The cognitive neuroscience of free will

At one time, the home page of the laboratory headed by Dr. John-Dylan Haynes had this statement: “Decisions don’t come from nowhere but they emerge from prior brain activity. Where else should they come from? In theory, it could be possible to trace the causal pathway of a decision all the way back to the big bang. Our research shows that we can trace it back 10 seconds. Compared to the time since the big bang this is not very long."
[Mic drop]
When this study first came out it made a big splash, because of its clear relevance for the question of "do we really have free will?" When you’re done grappling with the philosophical ideas raised in this narrated video, try this more earth-bound exercise: how do "preconscious" vs. "postconscious" activity in this action-decision task relate to the constructs of momentary evidence vs. accumulated evidence from SDT models of perceptual decision making?
For more info/content, please visit: postlab.psych....
Relevant paper:
Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H. J., & Haynes, J. D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature neuroscience, 11(5), 543.

[@stephenlawrence4821]

The question to do we have free will can be answered yes or no depending on how it's defined.
I think what matters is there is an illusion. People do not usually think their choices are predetermined and they do think they have a way of being able to do otherwise which is incompatible with that.
Leaving out that we'd have needed a different past prior to the choice to have selected a different option gives the impression which option we selected was entirely up to us, rather than we were fortunate or unfortunate to be predetermined to select the option we did.