The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity
in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds
before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab
recently used fMRI data to show that some "conscious" decisions can
be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long
before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly,
findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense
that one is the conscious source of one's actions. The question of
free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. A belief in free
will underwrites both the religious notion of "sin" and our
enduring commitment to retributive justice. The Supreme Court has
called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our
system of law. Any scientific developments that threatened our
notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing
people for their bad behaviour in question.In Free Will Harris
debates these ideas and asks whether or not, given what brain
science is telling us, we actually have free will?
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