Friday, August 17, 2012

Free will, neuroscience, and "willusionists"

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/does-contemporary-neuroscience-support-or-challenge-reality-free-will


Does Contemporary Neuroscience Support or Challenge the Reality of Free Will?


August 13, 2012

Most scientists who discuss free will say the story has an unhappy ending—that neuroscience shows free will to be an illusion.  I call these scientists “willusionists.” (Willusionists include Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Jonathan Bargh, Daniel Wegner, John Dylan Haynes, and as suggested briefly in some of their work, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.) Willusionists say that neuroscience demonstrates that we are not the authors of our own stories but more like puppets whose actions are determined by brain events beyond our control.  In his new book Free Will, Sam Harris says, “This [neuroscientific] understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.” Jerry Coyne asserts in a USAToday column: “The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”

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