Nature's Idea of Free Will

Here's an article in Nature Neuroscience regarding ongoing research with decision making. The experimentation has been around for some time now. It goes like this: put the subject in an MRI and observe the neural activity in the brain. Present them with a task involving a decision on what button to push. The subjects have some methodology that signifies when the decision is actually made. Observation of neural activity shows a pattern that highly predicts when the decision will be made that occurs significantly prior to when the subject says he's made the decision. Conclusion, decision is made prior to when the subject is aware of it.

Or is it?

Let's take this apart for a moment. We have a subject indicating a previous event as indicative of when the decision is made. Where does "awareness" come into it?

I recently went to buy a car to replace my lamented Geo. I bounced around several possibilities and settled on a 2004 Ford Focus. We go down to see the car. We like it and put money down on it based on some things that had to be done to it. We go back down a week later when the done things have purported to be actually done. By and large they have (though with buying a car the dealer never quite gets it exactly the way they say it will be) we give them the rest of the money and take home the car.

When was the actual decision to buy the car? When we went down? When we put a deposit down? When we checked what the dealer had done? When we gave them the money?

I submit to you that the actual decision to buy the car was represented by the act of putting the remainder of the money in the dealer's hot little hands. Up to that point are a set of increasing biases towards that decision, all of which indicate an increasing probability of the final decision being the same as the predicted decision. Was I aware of this increasing bias? Absolutely. Would it have been hard to walk away close to the decision? Absolutely. Could I have done it? Again, absolutely. If the dealer had done something to sour the deal, I would have walked away and left the deposit instead of the final payment. Certainly the probability was low. But it was still there.

Back to the Nature article. The conflating of bias and awareness is just plain silly and not supported by the article. The statement that people might "not become aware of their decisions until after they are made" is not a conclusion based on the experiments. Do subjects have subconscious biases? Sure. That's why they're called subconscious biases. Are decisions subconscious? Maybe. I doubt it. But it's not proven by this research.

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