because there are several ways to damage memory creation and retrieval, but have no idea how they work.
  - buboard 7y ago
    We do have many ideas and evidence how they work. We can identify where they are stored, change them and turn them on and off... in mice. This is the golden age of memory research. https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0261-6 https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-01...
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      Sentence one of your link’s abstract agrees with me :-) > The mechanism of memory remains one of the great unsolved problems of biology.

ekianjo 7y ago

You can't prove that something does not exist if you can't directly inspect it. "Free will" falls into this pit where it has a fuzzy definition in the first place and can't be directly looked at in any way. Plus, we already know that much of human functions are not based on Free will (how most of our organs function for one), but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior (which we constantly need to study to understand its complexity). If there was no such thing akin to Free Will we would have cracked human psychology for centuries already.

acqq 7y ago
> but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior Where do you draw the line between a "very simple animal" and "non-simple animal"? Because there enough animals that have the behavioral patterns completely matching these of humans. Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction. Most human behavior is not particularly exceptional. The tiny sliver that is exceptional is really exceptional though.
buboard 7y ago
Biology is driven by complex but precisely known rules (from molecular dynamics down to quark-gluon interactions). That doesn't mean we know how biology works , not even for a single person, because it's complex. Psychology attempts to do something much harder, understand the behavior of entire populations of nervous systems. Both are complex, but in principle not uncomputable. And there's a definition of free will: that actions of humans axiomatically cannot be precomputed.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Honestly, "free will" is the least interesting aspect of this comment thread. What's more interesting is the original experiment "proving" subconscious decision making found its way to pop-psychology, and for years now, we're being bombarded with assertions that every justification of a decision is a post-hoc rationalization invented by the brain, and it has nothing to do with the real reasons for that decision. It feels really dumb, and I'd be glad if it turned out to be just an artifact of bad data processing.

buboard 7y ago
It's not the only experiment. In fact there is no experiment showing the opposite.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Anytime anyone makes a claim about how neuroscience tell us X, just remind yourself, no one can explain how memories are stored. That’s the current state of neuroscience. We think maybe there are different kinds of memory because there are several ways to damage memory creation and retrieval, but have no idea how they work.
- buboard 7y ago
  We do have many ideas and evidence how they work. We can identify where they are stored, change them and turn them on and off... in mice. This is the golden age of memory research. https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0261-6 https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-01...
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    Sentence one of your link’s abstract agrees with me :-) > The mechanism of memory remains one of the great unsolved problems of biology.