by Richard Hemingway

Created on: April 07, 2009

Is there a free-will? Remember, you are free to read this, or are you? The honest truth is, free-will and determinism coexist. I'm going to take a scientific approach, that way if you don't agree, you can yell at them. There was an experiment put forth by Benjamin Libet. Most people use this experiment as an argument against free-will, but they seem to only understand part of the experiment. Maybe it's just selective attention.

He had a person flex their finger. He found that the neural activity associated with the flexing of the finger fired roughly a half second before the person was consciously aware of it. In other words, the decision was already made by the brain before the mind knew. The unconscious brain was ahead of the conscious mind. So, if I asked you to yell when you consciously decide to move the mouse next to your computer. The neural activity in the brain already put that action into motion before you yelled. Before you were aware! A lot of people know up to this point and know no further. Don't worry, that's what I'm here for. What he also found was that there is a gap of about 500 milliseconds for conscious will to intervene. The conscious will is only to accept and reinforce or deny the given behavior that the brain already dictated. He found this because he saw that the neural coalition associated with the finger flex was sometimes completely abandoned before the action was complete. So, if the brain has an impulse, the mind can veto it.

With this in mind, if you are judging free-will as I "chose" object a over object b. Then you are right, we don't have free-will. But! if you are judging free-will as, I wanted object a, but I denied it and took object b instead, that is an act of free-will. Even if you had the impulse to take a, then stopped yourself, thought about taking b instead, but in the end accepted a, this would still be an act of free-will.

Societies justice system depends on free-will. A man may have an impulse to pull the trigger of a gun, to shoot someone, but he has the power to deny himself at the last second. So, the criminal may say, "Well, this made me do it, because of my circumstance." Yes, that probably very much influenced whatever the criminal did, but nothing forced or compelled him to do anything.

Why do so many people not like the idea of free-will? Isn't that what those danm hippies yelled about back in the sixties, something about freedom. Well, you're going to have a hard time being free, if you don't have free-will. A chain of events determines many things in a person's life. Most things people do throughout the day, conscious will does not even play a role. But, we have free-will. Even if we didn't have free-will, I just don't think I would have the heart to tell those hippies that there is no such thing as freedom.

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