Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience. First, the article states:

  He asked participants to report, using the clock,
  exactly the point when they made the decision to
  move.

Then, it goes on to say:

  There’s no reason to think that we are reliable
  reporters of every aspect of our minds.

Well, this is quite the conundrum. Which is it? Report exactly when you do something or accept that we are not "reliable reporters?" Yet the author goes on to further say:

  Even supporters of Libet have to admit that
  the situation used in the experiment may be too
  artificial to be a direct model of real everyday
  choices.

Given the delays in perception we all experience due to working at "chemical speed", as opposed to light speed, this experiment smacks of fast-twitch muscle measurement more so than exercising free will.

Even the original premise of Libet's experiment negates a free will choice:

  “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”

How is this free will? Free will is a conscious choice to do something, not a subconscious act.

Really, the experiment seems to boil down to 'the decision happens before it is noticed'

It seems a big jump to extrapolate this to 'there is no such thing as free will'

It can also be a case there's a cognitive delay associated with taking note of the time. The mechanism involved into decision making for muscular movements might be dramatically faster than cortical perception and verbalization of time.

The experiment seems to boil down to, "Processing and propagating signals encoding decisions, to report them to the executive centers where the conscious mind will notice them, takes time."

That's not really a wild statement about free will. It's just another paper showing that brains are made of atoms.

Really I've seen so many terrible psychological experiments that spawned huge articles that I am not taking any of this seriously anymore. I don't doubt that we will get somewhere at some point, but it's very clear that at this point we are mostly bluffing.

Just because you set some kind of experiment that turns up some kind of data shouldn't mean that you compare your studies with science on the level of physics or astronomy. Unless your experiments provide a model that has any kind of predictive power you are probably getting nowhere.

The scientific method got where it got, because it started with people doing small experiments that turned up to generate incredible models with a great predictive power, and started building up from there. Just copying the method, disregarding the predictive aspects, and just bluffing from there to generate nice sounding headlines is hardly a similar path.

> appears to be a bit of bubblegum neuroscience.

Libet's experiments were carefully planned and are highly regarded. That's why they have never been refuted, and in fact spawned a lot of newer studies in the field.

They can be valid experiments that reveal important insights about the workings of human consciousness and still be utterly irrelevant to the question of free will. With 100% certainty, because this is the case.

Surely anyone can be 100% sure about their opinion, but without empirical, falsifiable data, it's not of much use.

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