"Cognitive science" is a concoction of disgruntled analytic philosophers as a critique of or alternative to it. I don't know what is meant by "neuroscience". If it is a medical field it behooves it to have the scientific modesty of general medicine, which proceeds on a rough notion of pathology and treatment and does not presume to theorize about what a healthy human being is. A medical field is exceeding its competence if it presumes to define its subject. By doing so it denies it freedom by fiat, not by the evidence. Libertarianism is an effort to justify moral licentiousness. As such it is fanaticism, not a credible theory of humanity. More pertinently, it arrogates a maximal scale of conclusion from what can only be minimal evidence. It is a clumsy mistake to suppose that human insight or free will must be some maximal effect. As if by the sweep of our hand we could reverse tides or make manna fall from the sky, otherwise there is no freedom in the world. The question is, how much divergence from the causal nexus does it take to make freedom real? If you can only expect maximal signs you have already prejudiced the matter against what is plainly more real than the ability to see them so defined. The life of mind is not even glimpsed in the methodology of "neuroscience", whatever the hell it is anyway.

Body and mind are One or the same. Freedom comes with the wisdom of equality.
"Free at last" =

An intelligent and useful post by Laura Maguire. Neuroscientists (of which I am one) sometimes feel qualified to pronounce on philosophical questions without understanding the long history of thought and progress on these questions. The idea of free will they want to dismiss seems, conveniently for them, to be an impossible, almost incoherent one: to have free will, a person must have a god-like inner chooser inside who makes decisions independent of the laws of nature and the person's character and experiences. It is easy to deny such a thing exists, and in fact its implausibility has long been recognized. (That concept is also profoundly dualist, which is ironic since those adopting it usually say they abhor dualism.)
When we speak of people being free in other areas such as freedom of action or freedom of speech, in contrast to freedom of will, there is broad consensus and little philosophical handwringing. In the area of free action, for example, our actions are considered free to the extent that we can do what we want to do. Our speech is free if we can say or publish what we want to say or write. Whether what one wants to do or say arises naturally from her character and experience, in other words whether what she wants to do or say is predictable and deterministic, is not considered relevant. For some reason never made clear by the free-will-deniers, that criterion of freedom is not sufficient when it comes to free will: for our will to be free, supposedly an inner deity would need to be able to violate the laws of nature.
Writings by these neuroscientists or 'neurophilosophers' often state the criterion of free will this way: "At the moment of decision, could he have decided otherwise?" That question is the beginning of wisdom, but the question is incomplete. What needs to be added is, "...if he had wanted to?" Not an easy question to answer in any particular case, and neuroscience at present usually can't provide an answer, but it is the only sensible question to ask if one wants to ascertain whether a person's will is free at that moment.
- Steve George

Thank you for your comments, Steve George!

丹尼尔·丹尼特在这周的节目中讨论的问题之一是是否有任何事情发生在这个行为上。丹尼特认为，像利贝特这样的实验中的行为是故意选择的，尽可能地没有目的。这些不是自由意志问题通常产生的行为类型，因为这些行为在任何实际意义或道德意义上都没有后果。当你按下按钮时，什么都不会发生。

Mr. George,
也许你已经指出了这个问题。参考。科学必须假设引用是没有问题的。因为如果是这样，那么推理的进展就迷失了方向，失败了。人是失去的所指，自由意志是它的语言。事实是，心灵是存在的，它无法被识别或定位在我们称之为大脑的部分。但是，如果我们认为需要调查的东西是由我们的调查工具决定的，那就太不负责任了。这并不意味着我们可以自由地创造我们的主题。但是，如果对参考文献的严格研究证明了它的失败，并且能够同样严格地在失败中找到它的主题，那么忽视这一发现将是同样不负责任的。
Science is hampered by its tools, as a matter of scale. We can investigate parts of the brain and find real phenomena there that is duly interpreted as functioning in a certain way, but if there is a fundamentally vexed relation between parts and wholes, then such interpretation is hamstrung by its presumptions. I'm not a biologist, but I have done some reading, and I am fascinated by the notion of cell differentiation. What orders this? Must it not be the case that every time a cell divides, at least in an organism which relies on cell differentiation as a means of becoming complex, that the result is two differentiated cells? How differentiated? If the whole point of a complex organism is that each cell is more ordered in differentiation than replication, where is the order of that difference? Might it not be that each cell has as its mission, as it were, to be the most differentiated? And so most conducive to the complex? And if you combine this thought with the matter of the lost referent, where does life begin, if not in a kind of freedom that only a vexed and uncompleted reference between parts and wholes can throw light on?
Gary.

