Is free-will an illusion?

When human participants perform under concurrent schedules of reinforcement, matching has been observed in some experiments

Thank you for that. That's basically what Chomsky said

Why?

He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling

these cases cannot be over-generalized

But why has there been any lawful matching of rates of behavior to rates of reinforcement?

What he won't know, and what you cannot know, in advance (unless I tell you), is that I will continue feeding him

Predicting free choices for abstract intentions
Chun Siong Soona,b,c,d,e,1, Anna Hanxi Heb,f, Stefan Bodeb,e,g, and John-Dylan Haynesa,b,d,e,h,1
a
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10115 Berlin, Germany; b
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive
and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; c
Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders, Duke-National University of ...

Edited by Marcus E. Raichle, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and approved February 22, 2013 (received for review July 19, 2012)


Unconscious neural activity has been repeatedly shown to precede
and potentially even influence subsequent free decisions.
However, to date, such findings have been mostly restricted to
simple motor choices, and despite considerable debate, there is
no evidence that the outcome of more complex free decisions can
be predicted from prior brain signals. Here, we show that the
outcome of a free decision to either add or subtract numbers can
already be decoded from neural activity in medial prefrontal and
parietal cortex 4 s before the participant reports they are consciously
making their choice. These choice-predictive signals co-occurred with
the so-called default mode brain activity pattern that was still
dominant at the time when the choice-predictive signals occurred.
Our results suggest that unconscious preparation of free choices is not
restricted to motor preparation. Instead, decisions at multiple scales of
abstraction evolve from the dynamics of preceding brain activity.
free will | Libet | self-paced

The subjective experience that our voluntary actions are initiated
in the conscious mind has been challenged by the
finding that the human brain may already start shaping spontaneous
decisions even before they enter into conscious awareness
(1, 2). Specifically, the human brain can start preparing spontaneous
movements up to several seconds before a person believes
themselves to be consciously making a decision to move (1–3).
To date, such early choice-predictive signals have only been investigated
for simple movement decisions (1–6). However, there
are several reasons to assess whether preparatory processes also
occur for higher-level, more abstract types of decisions. First, the
relevance of motor decisions for understanding the neural formation
and preparation of intentions has been heavily debated (7, 8),
mainly because of their reduced complexity (9, 10) and the limited
levels of awareness in motor control (11, 12). Second, previous
studies on predictive signals for motor choices have revealed early
information in prefrontal and parietal brain regions. These regions
are not generally considered “motor,” but they have been sporadically
observed in motor preparation (13, 14). This invites the
question of whether these regions provide only unconscious
preparation of motor intentions or a common, task-independent
network for preparing multiple types of decisions before awareness.
Given the fundamentally different neural processes involved
in performing motor acts and mental calculations, identifying
overlap between the early choice-predictive signals would be of
high relevance because it would point toward a common cerebral
starting point for different types of choices.

We also aimed to address another question regarding the
prediction of free choices. Previous studies (2, 4) have found
early choice-predictive information in areas that overlap with the
so-called “default mode” network (DMN) (15–17). For this reason,
we also directly investigated the link between our choice-predictive
signals and these “off-task” brain signals. Interestingly, we identified
a partial spatial and temporal overlap of choice-predictive signals
with activity in the DMN.

Results
We investigated the neural precursors of abstract intentions by
asking participants to perform an abstract decision task in which
they spontaneously and freely chose to perform either of two mental
arithmetic tasks: adding or subtracting...

Discussion
Our results show that regions of medial frontopolar cortex
and posterior cingulate/precuneus encode freely chosen abstract
intentions before the decisions have been consciously made. Previously,
a similar network of regions was reported to be involved in
the unconscious preparation of motor intentions (2). In contrast, in
the current experiment, the intended “action” was a nonmotor,
abstract mental operation. Importantly, the randomized response
mapping ensured that the motor output used to indicate the
arithmetic answer was independent of, and did not contain any
information about, the abstract decision made. In addition, these
regions did not encode the motor response at any time before or
after the conscious decision, even when the behavioral response
was made. Thus, by fully dissociating high-level intentions from
motor preparation and execution, our current findings provided
direct evidence that the medial frontopolar and precuneus/posterior
cingulate regions were involved in the formation of high-level
intentions for voluntary actions in general. This also confirmed that
the frontoparietal network previously reported was indeed involved
in the formation of free intentions per se (2), rather than
motor preparation. In future studies, it should be possible to enhance
the sensitivity for smaller differences between informative
brain regions by directly comparing motor and calculation tasks in
the same participants...

Unconscious neural activity has been repeatedly shown to precede and potentially even influence subsequent free decisions

free willing as is understood by the common sense is trying to get rid of determinism when it comes to the factors that precede the agent like genetics, history, circumstance ?

Are you a soft determinist or a libertarian ?

is trying to get rid of determinism when it comes to the factors that precede the agent