Free will.

Well, are we ''robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes''
or something else?
In philosophy the controversy has been raging for centuries.

And, surely, no homepage will be complete without a contribution...

Are we really just robots?

The robots are coming! Or so we are told.
But what about ourselves?

Benjamin Libet was a pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness. Famous for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will.
In one of his brilliant experiments, subjects where asked to carry out some small, simple motor activity, such as pressing a button, or flexing a finger or wrist, within a certain time frame. The subjects would then be asked to note the time when ''he/she was first aware of the wish or urge to act''.

On average, approximately two hundred milliseconds elapsed between the first appearance of conscious will to press the button and the act of pressing it.
Researchers also analyzed EEG recordings for each trial with respect to the timing of the action. It was noted that brain activity involved in the initiation of the action, primarily centered in the secondary motor cortex, occurred, on average, approximately five hundred milliseconds before the trial ended with the pushing of the button.

That is to say, researchers recorded mounting brain activity related to the resultant action as many as three hundred milliseconds before subjects reported the first awareness of a conscious will to act [Libet].

The subjects thought they had free will. But the results demonstrated the opposite...
Parts of the brain (controlling the finger) had actually been active for some time, when they ''decided'' to move the finger.

But hold on.

New experiments have tried to identify the EEG patterns for both the decision to act, and the control of the actual movement.
It then turns out that the control of the actual movement occurs after the decision.
I.e. Libets conclusion that the body makes the decision itself (and consciousness has no other job than explaining what has already been decided elsewhere) - is too simple.

Maybe, there are two kinds of actions - quick and slow actions?
Things that we think are planned, the slow decisions, are actually under conscious control, whereas the quick ones (in Libets experiment) are perhaps not (so much) under conscious control?

Then we are again masters, controlled by consciousness, rather than robots being controlled by our biology, with consciousness confusing us about who is really running the show.

But hold on.

Isn't consciousness and mental-states somehow produced by the underlying biology?
If so, then we are again robots controlled by our biology?

Well, perhaps ... Consciousness is not fully understood, and then, obviously, free will is not fully understood...

Michael Gazzaniga has some thoughts about it in his latest book ''Who is in Charge?''.
According to Gazzaniga, ''analyzing nerve states may be able to inform us how the thing could work, but not how it actually does''. It has to do with emergence.
Gazzaniga quotes nobel prize winner Philip W. Andersen:

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from these laws and reconstruct the universe.

Emergence is not very much liked. Finally, we have gottan rid of the homunculus inside our brains, and finally, we have gottan rid of Descartes' dualism - and other ghosts in the machine - and then people propose, that there are still ghosts in there ...

So, what is going on?
In genetics there is a multiplicity of events going on? And the same might be the case for conscious action? Downward (consciousness) and upward (biology) causation working together...?

Gazzaniga doesn't mention it, but I can't help thinking about software and hardware!
Using that metaphor, then it would make sense to say that we have software running in our brains that guides where the physical states will go next (''downward causation'').
And obviously, the ''mental software'' is ''running'' on our biology?

For more about Gazzanigas book see here.

Reference: The Free Will, Information, November 10th. 2012.