"At the moment of decision, could he have decided otherwise?" That question is the beginning of wisdom, but the question is incomplete. What needs to be added is, "...if he had wanted to?"
“有一只狗，他有两根骨头，他选择了另一根，选择的自由。”Devo
智慧没有起点，也没有终点，它就是智慧。=

说得好，我认为这些实验中的任务除了无关紧要之外，没有在其他方面涉及到一个人的意志。如果我们所说的“意志”指的是“意志力”和“意志坚强”等短语中所提到的东西，那么它是关于一种自愿行为的决定，但却是一种特殊的自愿行为。通常情况下，这需要在两件不相容的东西之间做出有意识的选择，一件会带来短期利益，另一件会带来长期利益。我想吃三巧克力山核桃派，但我也想继续节食。我想做轻松的工作，薪水高，但这对我所信仰的事业没有任何帮助，所以我也想做困难的工作，薪水低，但有机会让社会变得更好。显然，Libet、Wegner等人的实验并没有提到这种有意志的行为。
To be fair, in order to achieve scientific validity the tasks in those experiments had to be unambiguous, quantifiable, and repeatable, which I'm sure is why they were chosen. And, if it is true (questions about assessing the timing of the subjects' choices notwithstanding) that specific brain electrical activity precedes the moment when the subject feels he or she is making the conscious choice, it is an interesting finding about the basis of voluntary action. But, not about free will in its fullest sense.
- Steve George

而且，如果这是真的(尽管关于评估受试者选择时间的问题)，当受试者感到他或她正在做出有意识的选择时，特定的脑电活动在那一刻之前，这是一个关于自愿行为基础的有趣发现。但不是完全意义上的自由意志。

I absolutely agree!

The question is whether neuroscience is able to resolve the free will debate based on experiments such as the one described in Laura Maguire's introductory essay. A student of philosophy might first ask what the participants in the discussion mean by the term "free will." The ensuing discussion would probably lead to talk about what will is and what does it mean for that will to be free. At some point some participants might fall into the "nothing more than" fallacy of reductionism, which has a long pedigree going back at least to the time of Plato.
在我看来，完全决定论的论点的有效性被一种谢诺悖论所削弱。如果我们所思考和所做的一切都是完全确定的(没有任何偶然或随机事件——这是拉普拉斯所论证的立场)，那么讨论就没有意义，因为所有的参与者都预先确定了他们所论证的立场。对事情真相的洞察是无关紧要的，因为即使我们表面上选择改变我们的想法也是一种幻觉。
But we have plenty of evidence that randomness is real. Indeed, the whole of evolution (operating under the laws of chance and necessity as Jacque Monod called it) depends on randomness Mutations are not the linear result of the conditions that preceded them. If they were, they wouldn't be mutations.
If randomness is real, then a simplistic determinism such as that proposed by Laplace, B.F. Skinner, and others is false. Everything that happens is not simply the playing out of a script that was contained in full in the zero entropy event that preceded the Big Bang.
To say that there is no free will must mean, at least, that choice is an illusion. There is no entity that does any choosing, at least not consciously. Why then did consciousness emerge? So that conscious beings could observe what was happening without being able to affect events? That hardly seems plausible.
We believe that we make choices. We know what it feels like not to be able to choose, to be coerced into a course of action. We know what it feels like to have our will overborne. Why would we have these feelings and belief if the distinction between choice and choicelessness were a complete illusion?
We hold people responsible for their choices and actions. We call them to account. In some cases people clearly have lost the ability to make responsible choices (insanity, coercion, drug-induced states), and we don't hold them legally responsible. And the list of conditions that severely impair or completely eliminate an individual's ability to control her behavior is growing, particularly through our increased knowledge of brain lesions and other aspects of neuroscience. But we also know that these conditions are aberrations. They are not normal, which is why we make exceptions to the rules for people afflicted by them.
例如，我们知道，精神变态者缺乏一些负责任的人格的关键特征，包括同理心，这使得他们更难做正确的事情。但我们也知道，因为我们有例子，有同理心缺陷的人可以学会负责任的行为，控制自己的行为，尽管他们缺乏同理心。(同理心帮助我们避免伤害他人，因为它确实帮助我们感受他们的痛苦。那些很少或根本没有同理心的人缺乏这种抑制性的神经机制，但他们仍然知道是非，特别是当他们被冤枉时，他们有一种敏锐的感觉，不会被黑暗力量强迫表现得像十足的混蛋或更糟。
也许我是在回避问题，或者只是在断言结论。但这是一个很难避免的结论，一个大多数人都会接受的结论，就像约翰逊博士踢石头来反驳乔治·伯克利(George Berkeley)的理论一样。
At any rate, the experiments showing that our awareness of a decision is preceded by neural activity is hardly a compelling case to the contrary.

