Sensationalist, neuroscience vs. philosophy drivel from the author. There's nothing extreme about reductionist physical determinism in philosophy of mind literature. This methodology, besides being grossly inadequate at the experimental goals as portrayed in the article, doesn't add substantial evidence to the philosophical debate. Supervenience, epiphenomenalism, etc., all allow for fully deterministic physics of mind with various mechanisms of free will available (even if only as an explanatory agent in some). And I say this as someone who shares a similar metaphysical outlook as Kreiman.<p>Luckily Kreiman's work isn't about free will, but neural mechanisms of decision making. And it's quite interesting in that context. He (and Bok and Boyden) say as much in the article, but for some reason scientific journalism has to create equivocal contexts for everything because they're convinced whatever they're reporting on isn't interesting enough for what it is. And apparently it works, because it ends up here.
I will never understand this obsession with the concept of "free will". What the hell does the term "free will" even mean? In my non-expert opinion, <i>apparent</i> free will is indistinguishable from any other description of "free will".<p>I am thrown into existence, then I absorb information about how the environment works, then I make decisions based on that information. How else could it be? If my locus of control exists outside my physical brain, how useful could it possibly be since the data I use to make <i>ALL</i> decisions is stored in my physical brain? If we propose that information is also stored in some type of cosmic non-corporeal spirit-brain, nothing really changes, the same questions of agency simply move from the physical brain to the realm of the inexplicable spirit-brain.
I had a professor in college who was adamant that we do not have free will. His argument basically boiled down to this: we are who we are because of our genes, our environment, and random events that go on in the brain. We can't control any of them. Sure, you may be able to control your environment, but how we choose to do so is influenced by everything in the past. We think the way we do because of events we couldn't control.<p>Here's an interesting paper he wrote on the subject: <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full" rel="nofollow">http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full</a>