In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The concept of free will is heavily loaded with philosophical, ethical, and political implications. We take the scientific viewpoint of the detached observer, attempting a natural history of will. First, we can ask what is referred to as the human “will” and how does it work? From this evidence base, philosophers and others may be able to establish if it is indeed free or not. In our view, questions about “free will” make sense only when there is an adequate database. Neuroscience has an important contribution to make to this database, though many other disciplines may also contribute. Here we will comment on the chapter by Nahmias from the perspective of the neuroscientific database. Folk Concepts of Free Will and What Neuroscientific Data Say about It Healthy humans continuously experience an intuitive sense of their own volition and agency throughout adult life. This personal experience provides a powerful impetus for the folk concept of free will. We consciously decide on a course of action and only then do we carry out the relevant actions to fulfill it. When presented with a choice of two options, we may think about them, and then we perform a conscious selection between them by exercising our will. In this sense, our will is experienced as free. The above is a first-person description. The discipline of neuroscience holds that first-person experience, like all other mental events, is a product of brain mechanisms. There is no thinking “I” independent of the brain, rather “I” simply am my thinking brain. While many philosophers and neuroscientists accept this materialist position, a form of dualism often seems to creep in through a side door that has been inadvertently left open during debates about free will. In particular, the dualist intuition, that my conscious thought precedes and causes the physical events that lead to 1.2 A Neuroscientific Account of the Human Will Erman Misirlisoy and Patrick Haggard 38 Erman Misirlisoy and Patrick Haggard executing my action, has provided a long-running controversy, to which Nahmias’s chapter makes a useful and insightful contribution. Recent data in neuroscience has called this intuition into question by showing that unconscious activity in the brain preceding our intention— activity that we are never aware of—predicts the emergence of that specific intention to act (Bai et al., 2011; Fried et al., 2011; Haynes & Rees, 2006; Matsuhashi & Hallett, 2008; Soon et al., 2008), sometimes several seconds before it consciously emerges (Soon et al., 2008). For a paid-up, card-carrying materialist, such as most neuroscientists are, this really must be so since there is no brain-independent consciousness capable of triggering brain activity. Rather, conscious intention must be a consequence of brain activity and not a cause. Nahmias argues that preparatory brain activity is unlikely to ever be 100% predictive as humans can change their mind or react to cues in far less time than this. We agree. However, the process of spontaneous change of mind, or of reaction to an external stimulus, would also be driven by preceding unconscious brain processes in the same way as the original intention. The change processes, like the original intention, would be brain events that become conscious, not brain-independent conscious events that trigger brain activity. Directly predictive unconscious neural activity must necessarily precede any conscious intention, regardless of how small the time scale is, simply because causes must precede effects. How far ahead we can predict conscious intentions may in fact be of little consequence to the debate about whether the will is free. The time lags published in the scientific literature, often attracting widespread interest , are known to be very sensitive to three factors. The most obvious is the quality of the neural data used to predict the upcoming movement. The second is the required level of predictive accuracy. Since the neural preparation for action builds over time, any algorithm aiming to decode an upcoming intention will do so earlier prior to movement when a lenient threshold for accuracy is set, compared to a more stringent threshold. The third is the method for estimating the moment of conscious intention. The experimental methods for reporting the time of conscious events, known as mental chronometry, are known to be subject to multiple biases. Therefore, any estimate of the time of conscious intention, as an absolute number, should be taken with caution. Differences between estimates obtained in appropriately controlled experimental conditions are much more trustworthy than single values. The experience of conscious intention has also been studied...

Share