Free will does not preclude coercion, not even unrecognized coercion. Religions are past mastgers at this, not just magicians. Hell, any grocery store is riddled with techniques of "forcing".
The notion of randomness is way over-used as a dumping grounds for lazy reasoning. In physics nothing is really random, indeterminacy is calculable. In biology it is a feature so regular that DNA can be dated by it. But there is no "mutation" that does not require an active application by the organism to make a viable change in the species. In the brain, there are many more active exchanges than simple electrical impulses. There are exchanges of atoms and compounds, and any electrical charge entails complex features such as electromagnetic energy level, polarity, phase.
But there also are limits to rational deduction that the numbers of events that happen in the human brain must encounter somehow, but that science has not yet developed the intellectual means of recognizing, because no equipment or calculation can reveal it. And it takes a philosopher to point this out.
I wonder how the "slum-dog" managed to beat the "forced" response, choosing "D" when he was directed to "B"? But, I suppose, his answer mattered.

我很喜欢康纳你对这个问题的回应。If I may add some thought again:
科学的工作是测量和划分一切事物，他们知道，他们的测量结果只是不确定的或最多是可能的。但他们一直在测量，不是吗，这就是科学。疯子的定义不就是一遍又一遍地犯同样的错误，希望得到不同的结果吗?
Their scientific attempts to measure free will and determinism has led to the same insane problems of measuring a particle of light and its resulting wave-particle duality. Light as is truth is indivisible. To find the truth of the matter, be it light or thought, One must remove any uncertainty, once removed the absolute is all that remains. Measure is the uncertainty that creates these false divisions, remove it and see for yourselves, freedom and determinism are One or the same.
At the end of the tunnel there is a light, not a particles or a wave, not a measurement, nor a division, only the light of unity, the absolute of freedom. Truth will set you free.
Thanks,
= is

Thanks for that thoughtful and interesting post. Two comments/questions:
(1)随机性是如何促成自由意志的?如果一个人的心理活动和行为具有明显的随机方面——例如，从一套信仰和价值观蹒跚地转向另一套，而这与他以前的背景和构成无关——这是否会削弱自由行使意志的可能性，至少在能够按照自己的意愿行事的意义上是这样的?一个意志是否足够强大，能够克服外界的诱惑和影响，从而能够以可预测的方式运作，并以一种由人的性格和经历决定的方式运作，这难道不是比一个以令人费解的方式随机变化的意志更自由吗?
(2) Connorblum就我们自由选择的感觉提出了一个很好的问题:“如果选择和无选择之间的区别完全是一种幻觉，我们为什么会有这些感觉和信念?”休谟至少对这个问题给出了部分答案，我觉得这个问题很有趣，尽管我对这些问题的了解还不足以批判性地分析它。他认为，我们认为我们的自由选择缺乏严格的因果关系，这不是由于在某种程度上，与无生命的自然界中的原因相比，原因更弱，而是由于我们对因果关系强度的普遍错误理解。他说人们“……我们有一种强烈的倾向，相信他们对自然的力量有更深入的了解，认为因果之间有某种必要的联系。当他们再次反思自己的思想活动时，他们感到动机与行为之间没有这种联系;因此他们倾向于认为，由物质力量产生的效果，和由思想和智力产生的效果是不同的"在这篇文章之前，有一个关于因果本质的漫长论证，我并没有完全理解它，但我认为休谟在这里的解释是有道理的!(online ref:https://books.google.com/books?id=--LdAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT65#v=onepage&q&f=false)
- Steve George

