How I learned to stop worrying and love the alien hand syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Willusionists claim that science has proven free will to be an illusion. We propose a thought experiment that demonstrates how this view leads to an absurd conclusion: the term "free will" can no longer be applied differently to cases where agents control their bodily movements and cases where they do not. The experiment involves a fictional character, Dr. Strangelove, who suffers from alien hand syndrome in his right hand. He asks another fictional character, Mary, to return his free will. Mary, a world-renowned neuroscientist, believes there is no free will, only the illusion of it; therefore, she can only return the latter to him. To do so, she performs brain surgery that leaves intact the causal roots of the alien hand movements but nevertheless creates the illusion of control. However, it is evident that Strangelove still lacks control over this hand. We argue that the willusionist account fails to explain the disparity in control between Strangelove's left and right hands. This suggests that the willusionist perspective on free will may be fundamentally incomplete.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".