I recently picked up a book entitled 'My Brain Made Me Do It: The Rise of Neuroscience and the Threat to Moral Responsibility' that sought to defend free will and moral responsibility. Seeing as how I felt I was already well acquainted with the concepts of compatibilism, incompatibilism, determinism and so forth, I skipped towards the last few chapters. They were really well done.
However, later I realized that the author, Eliezer Sternberg, never actually spoke about alternative possibilities in the chapters I had read. I decided to read some of the earlier chapters, and I was met with the revelation that Sternberg feels only conscious control over one's own actions are required to have free will. So long as it is the conscious self that is in control, he says, and not the brain itself, then one has free will. He sees (mistakenly in my view) being able to do otherwise as part of the compatibilist view of things. However, from my experience, compatibilists see free will as simply being free from coercion, while it is incompatibilists (primarily libertarians) who defend being able to do otherwise. As I see it, under this view there is merely a switch from biological determinism to universal determinism; there is no refutation of determinism, just a switching of what kind it is that controls you. This mistake on Sternberg's part really disappointed me.
My question, therefore, is this: Will neuroscience one day prove that human beings don't have the ability to do otherwise?
No.
It's perfectly cleat scientifically that, if there are any non-deterministic systems in the universe, then the brain is one.
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