You can't explain away free will by saying there is an evil hypnotist taking your free will away because someone could always say that hypnotist has the free will to hypnotize you do do crazy things. You would need an infinite regress of evil hypnotists to explain away free will altogether, which is really getting nowhere.
Also, being influenced doesn't preclude free will. We can resist influences. We can choose one influence over another.

这是个问题，不是吗?，证明责任。除非我们愿意接受苛刻的询问，否则我们无权期待对方同意。简单地无休止地重复不真实的东西不会赢得同意或尊重。但这是一个严重的问题，违背基本假设的东西只应该被允许用这些假设来表达或研究。但同样严重的是，这些假设遭到质疑。这需要我们做出认真的努力，即使是假装解决这个问题。说没有自由意志，我们以为自己是谁?但是，同样的，我们认为我们说的是谁呢?谦虚是有必要的。但如果对方不谦虚，这就更难了。 Judgment by fiat cannot be permitted to prevail. I think the moderators of this site might do well to return to basics. But, then, fundamental thinking is so out of vogue these days that it is become virtually taboo.
Mr. George,
You will find the same argument in Plato's Apology, predating Hume by a bit.

Gary Washburn - thanks for the suggestion about Plato's Apology, and for your interesting posts about free will. I actually couldn't find a reference to something like Hume's argument (that a problem with understanding cause and effect leads to confusion about free will) in the Apology, e.g. the standard translation athttp://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html. I may be reading it too literally - and what great reading it is!. Could you point me to the place in the text where that argument is located? Thanks!
- Steve George

恐怕是我的记忆出了问题。我在想苏格拉底叙述安那萨哥拉斯如何试图用纯粹的物理术语解释意志的段落，这是一种滑稽的努力。这些段落不在《道歉篇》中，而是在《斐多篇》中，从D. 96开始，休谟的解决方案是一种连贯的理论，其中加入了一些行为模式。但关键是，不是我们有能力准确地解释我们通过感官体验到的东西，而是我们如何认识到我们没有，这改变了经验的词汇条件，如果不是形式条件的话。苏格拉底用很多地方世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区和方式向我们展示，我们认识到我们不知道，我们在学习，我们如何回应这些知识，我们展示了什么是人类，什么是拥有人类的特征，如理性，意志，道德判断，自由和良知，以及什么是“知道”。我们太看重我们能拥有和证明的东西，而忽视了我们的应对能力。与期望相符的事情并不能教会我们任何东西。这就像一场梦。但错误和损失唤醒我们面对现实。知识大厦的大部分是作为一种衰减的损失而持续的，仿佛时间是一种不变的永恒。 But what we recognize as real is the anomaly to such stability. There is some sense of this in physics, but in the macro sciences like medicine and neurology there is too much reliance on unexamined fundamentals taken as axiomatic. There are no axioms of time. We learn through confronting error and loss that changes our minds such that the very language of the conviction in constancy is itself inconstant. But if the mandate of conviction is constancy, and the realest term of it is change, it is in the apparently inexplicable alterations in that conviction, short of confronting a more critical reality, that express our truer nature. That is, even the conviction that consistency is rigor must have its moods. And though our moods can lead to changes in us without breaking out into understanding, fundamentals apply. Even ?neuro-scientists? have moods. It is anomalies to our fundamental convictions that generate them. And it is those anomalies that are kept hidden by our conviction that consistency is rigor that supply us with the tools to understand just how inconsistent is that conviction. It is not to abandon rigor, but to push it to completion, that we see what is human in that rigor. This is why we are in need of fundamental inquiry, which simply does not happen these days. Too many of our predecessors made fools of themselves. But fear of this is no alibi for conceit.

