Alfred Mele - Does Brain Science Eliminate Free Will?

Who's the boss, me or my brain? Brain data does not favor free will. In the famous Libet experiment, my brain makes decisions prior to my conscious sense of making that decision—brain activity precedes personal awareness. But there seems to be more to me than my brain? Is that illusion? How to judge among the diverse and competing claims about free will?



Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher and the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is also the Director of the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project and past director of the Big Questions in Free Will Project (2010-2013). Mele is the author of ten books and over 200 articles.


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[ChuckBrowntheClown]

I really don't see how pushing buttons and trying to fool the person on guessing which button that they pushed is proof of no free will? It's really sounds like some crackpot stuff.

[MrSanford]

The interesting thing about those experiments is that in a few cases the brain started preparing to move before the question was even asked. It could be that the person was picking up on subconscious cues from experimenter. But I think there’s a difference between awareness, and communication of awareness to another person in an
artificially constructed meaningful such as language. There may be a lag time between the Brain preparing to act and the brain Preparing to communicate awareness

[Bassotronics]

Such an irony in the fact that the brain is trying to understand how it works.

[thegoat]

What if free will is possible only when one reaches a certain level of self awareness/realization. What if you act subconsciously until you realize yourself.

[DaP]

If free will doesn't exist, why is regret and guilt a thing? What is the purpose of and reason behind existence of these "functions"?

[thereligionofrationality]

It's impossible to eliminate something that doesn't exist in the first place!

[Paulus_Brent]

That's not what Libet's experiment showed and not what Libet himself believed his experiment suggested.

[eksffa]

NTS: ok/99/use

Ok finally someone who makes sense more than don’t.

Forget all the philosophers in the group, just put all scientists in a EVO street fighter tournament and ask the players to describe exactly what they plan to do and what they did after each second of a 1 to 1 dispute, without letting they hear each other. Sure you need to pick someone who likes talking and does that fast while he plays. Then watch the tape over and over see how they immediately become aware that a certain move won’t work, how the opponent changing style or acting differently if what he predicted makes him rearrange all the planning and how he NEEDS to be aware of such decisions to make it way faster than those fractions of second. Most players will rapidly and relatively precisely describe, justify and explain what they are doing and why they are doing it, accounting for all elements on the system which he could or could not properly predict move by move. In the end you will just get note evidence that the ORCH-OR model is probably the most correct model to explain both consciousness and free will as you will get evidence of frequency having different effects on conscious decisions. You will see or orchestrated decisions completely rearranged the states of mind under the new rearranged configuration of all elements of reality experienced by inputs both visual and auditive, and you will be able to measure outputs to the players hands and fingers on joystick as well as verbal acts of speech describing and explaining the whole thing experienced, perceived and decided.

Come on put some hertz in those boring tedious experiments guys. One year is gone and you doing this lazy push button and let me read some electric pulses 😂 this is annoying and absolutely limited in possible conclusions. Push it to a higher frequency for gods sake, go measure it differently form what you would measure in a fat dying duck.

[James-zrlu]

@11:20 - It doesn't seem like much of a big difference if your brain is technically making decisions before you consciously think them? Then it's not "you" that has any say in anything... It doesn't matter if the difference is 1 day or Although even if there was no difference, you could still argue that logically you don't have free will.

[peterramsey]

Without getting in to neuroscience its easy to see you do not have freewill. Think of some decision that you have made in the past, think why you made that decision. I now send you back unknowingly to the exact time you made that choice. The reasons you made that decision and not an other decision are exactly the same, so you will continue to make the same choice no matter how many times you go back to it. If someone says you could have chosen otherwise, well you didn't and you couldn't. Ergo no freewill.

[PetraKann]

Does Free Will eliminate Brain Science?

[grybnyx]

But all of these neural impulses, whether before of after or at the time the subject thinks they are making a "decision", take place within the closed causal system that is material reality. A single cause cannot produce even the possibility of two or more consequent actions. I can't see how free will is possible.

[georgegrubbs]

I am posting my response that I made to Sean Carroll's YouTube video on free will. It also applies here.

Very nice, Sean, but I humbly disagree on a couple of points. (Sean made the statement that after the fact humans could have decided differently when making decisions.)

(1) You could not have done differently, because you did what you did after considering the options at a point in universal time. Your statement is hypothetical and cannot be tested. .

(2) To understand "free will, " we must understand what "you" and "me" are. We are that which emerges from patterns of neural networks, both of which obey the laws of physics (the emergence and the neural networks). Let's label that emergence, "X". X must have the capability to modify the other neural networks in the physical system that make up a human being. It is the conscious controller of the physical system (remember that X is an emergence from patterns of neural networks). We also call this the "self" ("me").

X has access to memories and other states of neural activity in the physical system (the person). Thus, X has preferences and biases based on genetics and experiences that come from memories and the system state.

X is also subject to influences in the immediate environment that may subconsciously determine a decision, thus the decision is not free. For example, suppose X is making a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Traditionally, X would choose vanilla since that is X's favorite (it produces good internal feelings of pleasure). However, there is a sign in the ice cream shop showing someone having a chocolate ice cream and they are having a great time. This scene triggers a reward system in the nucleus accumbens (it releases dopamine) such that X chooses chocolate without being aware of what caused the choice. The choice was not free. Given the same circumstances, X would again choose chocolate.

[wisedupearly]

We are inherently multi-tasking in terms of cognitive processing. Memories of deadlines to be kept, memories of associations, weighing of alternative choices, choice of words to be used etc. All run on different threads, and consciousness is the summation of all that have current priority. We can forcefully select the active topic but all the threads, including hunger, continue to run. In making a choice we decide, but it is possible that we may not be immediately aware of having made the decision due to some current thought.

[makhalid]

I think free will is more about how you interpret the data rather than some scientific problem. Of course our decisions are based on the neurons following the laws of Physics, but we have consciousness and the neurons are a part of us after all.

[alittax]

8:16 So we are first producing conscious thoughts when we're planning something, but we don't keep paying attention to all threads as we're planning (as we're working out a new thread, the previous ones move to the background), and what ends up happening is all of these processes that we first initiated consciously culminate in our unconscious decision, which we finally become aware of?

[cheaterxl]

I like that he makes a difference between picking and choosing.

[wayneasiam]

Great videos. Thanks for the cranial consternation.

[williamburts]

If we had no free will we would have no sense of being the doer of an activity, but we do have this sense of being the doer of an activity thus free will exist. If our body were to move like let's say to go to our car without our free volition to go to the car we would freak out because there would be this sense of you not being in control of your body's action. So free will is that level of experience that gives us that you are the "user" of your body experiencer.

[neffetSnnamremmiZ]

Of course not, because science can in principle only recognize determined and finite things, but not the Living, the "subject of knowledge" can never appear in it! Freedom you can only "be in" or "have"! Freedom is never "in abstracto"! That's the reason Kant explained, freedom is proven in the moment that we can think it!

And beside that, freedom is not just the opposite of determination, because it is "insight into necessity" (Hegel) or equivalence or correspondence to the "holy will" (Kant)!

Explained with Schopenhauer: it depends on who you are or as what you recognize yourself!

Even science can become, spoken with Nietzsche, an "idiocy"!