[jobigoud]

The thesis was that taking the action or not taking the action resulted in different EEG patterns, Bereitschaftspotential or not, and that the spike was visible before the person was consciously taking the decision. So it's not just the neural activity from the decision-making process, it's the neural activity from taking a specific decision, seen before the decision is taken by the person. As if the decision was taken by a deeper sub-system.

[cortesoft]

Isn't this an inherent problem with looking at brain activity for this sort of thing?

Suppose free will is real, and a person makes the decision and then takes the action. The brain waves marking that the decision was made HAVE to show up before the person is aware that they have made a decision, because both their awareness has to be 'signaled' by a brain wave coming from a decision. The deciding process, the decision, the awareness of the decision, and the actual brain signal to move the muscle ALL come from the brain, and will all feedback to each other. Any awareness that you have made a decision would show up in brainwaves BEFORE you are able to articulate it, since you can't articulate something that hasn't been experienced by your brain yet.

The only thing this sort of experiment could disprove is the idea that free will comes from something OUTSIDE your brain. If we believe your brain represents everything that you are (in terms of thoughts and consciousness), then anything the brain signals can't come BEFORE you have exercised free will, since the signal IS your free will.

I am very confused as to how anyone could think your brain waves could disprove free will.

[armitron]

You are mixing up definitions. You use "you" to mean "brain". Under that model, of course you can't disprove free will. But the model you are using is not at all useful, as you illustrate in your confusion.

The idea of free will is typically assigned to a "conscious self-model", not just a brain. The self-model generally accepted to be an emergent construct of the brain.

Thus, in the "conscious free will" model, if the brain makes a decision and hands it over to the "self-model", there is -obviously- no free will. The conscious self-model is simply an observer after the fact. Any notion of agency that it experiences is an illusion.

[cortesoft]

I don't think I follow... even if we think of the "conscious free will" as being an emergent property of the brain, it would still be made up of brain waves within the brain.

What else would free will be but an aspect of your brain? There is nothing else for it to be?

[armitron]

Think in terms of a layered system (subsumption architecture is useful [1]).

Sure the substrate is the brain and is common to all layers, but the layers are functionally different.

The self-model, "you" is a high-level circuit. The low-level circuits make all decisions and relay the results to the higher levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture

[2] https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=9000

[cortesoft]

From your second link: "Will and perception do not cause the firing of neurons; they result from it. By definition, everything we are conscious of has to be preceded by neuronal activity that we are not conscious of. That’s just cause/effect. That’s physics."

I guess that is the part that I have trouble with... especially the first sentence: ""Will and perception do not cause the firing of neurons; they result from it"

They don't cause it OR result from it... they ARE it. Everything that is us (including our free will) is made up of those neurons. Our thoughts are neurons firing. Everything we think and believe and experience and decide is contained in those neurons, their state, and their connections.

I always thought the question of free will (at least since I was a philosophy undergrad) was about whether our brains (and the universe) are deterministic or not. I feel like the more we learn about quantum mechanics and physics, the more it seems like the world is NOT deterministic. The uncertainty of the universe means the neuron behavior is NOT deterministic, and that non-determinism is where free will lies.

[mcguire]

The neat thing about layered systems is that they don't really exist. The sin of the "layering violation" is everywhere.

[mcguire]

And if the "self-model" is "the brain" that makes the decision?

[mcphage]

> and that the spike was visible before the person was consciously taking the decision

Or does that just mean that our ability to measure when a decision is made is flawed?

[rpmisms]

That's the point of the article. It shows that the spike is irrelevant.

[mcphage]

Right... I just never got why the experiment was significant in the first place.

[mcguire]

Are you assuming "consciousness" does not involve neural activity? How does that work?