by nipah | 2025-04-03 19:58:17+00:00
Sabine believes in superdeterminism, so it is her own position, not an universal one, nor a very popular one amongst physicists. It is VERY hard to say quantum physics is deterministic. And the studies you are citing are famous for being extremely restrictive, always made in closed-bounds and drawing unclear conclusions, if this proved our decisions originated 7 seconds before our action action of consciousness it would be REVOLUTIONARY, but it was not, it was defended as a determinism enabling position by many philosophers*, and was scrutinized by many others. For example, by having 2 options only (the study mentions that) you already increase the probability of your machine having consonance with the persons previous decisions (you can, actually, decide for X and then just after decide for Y, even minutes before you actually do the thing, being consistent with your own internal decisions is not being "determined", and the fact that this is only 60% matching is a good indicator there's something more going on here).

Another plausible interpretation of the case is that our brain does have a predisposed intuition building about something, and so it is not a [surprise] that the person chose whichever his intuitions perceives as better or more desirable, it also explains why the 60% correctness and disproves this as being evidence for some "determinism". Nobody is saying, for example, that free will equates being unable to be influenced by something, it is not a surprise that someone that has a vice in crack is craving for crack and in "70% of the cases" (or whatever) decides for using more crack instead of not using. Or that, if I desire to eat X, and X is available, and I'm planning to do it, I will eventually do it, it is expected that my actions are in good relation with my previous intents, desires and knowledge. The same way, it would be impossible for those experiments to predict something before showing the subjects what is being tested, and people are known to acting very differently (like, trying to outsmart the scientists or show themselves as better than they are) when tested, so the own thought of "I need to chose X" could be in their minds way before they [state] their conscious decision (because, if I like chocolate ice cream, even if I stare to the menu for 30 seconds I will still probably chose chocolate ice cream, but sometimes I could chose mint, it is not a surprise that decisions follow some kind of pattern when it is reasonable to expect so). The question is always about to what extent this is a [determinant], and the free will defense merely needs to say "not 100%".

It is also extremely unrealistic and out of this world to think our decisions would be able to be "predicted seconds before they happen", if the decision was conditioned to specific reaction events this would be IMPOSSIBLE, your brain cannot decide 7 seconds ahead of time what is the correct decision for a problem that you have only 3 seconds to decide (like "press the green color" when it appears or "type the word being shown in screen when you see it"), no kind of predictability would realistically arise from this kind of behavior (because it is physically impossible) rather than "the brain is preparing to type".