benjamin libet experiment free will

Benjamin Libet and the Denial of Free Will

How did a flawed experiment become so influential.

Posted September 5, 2017 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

You might feel that you have the ability to make choices, decisions and plans — and the freedom to change your mind at any point if you so desire — but many psychologists and scientists would tell you that this is an illusion.

The denial of free will is one of the major principles of the materialist worldview that dominates secular western culture. Materialism is the view that only the physical stuff of the world — atoms and molecules and the objects and beings that they constitute — are real. Consciousness and mental phenomena can be explained in terms of neurological processes.

Materialism developed as a philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the influence of religion waned. And right from the start, materialists realised the denial of free will was inherent in their philosophy. As one of the most fervent early materialists, T.H. Huxley, stated in 1874, “Volitions do not enter into the chain of causation…The feeling that we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause."

Huxley anticipated the ideas of some modern materialists, such as psychologist Daniel Wegner, who claim that free will is literally a “trick of the mind.” According to Wegner, “The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one’s thought as the cause of the act.” In other words, our sense of making choices or decisions is just an awareness of what the brain has already decided for us. When we become aware of the brain’s actions, we think about them and falsely conclude that our intentions have caused them. You could compare it to an imbecilic king who believes he is making all his own decisions but is constantly being manipulated by his advisors and officials, who whisper in his ear and plant ideas in his head.

Many materialists believe that evidence for a lack of free will was found when, in the 1980s, the scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments that seemed to show that the brain “registers” the decision to make movements before a person consciously decides to move. In Libet’s experiments, a participant would be asked to perform a simple task such as pressing a button or flexing their wrist. Sitting in front of a timer, they were asked to note the moment at which they were consciously aware of the decision to move, while EEG electrodes attached to their head monitored their brain activity.

Libet showed consistently that there was unconscious brain activity associated with the action – a change in EEG signals that Libet called “readiness potential” — for an average of half a second before the participants were aware of the decision to move. This experiment appears to offer evidence of Daniel Wegner’s view that decisions are first made by the brain, and there is a delay before we become conscious of them — at which point we attribute our own conscious intention to the act.

However, if we look more closely, Libet’s experiment is full of problematic issues. For example, it relies on the participants’ own recording of when they feel the intention to move. One issue here is that there may be a delay between the impulse to act and their recording of it — after all, this means shifting their attention from their own intention to the clock. In addition, it is debatable whether people are able to accurately record the moment of their decision to move. Our subjective awareness of decisions is very unreliable. If you try the experiment yourself, you’ll become aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision. You can do it right now, by holding out your own arm and deciding at some point to flex your wrist.

A further, more subtle (and more arguable) issue is that Libet's experiment seems to assume that the act of willing consists of clearcut decisions, made by a conscious, rational mind. But decisions are often made in a more fuzzy, ambiguous way. They can be made on a partly intuitive, impulsive level, without clearcut conscious awareness. But this doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't made the decision.

As the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, author of the Master and His Emissary, points out while making this argument that Libet's apparent findings are only problematic "if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much 'me.'" Why shouldn't your will be associated with deeper, less conscious areas of your mind (which are still you)? You might sense this if, while trying Libet’s experiment, you find your wrist seeming to move of its own accord. You feel that you have somehow made the decision, even if not wholly consciously.

An even more serious issue with Libet’s experiment is that it is by no means clear that the electrical activity of the “readiness potential” is related to the decision to move, and the actual movement. Some researchers have suggested that the readiness potential could just relate to the act of paying attention to the wrist or a button, rather than the decision to move. Others have suggested that it only reflects the expectation of some kind of movement, rather than being related to a specific moment. In a modified version of Libet’s experiment (in which participants were asked to press one of two buttons in response to images on a computer screen), participants showed readiness potential even before the images came up on the screen, suggesting that it was not related to deciding which button to press.

Others have suggested that the area of the brain where the readiness potential occurs — the supplementary motor area — is usually associated with imagining movements rather than actually performing them. The experience of willing is usually associated with other areas of the brain (the parietal areas). And finally, in another modified version of Libet’s experiment, participants showed readiness potential even when they made a decision not to move, which again casts doubt on the assumption that the readiness potential is actually registering the brain’s “decision” to move.

