[jnd-cz]

I looked up the Libet experiment:

"Implications

The experiment raised significant questions about free will and determinism. While it suggested that unconscious brain activity precedes conscious decision-making, Libet argued that this does not negate free will, as individuals can still choose to suppress actions initiated by unconscious processes."

[mapontosevenths]

It's been repeated a huge number of time since, and widely debated. When Libet first did the experiment it was only like 200ms before the mind become consciously aware of the decision. More recent studies have shown they can predict actions up to 7-10 seconds before the subject is aware of having made a decision.

It's pretty hard to argue that you're really "free" to make a different decision if your body knew which you would choose 7 seconds before you became aware of it.

I mean, those long term predictions were only something like 60% accurate, but still, the preponderance of evidence says that those decisions are deterministic and we keep finding new ways to predict the outcome sooner and with higher accuracy.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18408715/

[kortex]

"I conducted an experiment where I instructed experienced drivers to follow a path in a parking lot laid out with traffic cones, and found that we were able to predict the trajectory of the car with greater than 60% accuracy. Therefore drivers do not have free will to just dodge the cones and drive arbitrarily from the start to the finish."

Clearly, that conclusion would be patently absurd to draw from that experiment. There are so many expectation and observation effects that go into the very setup from the beginning. Humans generally follow directions, particularly when a guy in a labcoat is giving them.

> At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. [0]

Wow. TWO whole choices to choose from! Human minds tend to pre-think their choice between one of two fingers to wiggle, therefore free will doesn't exist.

> It's pretty hard to argue that you're really "free" to make a different decision if your body knew which you would choose 7 seconds before you became aware of it.

To really spell it out since the analogy/satire may be lost: You're free to refrain from pressing either button during the prompt. You're free to press both buttons at the same time. You're free to mash them rapidly and randomly throughout the whole experiment. You're free to walk into the fMRI room with a bag full of steel BB's and cause days of downtime and thousands of dollars in damage. Folks generally don't do those things because of conditioning.

[0] - http://behavioralhealth2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/U...

[mapontosevenths]

If that were the only evidence I might agree that alternative explanations are as likely, but I cited only one of many studies that show similar outcomes. There are loads of other studies done with entirely different methodologies that indicate most human introspection is mostly better described as post hoc confabulism. That is to say, we don't use reason to make decisions so much as we make decisions, and then justify them with reasons. Nisbet and Wilson were showing it experimentally as far back as the late 70's. [0] It's been confirmed in different forms hundreds of times since.

Certainly we can come up with some alternative theories (like "free will") to explain it all away, but the simplest (therefore most likely correct) answer is just that we're basically statistical state machines and are as deterministic as a similar computational system.

To be clear, I'm not saying that metacognition doesn't exist. Just that I've never seen any reason to believe it's very different from current thinking models that just feed an output back in as another input.

[0] - https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...