In 1983 Benjamin Libet found that brain activity predicts your movements before you are aware of deciding to move. The result has been reproduced many times, and it has been used ever since to argue that free will is an illusion. Three new papers say the measurements were fine but the interpretation was not. Let’s take a look.
Sources:
Action fluency and conscious intention: being aware of what we are about to do
Undermining Free Will Belief Increases Forgiveness of Self and Others
👉 ((btw www.base-search.net is a great search engine for scientific papers))
I can choose to do a thing that I neither want nor have to do. I can also choose to not do a thing that I want or need to do. Can I prove that to you though? Does my desire to be contrarian countermand my free will? It very well might.
I can rewind a video and watch it again. That is no different from your time travel example. I don’t think we can convincingly argue either way if a quantum field collapse will always happen the same way, even if we were to start save-scumming reality. I kind of hope we will never be able to.
None of this precludes me from having free will in the present. I don’t even think I need quantum dice contently rolling around in my consciousness. Even if I am completely deterministic, I can still make choices. My brain is a computational device made of meat. I can only have so much faith in what a choice even means, but I sure think I know one when I see one.