I would like to try a little analytic move here. I think the terms are just confusing people. The show touched on this but did not resolve anything. I think we are all in agreement (at least the non-dualists are) that what people on the street call free will is an illusion. The world simply does not work that way. But we have this whole history of moral language that is necessary to society. So try this:
When we talk about big issue and deep truths we step outside of the world of experience to take science seriously, that is we talk Outside the Myth of Free Will.
When we want to talk about human things and the ordinary ways in which moral persuasion works, as well as learning, then we are Inside the Myth of Free Will.
这很重要——回答Dan在节目中提出的问题——因为社会制度是一场道德灾难，它将无法控制的事情归咎于人们。我们的经济制度和司法制度都在运作，就好像自由意志的神话是真的一样。这些机构应该在神话之外运作，因此应该承认它是神话，并作出适当的反应。这并不意味着人们没有道德或不学习——它的意思是，我们需要以合理的方式让人们承担责任，以我们对科学的了解。

称自由神话。一些分析!经济学是神话，它很难在其构成框架之外运作。顺便说一下，经济学的神话是，价值是可以量化的。顺便说一下，量词的神话，就是为什么分析永远不可能是真实的。逻辑的基础是所谓矛盾的“规律”，而事实上，分析的事实是不可能有真正的矛盾的。只是相反。这个命题不是消除歧义，而是用歧义来衡量的。当科学试图消除其人性时，它会改变自身，而不是人性。

There is certainly a major verbal aspect to this issue. It's reasonable to make the distinction proposed in Richard Curtis' post, but I hate to concede that my belief in my own (occasionally) free will, as I understand what that phrase should mean, is a myth. If in a particular situation (1) I can will what I want to will and (2) I could have willed differently if I had wanted to, that's free willing according to the meaning of 'free' in every other context - freedom of movement, speech, action, etc. According to that meaning, if (1) and (2) apply, the will is free whether the person's want to will a particular thing is based on random chance, no cause at all, a totally autonomous inner chooser, one's consciousness resolving a quantum superposition (as some physicists have speculated), or - as I personally believe is most common - ordinary determinism. Could we agree to call the will "free"' no matter what lies behind what we want to will, but use another word for the supposed special case of the godlike inner chooser, such as "omnipotent will," or spontaneous, uncaused, or supernatural will? Also, to categorize such a possibility unequivocally as a myth will raise hackles, perhaps legitimately, since I don't think anyone can say for sure that it absolutely never happens.
例如，我知道在意大利语中，通常与“自由”对应的词是“libero”。“言论自由”就是“discorso libero”。然而，在自由意志的情况下(如短语“一个人自己的自由意志”)，它被称为自发性volontà，有点像我上面的建议，为“自由”的一个更好的英语单词，当意志是非决定性地发生。不过，在德语中，我在康德的网页中看到“Willenfreiheit”，所以在这方面，德语可能和英语一样。我想知道其他语言，比如印欧语系以外的其他语系。“谷歌translate”可能会把“free will”翻译成“free”+“will”，而不是把短语流畅地翻译成一个单位。有没有母语为汉语、纳瓦霍语或斯瓦希里语的人能熟练地将“free will”翻译成普通话、纳瓦霍语或斯瓦希里语，并将其与“free”在非“willing”情况下的用法进行比较?
- Steve George

Great discussion here! Thanks everyone for your thoughtful comments.
Check out my latest blog post here://m.f8r7.com/community/blog/laura-maguire/2015/07/power...

Mr. George,
Another Plato dialog you may be interested in is the Cratylus. In response to a question about the origin of the meanings of words, Socrates goes into an extensive, if fanciful, etymology of Greek words. The point, as always in Plato, is not explicit, but intimated. It is that our ability to understand each other derives, not from some pre-existing system or mechanism, but from the effort we make to understand one another. What if freedom is not something I possess as a innate capability or trait, but derives from my need that you be free so that we can come to understand each other? If you are not free to misunderstand me I am not capable of being understood.
Randomness, again? Well, again, nothing real is random. Probabilities are always calculable, or unreal. What is incalculable, where calculation fails, where the lost enumerator is what is real, meaning erupts. And person is its extremity in rigor. It is how we change our minds that measures how human we are and what that means. Science is about how we become fixed in our minds. And so, again, what is needed is philosophy, not "neuro-science".