Q&A: When Do We Really Have Free Choice
When Do We Really Have Free Choice
Question
The consideration in favor of free choice is the clear intuition that we have choice. You say Libet’s experiments are not evidence against it because that is a picking scenario and not choosing. But even in picking there is a clear intuition that I can freely choose when to press the button, yet we see from the experiments that this intuition is mistaken. The experience of choice in choosing is not essentially different, so why should that count as a consideration in the dilemma?
Answer
You indeed can press whenever you want. And you also do press whenever you want. It’s just that you want to when the RP tells you to. There is no reason to veto it. Not so in choosing, where there is a reason to veto.
Discussion on Answer
In picking, it is freedom; in choosing, it is liberty. The feeling is not the same thing. In picking, you feel that you are free, and you indeed are free. In choosing, you feel that you are deciding. In my opinion, that is a different feeling.
See my series of columns beginning with 126 on freedom and liberty.
But in terms of the experience, in picking I experience that I’m genuinely allowed to press whenever I feel like it. I’m free to choose. That isn’t an experience essentially different from, say, choosing to get up in the morning for prayer when I really want to keep sleeping. And if we learned that the experience of picking is actually an illusion because of the determinism that follows from the RP, how can one conclude that in choosing there really is choice just because of intuition and immediate experience?