This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Here's a choice. You can press the red button on the left or the green one on the right.

Here's another. You can opt for a scoop of vanilla or one of strawberry ice cream.

Sounds simple enough, but recent research suggests that under certain laboratory conditions,

neuroscientists can use brain scans to make accurate predictions about which choices we'll actually make,

sometimes before we make a conscious decision at all.

This phenomenon seems to undermine the idea that we have free will, but Edina Roski's of Dartmouth College is not so sure.

Adina Roski's, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks very much.

The topic we're going to talk about today is neuroscience and

free will. Can you give us an example of a neuro scientific breakthroughs in

research in neuroscience which plays into the philosophical problem of whether or not we have free will.

Sure. Most of the neuroscience that people have heard about that have relevance to the

philosophical problem are experiments that seem to indicate to many anyway that we don't have free will.

And perhaps the most famous of those experiments is an experiment by Benjamin Libbitt back in the 80s actually and what Libitt did was he hooked people up to EEG

machines so they were recording potentials from the scalp electrical signals from the scalp and

he asked people to periodically raise their finger freely, raise their finger when they feel like they want to raise their finger.

And at the same time he had them look at a clock face that had a rotating spot and they were supposed to remember

when they had the desire to move their finger or the urge to move their finger, where was the

...