"An article in Nature reports on recent experiments suggesting that our choices are not free.
“We feel that we choose,” says the neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes, “but we don’t.”
The experiments show that, prior to the moment of conscious choice, there are correlated brain events that allow scientists to predict, with 60 to 80 percent probability, what the choice will be.
Of course this might mean that the choices are partially determined by the brain events but still ultimately free. But suppose later experiments predict our choices with 100 percent probability?
How could a choice be free if a scientist could predict it with certainty?
But my wife might be 100 percent certain that, given a choice between chicken livers and strip steak for dinner, I will choose steak. Does that mean that my choice isn’t free?
Couldn’t she be sure that I will freely choose steak?
Perhaps, though, what’s important about the experiments is not that choices are predictable but that they are caused. How could a choice that is caused be free?
Wouldn’t that mean that something made it happen? On the other hand, how could a choice that was not caused be free? If a choice has no cause at all, it is simply a random event, something that just occurred out of the blue. Why say that a choice is mine if it doesn’t arise from something occurring in my mind (or brain)?
And if a choice isn’t mine, how can we say I made it?"
By Gary Gutting/ NYTimes.com/more
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