First, let's get to know you and learn how you became interested in free will.
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Iona. I work as a lecturer in the neuroscience department of the same school. I previously worked at Franklin and Marshall University's Scientific and Philosophical Mind Studies program. Likewise, I served as an instructor at King's College London and the University of Alabama. I continue my current and future studies by examining whether there is autonomy of the will from the perspectives of philosophy, neuroscience and psychiatry. I am particularly researching what neuroscience offers us about our meaningful actions.
I became interested in free will through different disciplines. During my undergraduate studies at Grinnel University, I received an experimental and clinical psychology education. We were discussing topics such as the relationship between the mind and the brain, scientific consciousness studies and the harmony of humans with nature. In my senior year, I realized how much these topics fascinated me from a theoretical perspective, and I decided what to pursue next: The neuroscience of free will.
What is this free will?
Free will is a concept we are used to in our daily lives. Most of us believe (at least we once believed) that our actions depend on us to some extent. For example, I am free to decide to do my work today or go for a run in the afternoon. Free will doesn't just mean taking action towards my goal. I also have a will in terms of the decisions I make. My decisions and actions depend on me in terms of the values, judgments and intentions I hold. "I decided to do my current job because I share a similar vision with the institute I am affiliated with." or I may believe that this job is suitable for me and will grow with me.
Depending on this, I may also decide to do something different. For example, I decided to go for a run in the afternoon and no one forced me. I could have gone for a coffee instead. This is how I handle the situation.
From such starting points, philosophers try to produce a plausible idea of free will. Generally speaking, there is a correct view of free will. Therefore, there are disagreements. However, most philosophers believe that a person has free will if he or she has the ability to act freely, and that such control depends on whether it is appropriate to hold that person responsible for his or her actions. For example, when a person is under threat and coercion, we do not hold him responsible for his actions.
How do neuroscientists handle free will?
With exciting claims about the neuroscience of free will. There are also many opinions about whether science disproves free will (EX: My brain made me do this). Considering the relationship between free will and legal and moral responsibility - punishment, etc. - there are important claims not only in terms of human nature, but also in terms of our daily life.
Current neuroscience of free will is based on the famous experiment of Benjamin Libet and his colleagues. It extends up to . Most of our actions start with our body movements. Most of us think that before taking an action, we make a decision in our brain and transfer the job to our motor neurons.
In the study of Kornhuber and Deecke in the 1960s, they found that before voluntary movements, the negatively charged areas in the supplementary motor area (SMA) and pre-SMA It is known that increased brain activation is revealed by the electroencephalogram (EEG) device. This brain activity, also known as readiness potential (RP), is considered as a neural preparation for the upcoming movement and occurs approximately half a second before the movement.
Thereupon, Libet and his colleagues believe that this latent activity is They asked exactly when it appeared. The moment of decision made in the relevant part of the brain had to be measured in a laboratory environment. Therefore, Libet asked his participants to move their fingers and then indicate, using a special clock designed for the experiment, exactly when they made the decision to make this movement (This moment is described as the "W moment").
In this study, Libet, contrary to popular belief, stated that revealed that participants' decision-making awareness emerged about one-third of a second after the readiness potential (RP) emerged. In other words, the brain first creates an unconscious The person makes a decision and then implements it.
Libet used this finding as evidence that the conscious self is incapable of initiating any movement. It was unconscious brain processes that initiated the movement. However, if all our "voluntary" behaviors occur in this way, that is, if the conscious self is not the initiator of any movement, how could the way we manifest that movement depend on us?
While these results worry many people, they are quite big for cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. created a research field. However, we should not conclude that we cannot act freely or that we do not deserve any of the moral reactions others have to our actions. There is still a healthy debate about whether the results of Libet's experiment suggest that humans can be considered self-governing, free and moral persons.
The "W moment" refers to a moment of decision awareness. Can we scientifically describe this as "moments of conscious awareness"?
After Libet's experiment, discussions began to emerge about whether a moment of conscious awareness could be measured. After all, we are only talking about milliseconds. In this experiment, all relevant activations appear to occur within 1 second before the participant moves their finger. According to Libet, the data obtained were reliable because the participants' responses to stimuli such as electric shock were accurately determined in the same laboratory. Recently, the reliability of the "W moment" has been tested with current studies. In these studies, the "W moment" appeared at different times in certain tasks completed by the participants.
Many projects that Parés-Pujolràs and his colleagues are working on, such as the simultaneous and online measurement of a person's conscious decisions, are put forward by different researchers. In these studies, participants watch a broadcast in which letters continuously flow on the computer screen while they spontaneously press the button in their hands. However, the color of these letters changes from time to time. Participants are then asked to press the button when they notice that the color change will occur. Such practices require conscious actions of the participants. It constitutes a reliable alternative in measuring the awareness of people.
What do the current studies on the neuroscience of free will show?
To mention the two most current topics, the studies are negatively charged. It focuses on what exactly is the readiness potential (RP), which indicates brain activation, and ensuring the internal validity of the conscious actions that participants demonstrate in the laboratory. Researchers are studying the possibility that readiness potential (RP) is not an activity specific to the movement performed. Schurger and his colleagues, with their empirical studies, consider the readiness potential as the neural signature that occurs when we exceed some neural thresholds during an action. This possibility can be worrying, as actions that may be undertaken by the "I" for certain reasons will actually be the result of fluctuating brain activity.
Going back to the second issue, researchers are working to enable us to experience similar decision-making processes we experience in daily life in a laboratory environment. According to Libet, since readiness potential occurs before complex actions, tasks such as wrist bending or button pressing should be replaced by these. We can thus provide an integrated explanation of practical decisions and timings of body movements. Many, like me, think that the task of pressing the button is not an appropriate task to reach the conclusion that we do not consciously decide our own actions. Therefore, some ongoing studies are making left or right button pressing tasks more meaningful by associating them with rewards/punishments or meanings such as donating to a foundation.
And on the other hand, researchers have many brain imaging devices at their disposal. Many important studies have been conducted to revive the Libet experiment with devices such as cell tracking and fMRI. For example, projects such as "Big Questions in Free Will" and "Consciousness and Free Will" bring together many philosophers and neuroscience laboratories from all over the world. I think we should expect much more advanced explanations from these projects about all these issues that we talk about.
In neuroscience Apart from this secret control, are there any other studies that tell us something interesting?
Yes. One of the most undeniable aspects of our lives is that we experience ourselves, our actions, and their consequences in the world. There are studies in the cognitive neuroscience literature that consider this sense of self as intentional binding (we are open to better translation suggestions).
Imagine that you have designed a clever experiment and ask the participants who is responsible for their actions. If these actions lead to a positive outcome, participants will take responsibility, while if they have a negative outcome, they will attribute the responsibility to external factors. This situation is called "Self-serving bias" in the literature.
Cognitive neuroscientists are working on a methodology that can measure participants' feeling of "having control of the actions taken and their consequences" without resorting to "I did it" feedback. In this context, researchers ask participants to evaluate the timing of movements (e.g. pressing the button) and the sensory consequences of these movements (e.g. the beep sound after pressing the button). According to the results obtained, those who intentionally pressed the button and heard the beep perceived the touch and hearing times as much closer to each other than those who did not intend (those who pressed the button through neural stimulation).
In other words, when we voluntarily press the button, we perceive the touch and the beep as much more interrelated. What is intriguing about this research is that our perceptual judgments about the world change depending on who we see as the perpetrator of the actions. Studies on intentional association can address a more natural sense of self when stressed by different options.
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