From “Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will” (Nature, 31 August 2011), we learn:
Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
Nowadays, says Mele, the majority of philosophers are comfortable with the idea that people can make rational decisions in a deterministic universe. They debate the interplay between freedom and determinism — the theory that everything is predestined, either by fate or by physical laws — but Roskies says that results from neuroscience can’t yet settle that debate. They may speak to the predictability of actions, but not to the issue of determinism.
Neuroscientists also sometimes have misconceptions about their own field, says Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In particular, scientists tend to see preparatory brain activity as proceeding stepwise, one bit at a time, to a final decision. He suggests that researchers should instead think of processes working in parallel, in a complex network with interactions happening continually. The time at which one becomes aware of a decision is thus not as important as some have thought.
The philosophers covered are mostly disappointing, talking as though materialism with help in some way, but at least they sense something isn’t right.
From a Catholic Christian perspective, free will is a solved problem: It grows with growth in virtue. That, by the way, is why it is not meaningful to talk about free will in relation to animals.
See also: The Spiritual Brain
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Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose