by mk

IMHO, this paradox lies in the question, and not within the answer. To me, 'free will' doesn't even make sense as a scientific term. It is a concept that can't be defined in reality, something akin to "an apology". We can't prove or disprove the existence of something that is not physical. Free will is not a relationship of physical things, it is a human interpretation of these relationships, it depends upon humans to have meaning. It's a measure of a human context, that is all.

All that aside, this was interesting:

A team of psychologists at MIT and the University of California at San Diego, who were puzzled by the suspiciously definitive results of many brain-scan studies on these topics, asked the authors of 55 such papers how they had analysed their data. The team reported in 2009 that over half the studies used faulty methods that were guaranteed to shift the results in favour of the correlations they had been looking for between mental activity and blips in parts of the brain. It’s worth bearing this in mind the next time you read about a brain-scan study which purportedly reveals how and why we do what we do.