Neuroscientists need to consider whether they are ready to sweep all this away, says Hodgson. There's very good reason to continue to insist on the fundamental distinction between acts which are voluntary and acts which are not. But even some of the researchers who are most adamant about ejecting folk psychology from the neuroscience lab are willing to grant it a seat in the courtroom. Our subjective sense of free will and voluntary choice is a fact of our conscious experience, says Colin Blakemore of Oxford University. It's silly just to dismiss this.
People believe that they have intentions, and that's critical to their lives.
It's a highly evolved, very clever system. Since such a system evolved, it presumably must have been useful to people in their individual and social lives.