Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will

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  This is philosophy bytes with me, David.

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  Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.

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  Philosophy bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.

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  Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

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  You can opt for a scoop of vanilla or one of strawberry ice cream.

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  Sounds simple enough, but recent research suggests that under certain laboratory conditions, neuroscientists can use brain scans to make accurate predictions about which choices we'll actually make, sometimes before we make a conscious decision at all.

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  This phenomenon seems to undermine the idea that we have free will.

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  But Adina Roskes of Dartmouth College is not so sure.

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  Adina Roskees, welcome to philosophy bites.

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  Thanks very much.

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  The topic we're going to talk about today is neuroscience and free will.

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  Can you give us an example of a neuroscientific breakthrough or some research in neuroscience which plays into the philosophical problem of whether or not we have free will?

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  Sure.

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  Most of the neuroscience that people have heard about that have relevance to the philosophical problem are experiments that seem to indicate to many, anyway, that we don't have free will.

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  And perhaps the most famous of those experiments is an experiment by Benjamin Libet, back in the eighties, actually.

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  And what Libet did was he hooked people up to EEG machines, so they were recording potentials from the scalp, electrical signals from the scalp.

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  And he asked people to periodically raise their finger, freely raise their finger when they feel like they want to raise their finger.

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