AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Whether or not we have free will has long been a philosopher’s question, but in the last 50 years, neuroscientists have claimed to be able to weigh in on the problem. I begin by reviewing the philosophical landscape of free will, which is dominated by the question of whether or not determinism is true, and argue that neuroscience cannot provide evidence for or against the truth of determinism, so cannot bear on the problem in that respect. I then turn to another way in which neuroscientists have tried to provide evidence that we lack free will, by drawing on evidence that they interpret as showing that our conscious will is inefficacious. I argue that new ways of thinking about how to interpret that evidence undermines the conclusions that typically had been drawn. I close by considering how this new interpretation of the neural data may bear upon some standard philosophical positions in the free will debate.