The summary is basically that to our best knowledge there is no free will because decisions are caused by neural activities which in turn are caused by sensory input and noise (but unlikely by quantum noise). However, humans have evolved a strong sense of agency because that's simply an efficient way to reason about machines that produce actions in response to the entirety of their sensory input (especially regarding parent child relationships and mutual behavior correction). This neuroarchitectural bias is essentially an illusion of free will that is so firmly wired into our brains that we cannot escape it. It is also the reason why the idea of a God comes so intuitively to many of us: an invisible actor which can be used to explain inexplicable chains of causation and can serve as a very effective metaphor for behavioral error correction (as a proxy for actual social repercussions, and hence relieved from all the complicated and hence fallible power relations to actual social error correction instances).
There are obviously some mechanisms for creating new information and action, based on past experience as well (thus also creating new unforeseen behavior). These mechanisms can clearly be implemented on the neural machine of the brain, since it's evident that it can even already be approximated in Google Deep Dream to create new unforeseen images based on previous inputs.
Whether the human can always verbally describe the decision tree (or whatever other decision mechanism is used), is another question. But even if it cannot describe, so what? The decision is done somewhere deep in the net, and the verbal processor does not have access to it. It's still the network making a decision...
So what makes you say that free will is an "illusion"? Our brains obviously soak up the information and then make future decisions based on that information (subject to effectiveness of learning, etc...).
I am the pre-existing condition that (largely) determines my choices. That's what makes my decisions mine and not just 'free' decisions devoid of context, responsibility or attribution.
So if my decisions are made by me and are not coerced or biased by limited access to information, then they are mine and they are free and I will happily accept responsibility for them. But magically occurring decisions free of conditions and not influenced in any way by my actual mental state or faculties are simply not my decisions.
A construct that can react in multiple ways to a single given set of inputs, but does so by combining them with some internal inputs which are non-deterministic but generally random in nature, also intuitively doesn't have 'free will'.
What you need to really satisfy the intuitive concept of 'free will' is some analytical agency, external to our physical reality, which affects the outcome in some purposeful way. So, basically, a 'soul'.
Of course, to move past the 'intuitive' sense we're gonna need to actually rigorously define 'free will', which is something that is curiously lacking in virtually all discussions of this kind of stuff.
And the thing about it is, the idea that a person reaches a decision unconsciously several moments before they consciously "feel" they "make the decision" is threatening to the idea of "free will"
But what exactly is being threatened? Does a person expect their decision to reached without any physical precursors? Do they expect one magic addition of pros and cons to be registered at the moment they subjectively experience "a decision"? I'm using hyperbole not to discount the importance of this phenomena but to highlight how you have a "highly value experience" that is simultaneously extremely vague. Psychologists would do well to study why people value such experiences.
[1] The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Tor Nørretranders, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion
If this was the case, freedom would not exist since our whole life experiences predisposes us to unconsciously exercise our freedom of will in certain ways.
Here is an amusing example:
I'm 12 and I want to try using a big person's hammer for the first time. My annoying little brother is beside me (as always... sigh).
In mid-air, as I swing the hammer towards the nail, he yells (right in my ear): "You're going to hammer in that nail and because I knew this before it happenned, you didn't decide to hammer it on your own".
In this example, the lack of causality is evident and the amount of LBAF is enormous (LBAF: Little Brother Annoyance Factor)
The parallel can be made with the mind. It's not because we become cognitively aware of our choices fractions of seconds after some brain activity that seem to be decisional that we didn't "will" it, for all we know, this activity is the gist of willing.
Furthermore, there is no indication that our cognitive experiences do not mold our subconscious behaviours, so much that this subconscious activity naturally corresponds to our actual will.
Clearly, it is not sufficient to break a misconceived definition of will in order to claim that freedom of will does not exist, with the argument used, one would also need to prove that this subconscious brain activity is incoherent with our conscious activity.
The problem I have with statements like that is that such statements tend not to provide an alternative meaning for freedom that most people would accept.
It seems better to say that most people comprehend freedom in a fashion that's some combination of incoherent, self-contradictory and trivial.
IE, it's better to say people comprehend freedom as you say but such a comprehension doesn't make sense if you look at it logically.
One thing you might say is that the concept of free and unfree choice makes sense in informal human concept of control and blame - those who freely choose things we don't like get blamed for it, saying people should be free is saying their behavior should be regulated by informal, unconscious interactions rather than formal, rules-based systems.
[0]: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/extref/nn.2112-S1...
[1]: https://courses.cs.ut.ee/MTAT.03.292/2014_fall/uploads/Main/...
- Downplays how inaccurate the classifiers are (55-60% accuracy according to the figures).
- No table of actual left / right frequency pushing frequency. So we can't compare this to the empirical rate of chance (they assume 50% - I would bet £100 that it's not 50%).
- Exclusion policy of people who don't push buttons the right way was inadequately justified, particularly given the above.
- Vague explanation of their statistical methods, even in the supplementary material. In particular I can imagine several ways to interpret what they said about the ANOVA - it shouldn't be up to me to guess what they did, the paper should tell me.
- No use of hold-out data sets.
After a few repetitions, it became apparent why this may be so. It's the instructions. I'm to move the finger "immediately". My brain prepares the movement because it wants to do it "immediately" after "deciding".
Here's a more relaxed setup. Alternate between looking at two fingers at a relaxed pace. At any moment, decide to move the finger you're currently looking at after silently counting to five.
Introspectively, I find no imagined movement before the decision with this task.
Is there an expert here who can comment on the accuracy of this 2008 study, given the more recent news about bugs in fMRI software?
