I feel the exact same way.
It's like saying because a pain signal takes some time to come from your foot to your bran that then the pain is not real, when it is merely delayed.
It seems to me it's only natural that there's a delay between the decision being made and the perception of the decision happening. Doesn't absolutely mean the decision was "illegitimate" and certainly that can't be deduced from the delay.
Humans are still demonstrably able to perform decisions which vary based on input, of course, so in that sense, "free" will is indisputable.
The decision being made before that result is perceived is certainly not the way to prove the decision doesn't come from consciousness and perception (biases and heuristics aside, thanks to millions of years of animal brains).
And it might be that, for most decisions, perceptions and heuristics do play a part. That again doesn't mean all decisions are pure automatons.
Why not? Surely if consciousness and perception are creating the decision, they should be the first which contain information about it.
> And it might be that, for most decisions, perceptions and heuristics do play a part.
Certainly. It seems highly unlikely to me that perceptions and heuristic do not play a part: as an additional input into the decision-making system, derived from physical sensory input and memory.
> That again doesn't mean all decisions are pure automatons.
How does it not? I presume the distinction lies in the exact definition of "pure automaton", but it sounds to me like the term's intent is to try to divorce human decision-making from pure, causal (or, in the worst case, random) reaction to input.
I don't see how this would be possible. How would the non-"pure automaton" part look like?
One of the problems I have with the Libet experiment is that the subject-reported awareness of conscious thought time is assumed to be accurate. But how can it be? The subject is being asked to move their hand. That takes a conscious effort. But the subject is also being asked to monitor thinking about moving their hand. That's a whole new task. Then they're being asked to report on their memory of thinking about moving their hand. Yet another task.
Normally when you move your hand, you just move it without the additional perceptions of "I am now thinking about moving my hand. I am now going to tell someone of the moment that I became aware of thinking about my hand." We don't normally reflect upon our motor movements in such a fashion. If you stopped to reflect upon each step before you took it, you'd be tripping on yourself all the time. So the reporting task is an unnatural and artificial burden above and beyond our normal mode of thought. I would contend that the extra tasks introduce a delay in the subject's self-awareness because the subject has to now additionally wait for the constructive thought "observing myself in the act of thinking about moving my hand" to rise to the threshold wherein that thought becomes part of the internal monologue of the conscious mind.
On top of that, perhaps the mind plays a trick on itself regarding conscious thought. When your eyes quickly saccade from one spot to another, there is motion blur, but you don't perceive it; your mind edits it out since it conveys no useful information about the world. Similarly, when you are contemplating taking an action, your brain has to make certain calculations before it can execute that action. Your motor cortex needs to communicate with the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe. You need to refer to past calculations of similar movements so that you don't overshoot or miss the mark. All of that takes time. Perhaps the brain edits out that time because it would be wasteful and non-productive to monitor the experience of "thought delays."
Humans do not possess a free will in this sense either. How could they? Their actions have to be causally dependent on the input, otherwise their behaviour would be magical and unrelated to reality.
Otherwise, quantum mechanics at best leaves room for randomness (non-determinism, stochasticity) of the will, not what people usually mean when they say it.
Subjectively speaking, nondeterminism doesn't really seem to "buy" me anything. It does not restore any of the agency. In fact, if it is true, it gives me even more of a " arbitrary puppet" feeling than if the mind is deterministic.
We're not so free.
I've always worked off a model of "constrained will". We have will, it is just subject to a large number of constraints with a few degrees of freedom.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
OK.
> So many tenuous connections had to be made to connect electrical signals with free will
Wait... I thought you don't believe in free will?
> they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.
To me it really appears you do believe in free will.
When one doesn't believe, one would need a proof that the phenomenon which many people (especially philosophers and the religious apologetics) call "free will" even exists. Not the vice versa. Only a believer, by definition, believes in something without a proof.
I don’t. I also don’t find the libet experiment to provide convincing evidence either for or against the existence of free will.
You're doing it again!
It nicely fits the title of the article.
You can redefine free will to just be the collection of algorithms and processes that play out as your brain decides how to respond to environmental stimuli, but then I think you have departed far enough from most people’s conception of what free will is to essentially just be redefining terms to suit your argument. FWIW, I think the best explanation of free will is that it doesn’t exist, but instead that it’s an explanatory framework we impose upon each other as a way of regulating people’s behavior.
When I hear someone deny the existence of free will, it sounds to me like they're saying a person's decisions are not really their own. If that's what they mean, I think it's preposterous -- of course your decisions are yours, that's definitional.
People do stuff all the time that they wish they didn't do. Or that they can't stop doing.
Plenty of things you do aren't because of any decision or choice that you made.
Many desires exist within us. Desires motivate us to act. Our will is the harmonization of those many desires into intended actions.
The individual self is an illusion. We are the confluence of infinite influence. There is no single I. Weird but true. Identity and personhood is a useful social construct, but it doesn't make any sense when considered.
Wait... is this how AWS eventually becomes sentient?