I hope this is a miscommunication between the scientists and reporter because otherwise it’s a very embarrassing experiment
No just an exaggerated tittle.
The article makes it clear. The experiment just suggest free will is more mentally taxing and calculated then random will.
I read the article, I mean how they decided to stimulate brain activity for making a choice by… choosing colored balloons?
And they were surprised the subjects brains responded almost exactly the same? That means… nothing. Everything that comes after is speculation and pseudoscience.
Free will can only exist if we had the supernatural ability to change the past. This idea is something lots of people really don’t like, so they come up with all sorts of ways to magic their way out of it like thinking the supernatural is real, rejecting the scientific method, and/or inconsistent ideas like compatibilism.
We sort of do and don’t. Determinism or not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle means that people can make decisions which are completely unpredictable.
Does uncertainty or our inability to predict it, mean we can will it? How are we outside how everything else in the universe works? Are our brains magical? Do we have souls?
Gateway paper to dictatorship
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“We don’t have free will but we have the experience of freedom” - Brian Greene
We do things for two reasons: either we have to, or we want to. There’s obviously no freedom in having to do something but we’re not free to choose our wants either. It obviously feels like freedom when you have a desire to do something and then you do it, but what else could you have done?
Also, free will implies there’s someone making a decision. What is that “someone” and where is it?
My personal view is that it’s not so much that we should live as if free will exists, but simply that the concept of no free will is incomprehensible - or even destabilizing - to some people. Being acutely aware of it may not be useful for everyone.
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What free will?
Whether you believe in free will or not is dependent on how you classify you.
If you believe you consist of everything that’s inside yourself, you ought to believe in free will because there is no external actor making your choices.
If you think your conscious thoughts are different from the processes your brain and microbiota influencing it you probably either don’t believe in free will or think that information your conscious thought access is processed elsewhere.
Our brains do processing all the time, we access only the part of it. You do things without conscious effort because of that but it’s still you doing things of your free will.
