Tag Archives: Daniel Dennett

An Edge Question: What’s Your Law?

On Falling Behind

When I returned to writing this blog after a bit of a hiatus, I made a faintly uttered promise to myself that I would try to write something once a week.

I am currently struggling heroically with an article on Philip Tetlock’s masterful book Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction, but it will just not submit.

It’ll fall eventually, but in order to keep my promise for this week, I’ve had to resort to pinching material, very nearly wholesale, from the Edge.org site. You’ll understand in a second when I say a candidate for Varey’s Law could be…

“Intellectual theft can be a good thing.”

The Edge Question, 2004: What’s Your Law?

Every year, John Brockman of Edge.org poses a question to Edge contributors, and turns the responses into a book. In fact the group of Edge contributors contains some of the smartest people on the planet, mostly (but not exclusively) being made up of scientists from all fields.

In 2004, Brockman’s question was “What’s Your Law?”.

Here are some of the best responses…

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On the 300 Millisecond Issue II

I have written earlier about Sam Harris’ book Free Will, particularly a passage on page 8 where he cites the work of Benjamin Libet. To recap, in the 1970’s, Libet used EEG scans to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex region can be detected approximately 300 milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of having taken a simple decision to move his or her finger or wrist.

This work has been used as an argument against the notion of free will, and Harris doesn’t hesitate to press it into service:

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next — a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please — your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision”, and believe you are in the process of making it. (Free Will, pg. 9)

It strikes me as curious that Harris should lean so heavily on an experiment that tests such a simple aspect of conscious human decision making. It is a big leap from trivial finger movements to more decisive or contemplative situations in life, where really significant issues of free will come into play.

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On the 300 Millisecond Issue I

In Free Will, page 8, Sam Harris describes the research of Benjamin Libet in the 1970’s relating to the timing of certain human brain functions. Libet used EEG scans to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex region can be detected approximately 300 milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of having taken a simple decision to move his or her finger or wrist.

Many commentators, Harris amongst them, feel these findings deal a substantial blow to our common notion of free will. In Harris’ words,

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next — a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please — your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision”, and believe you are in the process of making it. (Free Will, pg. 9)

Harris goes on to query, “Where is the freedom in that?” (Free Will, pg. 9).

Although on the face of it, these findings do seem to threaten a notion of free will, it is not clear to me that they really threaten all notions of free will. Rather, although I agree they do deal a blow to what might be called conscious free will, there might be other notions of free will that, as Daniel Dennett puts it, “are still worth having”.

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