There was an interesting blog post on the NY Times today about an experiment that showed that the decisions of monkeys could be predicted before the monkeys knew they had made the decision. The part I found more interesting connected with my previous post on free will and how the ability to predict our decisions does not have to mean that we don’t have free will:

Let me explain what I mean by way of an example. Imagine we suspend a steel ball from a magnet directly above a vertical steel plate, such that when I turn off the magnet, the ball hits the edge of the plate and falls to either one side or the other.

Very few people, having accepted the premises of this experiment, would conclude from its outcome that the ball in question was exhibiting free will. Whether the ball falls on one side or the other of the steel plate, we can all comfortably agree, is completely determined by the physical forces acting on the ball, which are simply too complex and minute for us to monitor. And yet we have no problem assuming the opposite to be true of the application of the monkey experiment to theoretical humans: namely, that because their actions are predictable they can be assumed to lack free will. In other words, we have no reason to assume that either predictability or lack of predictability has anything to say about free will. The fact that we do make this association has more to do with the model of the world that we subtly import into such thought experiments than with the experiments themselves.

The rest of the blog post was a bit crazy and I think extrapolated a bit much from these experiments, but I think the excerpt above makes clear the argument that we can still have free will even if it turns out we can predict all our decisions by looking at all the neurons, chemicals, signals, inputs, etc to the brain.