fMRI software bugs could upend years of research
As someone who works in the biomedical imaging business and is also a fan of philosophy, I think this news will matter more to folks in the latter camp.  For a couple years now philosophers have insisted that fMRI images prove there is no such thing as free will.  Today's revelation should put an end to that whole line of reasoning (and the absurd amount of fatalism that it engendered).<p>(The back story: Apparently fMRI showed motor signals arising <i>before</i> the cognitive / conscious signals that should have created them, assuming we humans have free will.  This has led to the widely adopted belief among philosophers that we humans act before we think, thus we don't and can't act willfully and freely.  To wit, science has proven there is no such thing as free will; we're all just automatons.)<p>Just this week there was an article in The Atlantic on how we all must accept that we're mere robots and we don't really choose our actions (nor can we choose to believe in a god).<p>Ah well.  It seems philosophers STILL haven't learned the importance of applying the scientific method before leaping to a conclusion -- sometimes just to check that someone else didn't just abuse the scientific method.