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All right, so I'm going to start out by talking about what I call the neuroskeptical case against freedom of the will.

Okay.

And though I'm ultimately going to defend freedom in some sense, you're going to find I don't exactly disagree with this neuroskeptical case.

All right, by neuroskeptic, I mean someone who denies that we have freedom of the will based on the supposed implications of neuroscientific findings.

In recent years, there have been no small number of neuroskeptics, addressing both academic and popular audiences.

Neuroscientific findings gathered over the last few decades do seemingly provide

much stronger support for neuroskepticism than one might think. These findings do not really point to what,

for many of us, are the expected neurophysiological underpinnings of our free will perceptions,

but seem to give us good reason to conclude that these experiences have nothing to do with the causation of our activities.

Or at least that is how these findings have been frequently interpreted.

That is, we have scientific reasons to doubt whether conscious deliberation is, in fact, a causal antecedent of our actions.

In 1964, two German scientists,

Hans Helmut Kornhuber in Luder-Dickey,

set out to investigate the degree to which the brain is actively involved in decision-making processes.

To that end, they conducted an experiment in which human subjects were asked to tap with one finger

at whatever interval they chose, while any changes in the level of brain activity were recorded.

Deke and Cornhuber found that there was indeed a spike in brain activity leading up to the subject's finger-tapping.

...