David Eagleman is the author of The Brain: The Story of You.From his Q & A with Stephanie Cross for the Guardian:
You underscore how little conscious control we have over our decisions – will science eventually rule out free will altogether?--Marshal Zeringue
There’s a lot of debate about this. There are many neuroscientists who feel that we probably don’t have free will because fundamentally it’s all pieces and parts interacting and it’s difficult to see where you could slip the ghost into the machine.
And you?
Personally I feel like the jury is still out in the sense that our science might still be a little bit too young to understand exactly what we mean by free will; and certainly it’s the case that we have the illusion that we have free will, which means at minimum that would need to get explained. But what we can conclude is that if we have any free will at all, it’s going to be the smallest bit of what’s happening – much smaller than anyone ever intuited about themselves – because who you are comes about as this confluence of your genetics and all the experiences you’ve ever had, and that’s what sends brains off on...[read on]