Christianity and Freewill: Can Human Brain States Really be Predicted? By Brian Simpson

According to a paper by the team of Yifei Sun, Mariano Cabezas, Jiah Lee, Chenyu Wang, Wei Zhang, Fernando Calamante, and Jinglei Lv, "Predicting Human Brain States with Transformer," https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19814, AI can predict your brain patterns five seconds into the future using only 21 seconds of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), using blood oxygen level dependent changes to infer neural states. All this is complex for this publication but relevant as we can see where this goes through internet coverages, which have been that free will is an illusion.

These neurological arguments for determinism have been made before, such as an interpretation of the work of Benjamin Libet, who conducted experiments that suggested our brain initiates actions before we consciously become aware of them. In his experiment, participants were asked to make a voluntary movement and report the moment they were consciously aware of their intention to move. Libet found that brain activity (the "readiness potential") began several hundred milliseconds before the participant consciously decided to move. This led to the conclusion that the neural processes determining actions might occur before conscious awareness, challenging the concept of free will. This is obviously of relevance to Christin theology and philosophy, where the concept of free will is central.

These positions to me seem to assume that there is some sort of one-one correspondence between neural states and conscious states. Thus, the neural state N is supposed to correspond to me thinking, for example, "Plato's theory of forms is incorrect." However, conscious states, especially thought processes, are vague and can take on infinite, or potential infinite dimensions. There are many more thoughts, even about Plato than possible neural patterns, So things cannot be a one-to-one correspondence. Yet this is what is needed for the types of mind-reading determinism contemplated in these experiments.

Thus, I believe the Christian concept of freewill is philosophically defensible against neurological reductionism.