There was a court case recently in Australia where a guy claimed he became uncontrollably horny after suffering a head injury at work.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/12/20/1166290613406.html
This guy’s lawyer convinced a judge that his client was extra horny because of the brain injury. After the accident, the client allegedly misbehaved around women, watched porn, and called phone sex lines.
There are at least two reasons to believe that this lawyer is the best who has ever lived:
1. The lawyer convinced a judge that men do not do stupid and horny things unless they have had a head injury at work.
2. In effect, the lawyer convinced a judge that free will doesn’t exist. If his client had free will, he would have been able to resist any extra temptation despite the physical changes to his brain. But the client couldn’t, so he must have no free will.
If I ever get arrested for going on a killing spree at the Superbowl in front of 16 high definition cameras and 1 billion witnesses, I want that lawyer to represent me.
To be fair, perhaps the judge was aware of recent findings in neuroscience that make the concept of free will increasingly far fetched. Here’s an article on that point from The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8453850
It seems to me that free will can be easily tested. The next time someone is getting brain surgery, just take a few minutes to perform the test. Sometimes the patient remains awake during brain surgery so he can report what functions are changing as the surgeon is poking around. So for example, when the surgeon electrically stimulates the language center of the brain, the patient might temporarily lose his ability to speak.
The test for free will would be this, for example: First the doctor locates the place in the brain where electrical stimulation causes the patient to lose speech. Then the surgeon asks the patient to keep speaking normally despite the electrical stimulation.
If the patient can speak normally despite having the speech center stimulated, then the patient has free will that can overcome the normal chain of cause and effect in the brain. If he can’t speak, then you have proven the brain is nothing but a moist and complicated machine and your life is a pointless series of miseries.
Maybe there’s a reason no one is testing for free will.