[marginalium]
Modern determinism; free will dies again
23 Jan 2025
Benjamin Libet is famous for doing an experiment in the 80’s, predicting what button people would press using EEG (brain) measurements about half a second before they were conscious of the decision they’d made. Plenty of heated debate about method and interpretation, but the general idea is that if the decision is made before we’re aware of it, then maybe free will isn’t a thing. Now, we have AI transformer models predicting your brain activity five seconds into the future from just ~20 second samples. See also the cases against free will. But importantly, I’m still not really sure that a lack of free will has many practical consequences?
Anthologies: Betterment, Thought Architecture, On Ethics, On the Nature of Things, On Thinking and Reasoning