The New York Times on Free Will
Published by Hanno Kaiser January 2nd, 2007 in PhilosophyHere is a nice article on the contemporary free will debate by Dennis Overbye.
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it is a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.”
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I agree that free will may occur in a deterministic universe if and only if our consciousness has some genuine control over a bodily event. For that reason, I wish the NYT had said more about Libet. I find Libet’s work the most stimulating contributions to the whole mess of debates.
And I find the alternatives — i.e., which postulate some “preconscious free will”, or which appeal to quantum mechanics, or a useful fiction, or whatever — to be wrongheaded. At some point, we have to stop giving ourselves excuses for these feelings we have about freedom, and we have to actually commit to intuitively plausible necessary and sufficient conditions on the matter (verifiable or not). These latter options have seemed like so much squirming from the core concerns that I can’t find myself convinced.