Comments on: The New York Times on Free Will http://www.lawsocietyblog.com/archives/344 Notes from the intersection of law, society, technology, economics, and culture Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:45:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2 By: Ben Samuel Nelson http://www.lawsocietyblog.com/archives/344#comment-8753 Ben Samuel Nelson Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:52:43 +0000 http://www.lawsocietyblog.com/archives/344#comment-8753 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. 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.

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