A famous neuroscience experiment takes a knock

The issue of "free will" is a multi-front forever war in philosophy.  What does the phrase mean?  Do humans have it?  Is it necessary for the coherence of important ideas about moral responsibility to presume that we have it?

One of the fronts in the war involves conscious human intentions and their timing.  Do we really form conscious intentions to do X before we do X?  Or are conscious intentions just confabulated after the fact -- after our neurological unconscious has already reached a point of no return? And what notion of free will could survive a "yes" answer to that question? 

In 1983, an important paper, by Benjamin Libet at al,  appearing in a scientific journal aptly entitled BRAIN, discussed experiments that seemed to show that humans make decisions before we are even aware of it.  This seemed to destroy any intuitively plausible role for free will, or for the operation of "will" at all.  But of late neurologists have been looking with some skepticism at Libet's results.

Perhaps the very artificial conditions and decisions on which Libet focused for his experiments skewed the results. 

A new paper, by a team of London-based scientists led by Zheng Huang, used a somewhat different experimental technique from Libet's: one that involved the familiar activity of typing.  This brings "action fluency"  -- the subjects knew what they were doing and had often done something close before.  

verbal fluency.

The resulting paper said that the team's measurements "are difficult to reconcile with the view that experiences of conscious intent are merely a retrospective confabulation."

Here is a link to the new paper:  OSF | Action fluency and conscious intention: being aware of what we are about to do. 

Perhaps we do things, after all, because we hold in front of our mind the plan of doing them, and perhaps such a simple statement of the case survives reductionist neurological projects. 

I, for one, am delighted with the Huang study. There are still a lot of fronts to fight on, but this looks like an important victory for the incompatibilist voluntarism to which I adhere.