Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?

Abstract

The claim that neuroscientists have proved that - or at least produced powerful evidence that - free is an illusion has received a lot of press. Here are just two examples:Free will is not defining feature of humanness, modern neuroscience implies, but is rather an illusion that endures only because biochemical complexity conceals mechanisms of decision making. (Science News, Dec. 6, 2008; Siegfried [2008])Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. . . . The result was hard for some to stomach because it suggested that unconscious brain calls shots, making free an illusory afterthought. (ScienceNOW Daily News, April 14, 2008; Youngsteadt [2008])In Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Mele 2009), I argue that scientists - neuroscientists and others - have not proved that free is an illusion and have not produced powerful evidence for that claim. Manuel Vargas has suggested that in that book I ignore a serious scientific to free (2009). The alleged is identified in section 1 . It is me topic of this article.Scientists who argue for illusion thesis about free arrive at that conclusion by way of some pretty striking empirical propositions that they infer their data. For example, Benjamin Libet contends that brain produces unconscious decisions to act about a third of a second before person becomes aware of them (1985, 2004), and Daniel Wegner argues that are never among causes of corresponding actions (2002, 2004, 2008). In Effective Intentions I review me experiments that are claimed to support striking empirical propositions such as these and I explain why propositions are not justified by data. Because these empirical propositions play a central role in reasoning that leads such scientists as Libet and Wegner to their conclusions about free will, if my arguments that propositions are not justified by data hit their mark, they undermine scientific arguments at issue about free will. For example, it may be plausible that a person whose conscious intentions never play a role in producing corresponding behavior never acts freely; but if we lack good reason to believe that our conscious intentions never play a role of this kind, this particular line of argument for thesis that free is an illusion is out of running (at least until powerful evidence for claim about conscious intentions is produced).1. What Threatens Free Will?In a review ?? Effective Intentions, Manuel Vargas suggests that the core threat to free might arise not striking empirical propositions that I discuss there, but instead from bare fact that there are neurological antecedents to conscious decisions. . . . What is really at stake is whether our conscious intentions, even given some role in production of action, can be picked out of causal nexus and treated as special or 'free' (2009). He offers following diagnosis of what scientists I disagree with might be thinking:[They] are sometimes motivated by what philosophical literature labels as intuitions - idea that for us to act with a free we must be ultimate origins of strands of causal nexus. On one way of putting things, source theorists think that free acts cannot have causal antecedents that extend back in time prior to decisions of agent or agent's free formulation of relevant characterological inputs to that decision. . . . Acknowledging that our actions have causal roots in pre-conscious brain activity, as Mele does, just highlights fact of our causal embeddedness. It does nothing to block basic worry of how we could be kinds of beings that stop buck enough to count as free, or as deserving of moral praise and blame. …