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On Daniel Dennett's scratching his beard when Benjamin Libbet isn't watching

More than once, when Aquinas wants to talk about actions that are done by humans but not deliberately, he give us the example of scratching an itchy beard.  Such an action, Aquinas tells us, does not involve the intellect but the imagination.  I am not quite sure of whether he thinks we imagine the itch itself, the relief we'll get from scratching, or both.  But what's clear about his explanation and clearly important for the point I'm about to make is the fact that deliberation is not involved; hence neither is reason; hence the action is not free.

Contrapositively, if an action is free, it involves reason and deliberation.

Benjamin Libbet's experiment is about someone trying to randomly move his/her hand at one moment rather than another.  Deliberation comes into play inasmuch as the test had to cogitate about whether or not to participate in the experiment; but that sort of deliberation is presumedly not going on at the time of the experiment.  The subject is not supposed to deliberate at all.  Just act whenever he or she wants to do so, without being constrained or guided by this or that reason.

The behavior targeted by this experiment looks a lot more like scratching one's beard than it does like the sort of action that involves freedom, deliberation.  Is it any wonder that scientists discovered that an action potential in the brain precedes the pseudo decision to move one's hand?  This action potential is analogous to the process that activates the imagination so that one becomes itchy.  But just as one can sometimes decide not to scratch an itch, so too Libbet discovered that his subject could, in the last 1/10th of a second, decide not to move his or her hand even after the action potential has arisen.

Aquinas never talks about freely deciding not to scratch one's beard, but Libbet makes room for something analogous to that: in this way, Libbet's experiment finds freedom where Aquinas hand't even thought to look.  Instead of being a repudiation of free will, Libbet's experiment points out an interesting case of self-control.

If I were a better punster, I would find a way to relate this beard-scratching to Ockham's razor...as in Ockham's beard?

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