For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about new developments in free will.
Think about a decision you’ve made — a big one like where to go to college, or a tiny one like whether to pick up your phone. People take for granted that they act according to their decisions, and that our actions only begin once we’ve made a conscious choice. But is it really true? Several fascinating experiments have suggested otherwise. Beginning this year, a 17-member international team of leading neuroscientists and philosophers will undertake an ambitious four-year set of studies to expand our understanding of decision and action, funded by a $5.34 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation and a $1.7 million grant from the Fetzer Institute. The project, led by Chapman University computational neuroscientist Uri Maoz, will seek to tease apart, conjecture by conjecture, whether it can be shown that our behavior is guided by conscious intentions, reached by rational deliberation — in essence, whether this robust understanding of free will can be backed by scientific evidence.
A series of philosophically-guided experiments will use brain imaging techniques together with computational modeling to develop a sophisticated understanding of the causal relationship between intentions and their associated actions. This project will use Benjamin Libet’s seminal 1980s experiments as a jumping-off point. These studies purported to show that participants’ brains initiated simple actions like pushing a button before the participants had consciously decided to act, suggesting that many apparently conscious decisions might simply be post-hoc stories we tell ourselves about processes initiated unconsciously. The experiments carried out by Maoz and his collaborators will work to establish neural markers that distinguish between conscious and unconscious decisions, and between decisions undertaken with deliberation and those taken arbitrarily. If — as Libet’s experiments suggested — a person’s neurological transcript of the decision-making process tells a story that differs significantly from his self-reported timeline of the decision, it would be evidence that the action was not, in fact, a direct result of a conscious decision.