Determinism Vs Libertarianism

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The opinions surrounding free-will are divided between two views; hard determinism and libertarianism. Those advocating hard-determinism maintain the idea that every action is caused by previous events thus producing a chain of events that is “determined, replicable, and predictable” (Rigoni, D., & Brass, M., 2014) therefore we do not have free-will. Whereas, those who believe in libertarianism maintain the idea that free choice exists. To comply with the definition of free-will coined by hard determinism, the situation must respect the three rules of this particular view. However, in the field of cognitive science there has been little production of observable evidence to support this theory. The problem addressed by the researchers was the degree of the impact of scientific …show more content…
One group read a scientific paper rejecting free-will while encouraging reductionism, physical causation, determinism and scientific evidence proving that free-will is an illusion, the other read a scientific paper neutral on the subject of free-will however it provides incentive to question the compliance of free-will. They were instructed to both read and consolidate the texts. Subsequently, they where asked to mentally answer complicated mathematical arithmetic problems. They were informed that due to a glitch in the computer system the answer would be projected on the screen after the question had disappeared and that in order to prevent the answers from being displayed participants need to press a button. The participants were told that they experimenters would not know wether the participants pressed a key however they should avoid looking at the answers and attempt to solve the problems honestly. However, the experimenters were in fact measuring the amount of times the participants pressed a key terminating the appearance of the correct answer on the screen BEFORE them (dependant
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