Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t

January 2, 2007 | Source: New York Times

In making decisions, the conscious brain is only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has found from his research.

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility.