photo: Un ragazzo chiamato Bi
There is a fascinating article over at Wired, “Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them”. It seems like researchers can predict people’s decisions seven seconds before they were even aware they made them.
It’s an interesting article and food for thought. As far as I know, science doesn’t really give us much evidence that free will does exist. At the level of physics, everything is generally deterministic. Of course, you get down to the quantum level and determinism doesn’t really exist there: but that’s randomness rather than free will. If free will was a quantum phenomenon, we would expect it to be totally random.
However on an evolutionary point of view, the perception of free will is probably something that would be selected for. After all, if you don’t believe in free will and people’s autonomy to make their own decisions, you can no longer hold people accountable for the things they do and the decisions they make. That’d totally undermine the whole system of law and order in our society today.