Am I Free To Read This Article? Or Not?

How a groundbreaking 1964 study 'introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will' https://t.co/RRa0ptLSrC

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 29, 2021

"The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps," Gholipour wrote. "In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people's brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists' lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit."

Gholipour continued, "The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants' brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world — when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph —but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone's brain actually initiating an action."

That German experiment from 57 years ago, according to Gholipour, was groundbreaking because it showed "the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement."

 

Gholipour explained, "This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential (readiness potential) to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain's wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. Suddenly, people's choices — even a basic finger tap — appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition."

Libet, according to Gholipour, "introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will."

Yeah, only if you define "free will" as an absolutely volitional exercise functioning at the level of awareness.  Then again, my typing, just like my writing by hand or playing the piano, doesn't happen at my level of awareness.  When it does, I am like the centipede who was asked "Which leg comes after which?"  Which, the poem tells us, raised the centipede's mind to such a pitch it lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run.

A lot of things we do aren't at the level of conscious effort.  I just paused, between paragraphs (because I'd stopped typing a second) to stratch my head, without even really thinking about which fingers to use or how far to raise my hand, etc.  I just did it.  Was I not free to choose to scratch?  And if my brain is already mapping out the movements of my fingers (as I type, again), is that a denial of my free will to type the words I want to type (or mistype them, as I often do)? I can remember learning to type, or recovering what I'd learned about typing from high school long after high school, when computers became ubiquitous.  I had to think about the spelling of each word.  This went on for a long time, until now all I have to do is think about the words, without thinking about each individual letter at a time.  Have I lost free will?  Or gained a skill?

I haven't played piano in decades, but recently I sat at the keyboard and found I recovered much of my ability to make music (awkwardly, badly, nowhere near with the felicity I once upon a time displayed) without thinking too hard about it.  "Muscle memory," I've heard it called, and you really can't play a musical instrument without it. I used to play bassoon (long, LONG ago).  I could translate musical notation into notes (one at a time on a woodwind; chords and arpeggios and harmony and melody at once on the keyboard) without thinking about where to place my fingers.  Was I not choosing freely because brain activity would have shown my brain was determining movements before my mind could be aware of them? Indeed, my mind was hardly aware of where my fingers were on the bassoon; I was concentrating on the sounds I was making, just as I'm concentrating on putting these sentences on the screen right now.

Well, "now" to me.

If my perceived volition is unaware of what it takes to put words in my mind (brain?) on this screen my eyes can see (you could cover my hands, I'd do as well as I'm doing now with them visible but not really part of my perception), does that mean my will is not free to choose what the next word is? (The question of where those words come from is yet another matter.)

Philosophers and theologians abandoned this issue a few centuries ago.  It was primarily an issue related to sin and salvation, an issue for Augustine and Aquinas and then Calvin and Luther. If it still comes up, it’s mostly related to Calvinism and predestination, which is a fringe concern in church circles, not a central one. It's amusing neurologists (and pop-sci writers) are after it again.  Do they think they will be the new high priests and these are the burning issues they must tackle to prove their bona fides as the ones to lead the people?  I'm sure they imagine that's what priests do.

One more thing they couldn't be more wrong about.