Somewhere in this interview, Chomsky says there is currently not enough evidence to conclude whether we have free will or not. I recently asked him about the famous experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, which have convinced many people that free will is a myth. Here is his answer:
I know of the experiments, but I don't think they bear on freedom of will. Rather, they bear on the interesting (but in this context marginal) question of the point within mental processing where decisions are reached. There is a widely believed dogma, articulated explicitly by prominent philosophers, that mental processes must be accessible to consciousness. The idea has never been given a coherent formulation, and there is no reason I know to take it seriously, other than the weight of tradition.
We can't answer the question now. Whether we ever will be able to is, of course, unknown. And there are also questions about what counts as an answer. We have long ago abandoned the hope of answering the questions about motion that were the primary concern of the modern scientific revolution, for example.
Chomsky on Humanism II (1/3)
Chomsky on Humanism II (2/3)
Chomsky on Humanism II (3/3)
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