From Scientific American via Business Insider:
In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.
Though the precise way in which the mind could do this is still not fully understood, similar phenomena have been documented elsewhere. For example, we see the apparent motion of a dot before seeing that dot reach its destination, and we feel phantom touches moving up our arm before feeling an actual touch further up our arm. “Postdictive” illusions of this sort are typically explained by noting that there’s a delay in the time it takes information out in the world to reach conscious awareness: Because it lags slightly behind reality, consciousness can “anticipate” future events that haven’t yet entered awareness, but have been encoded subconsciously, allowing for an illusion in which the experienced future alters the experienced past. More.
As usual, they offer a tricky little experiment.
Free will is an itch that naturalism just has to keep on scratching. It’s not a philosophical conundrum for the naturalist: His bread-and-butter depends on the idea that the mind is not real, and neither is free will.
Yes, it’s bad for science, but then he expects to be eaten last.
See also: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice?
and
“I will ” means something after all
From the files:
Paul Bloom: Okay, so maybe we materialists went too far, but … Bloom, Yale psychologist, writing in The Atlantic on the recent backlash against the materialist perspective he espouses, takes a more sophisticated approach to warding off criticism than “you just didn’t evolve so as to understand Evolution,” the usual type of explanation.
What is the backlash and why?:
Does science know the answers to absolutely everything? (Widespread backlash against scientism)
Decline in belief in God masks rise in superstition
Are two out of three people really secret torturers?
“I will” means something aftr all
An end to th madness (the fall of the DSM)
Scientists clash over the origin of monogamy
The slow death of a pseudo-discipline