Now, I move to the third problem. Now, here, what I'd like you to do is to pretend that everything I said by way of criticism so far is false. Pretend that it's all false. Sometimes when I do this with audiences, I can see a look of despair coming over their faces, like you mean it's all false? No, I think it's all true, but pretend it's false, and let's ask ourselves this question, if decisions and intentions really do come about at these early times in these studies, before people are conscious of them, would it follow that all decisions and intentions are like this? Because if these studies are going to threaten free will, they can't just threaten them in this little restricted domain of actions on which nothing hangs, they would have to apply to all decisions and intentions. I want you to recall in this connection, a quotation that I read to you earlier from Libet, it's the generalization quotation, here it is again, ''Our overall findings do suggest some fundamental characteristics of the simpler acts, that may be applicable to all consciously intended acts, and even to responsibility and free will.'' Now, just to get a feel for what I want you to be thinking about, I want to tell you about my own experience as a subject in a Libet style experiment. This was years ago. I gave a lecture to a motor control unit at the National Institutes of Health and it was a lecture on free will in neuroscience, and the plan for that day was, I would give my lecture and then I would be a subject in a Libet style study and then they would take me out to dinner. So I gave my lecture and it went well I thought, then it was time to be a subject in the experiment. So I sat in the chair and I wanted to be a naive subject, so I wanted to just wait for the urges to flex to pop up and watch that clock and pay attention to where it was, where the hand was on it when I first became aware of the urge and I wanted to flex in response to the urge and then report after I flexed where the spot was on the clock when I first became aware of it and by the way, the way I reported back then was I just moved the cursor to the spot on the clock where I thought it was when I first became aware of my urge. So there I am, sitting in the chair. Waiting for the first urge to flex now to arise and what I discovered after a little time is that nothing was happening, that is no urges were coming to mind. I thought, my goodness, how do subjects do this? Then my next question to myself was, and what am I going to do to go through and complete the experiment so that I can then have dinner? What I did is I settled on the following strategy, what I would do is to say now silently to myself, and to treat that now saying as an expression of a decision or intention to do the thing now, and then I would flex in response to it and try to keep track of where the spot was on the clock, when I said to myself silently. The point I want to emphasize now is this, that when I said, ''Now,'' to myself, it was utterly arbitrary. So I knew I had to do it a fair number of times and by the way in these studies back then, you would always do at least 40 trials. So that you could have a readable evidence. You needed a bunch of trials so that once you did all the back averaging and so on, you'd get data that you could use. So I was saying now, 40 times over the course of an hour or so. But the precise time at which I said it was arbitrary. So what I was doing was randomly picking a time to say now. Now, there's this old fable, The Fable of Buridan's ass and it's actually relevant here. So Buridan's ass was hyper-rational donkey and it was so rational, so hyper-rational, that it would never do a thing unless it had a reason to prefer doing it to anything else it might do at the time. So one day the ass was wandering around wherever asses wander and it found itself equidistant between two bales of hay, and the bales were equally large and equally attractive. It was starting to get hungry and it looked to the left and I thought, ''That's nice,'' and it looked to the right and it thought, ''Equally nice.'' It looked back and forth, couldn't find a reason to prefer either to the other, and so what it did was to starve to death. Now fortunately, we are not hyper-rational and so we can just arbitrarily pick. Now, in the free will literature, so here's just a little bit of philosophy. In the free will literature, one of the views is called Restrictivism and according to the restrictivists, you're not in any position to freely choose, to make a free choice or exercise free will unless you're torn between what you think you should do and what you're tempted to do. Or some other restrictivists will be a little bit broader and say, ''Unless you're torn between either that or long-term self-interest and short-term temptation,'' but in the Buridan's ass kind of case, you're not torn in that way between things of different kinds, you just have to arbitrarily pick. That's what I was like and that's what all of these studies are like. All the science studies that I've been talking about. In all of them, you are arbitrarily picking. Now, either the restrictivists are right or they're wrong. If they're right, then none of these studies is even a study about free will, because they're all about arbitrary picking. But suppose that the restrictivists are wrong, well then the studies could be about free will. But even then we see how different arbitrary picking is from other cases of deciding. So think about decisions that are really important to you, that you think about for a long time before you actually make the decision. So for example, whether to propose marriage to a certain person now or to wait a while or maybe not do it ever, whether to accept a certain job offer when you have a good job already and you think it might be better, but you're not so sure, whether it's time to go for a divorce or not. These things are not cases of arbitrary picking for the most part. So, you put a lot of thought into it. And notice that the instructions in the neuroscience experiments shove consciousness aside except for the purposes of reporting. So you're not supposed to plan in advance of when to flex or which key to press. You're not supposed to think about it. You're supposed to be spontaneous. But many of our decisions are not like that. They are preceded by conscious thinking and it may be that the conscious thinking increases the probability of conscious deciding. So it would be very difficult to generalize from the supposition that in the studies I've been talking about, all the decisions are made unconsciously, to the claim that all decisions even the ones preceded by conscious reflection are made unconsciously
