Those “Free Will” experiments
The “This Week” section of New Scientist for 2009-09-26 reports on an experiment (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2009.08.006) that apparently refutes Benjamin Libet’s conclusions about his experiment of 1983 (Brain, vol 106, p623)
What they don’t mention in the article is that Libet’s experiment fails under the following simple argument. The experimental subjects exercised free will (if they have it) at the point when they decided to enrol in the experiment. Barring capriocious behaviour1, by the time the experimenter tells them what to do, their earlier decision dictates what they do.
When it comes to the task of pressing a button “at random” no conscious decision need be involved: it is perfectly reasonable to posit the delegation of a random choice to an unconscious process (I’m not sure what one could consciously do to wait a random interval; most of the notions I come up with involve making a choice some time before acting, and then working through the process. Again the free choice happens some time before the action)
[Perhaps on seeing the look of the experimenter they also decided whether to cooperate in the experiment or to do whatever they could to confound it. This makes little difference to the argument above]