Because of issues such as these — and others that I don’t have space to mention — it’s mystifying that such a flawed experiment has become so influential, and has been used frequently as evidence against the idea of free will. The reason why the experiment has been so enthusiastically embraced is surely because the apparent findings fit so well with the principles of materialism. It seems to prove what materialism implies: that human beings are automatons.

But how can a self choose, of its own free will, to argue that it has no free will? Do the theorists who argue against free will seriously believe that they have somehow been pre-ordained to formulate their arguments and write their articles by their own brain processes or genetic disposition? In developing their theories, they have constantly exercised their free will — for example in deciding which articles to read, which ideas to reject or accept, to the point of deciding that the theory is worth writing up and sitting down to begin writing it. They might argue that they accept that free will is an illusion, and are simply allowing the illusion to express itself through them — but if this was the case, why would they trust this illusory power, and follow its dictates so assiduously, allowing it to determine their lives? Would you allow a genie in a bottle to tell you what to do with your life?

It’s interesting to ponder why so many intellectuals are so intent (with their own free will) on proving that they have no free will. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed out ironically, “scientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”

In my view, this is connected to the general nihilism of our culture, the collapse of values that has followed from materialistic science. Such absurd views could only arise — and make any kind of sense — amidst the climate of meaninglessness and confusion that scientific materialism has given rise to.

Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of Spiritual Science: Why Science needs spirituality to make sense of the world.

Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of several best-selling books, including The Leap and Spiritual Science.

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The Oxford Scientist

The University of Oxford's independent science magazine

To believe or not believe: Does free will exist?

Although free will may not exist, many may find comfort in believing that our decisions are truly ours. Photo credit: Zac Durant via Unsplash

Despite the implicit assumption of human free will, neuroscience forces us to reconsider our freedom…

Every day, human beings make countless decisions about significant and trivial things alike. The ability to choose seems fundamental to human existence, whether it concerns the breakfasts we eat, the romantic partners we date, or the career paths we pursue. Acting of our own volition, characterised by the concept of ‘free will’, is not just something humans do — it feels like who we are. Even when we’re constrained by unfortunate circumstances, we often find solace in our capacity to exercise some control over what happens next, even if it only involves a measly perspective shift. Despite the implicit assumption of human free will, neuroscience forces us to reconsider our freedom and re-evaluate the forces that drive our decision-making and who we become.

In his book Determined: Life Without Free Will, Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky comprehensively reviews scientific research to argue that ultimately, humans have no free will. He writes that we cannot select or regulate the numerous environmental and genetic influences that act upon us, and whether they consequently lead to our doom or exaltation. In a bleak summary, Sapolsky states, ‘We are nothing more or less than cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control’.

…Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky comprehensively reviews scientific research to argue that ultimately, humans have no free will.

The scientific debate surrounding free will gained popularity following a seminal experiment from American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, where participants were asked to spontaneously flex their fingers or wrists and report when they first became aware of their intention to move. While participants did this, Libet used electroencephalography (EEG) to study the bereitschaftspotential , or ‘readiness potential’, defined as a slow negative electrical potential in the brain that precedes voluntary movement. Libet’s study showed that the bereitschaftspotential occurred before participants had reported an intention to act, suggesting that their brains were already initiating a response that they weren’t consciously aware of yet. More interestingly, this result introduced the jarring possibility that human beings were not making choices by their own volition at all.

In the years following this study, numerous criticisms were raised about Libet’s findings on both philosophical and scientific grounds. For starters, there are a plethora of human decisions that are far more complex than a spontaneous flexing task, a fact acknowledged by Libet himself. Other explanations are also plausible: instead of the bereitschaftspotential reflecting the brain specifically preparing for movement, scientists have suggested it could be part of the natural ebbs and flows of neural activity, with some levels being more conducive to movement than others.Despite these flaws, Libet’s work spurred massive interest in examining free will through a neuroscientific lens, and several studies began to hint that people were not consciously aware of the decisions they made. Alongside this laboratory research, support could be found in the real world too. For instance, one widely referenced example is Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, was tragically involved in an accident where an iron rod pierced his head. Following the immense cranial damage, Gage began to display a radically different personality, leading Sapolsky to describe him as ‘the textbook case that we are the end product of our material brains’. Though examples like Gage are dramatic and rare, they lead us to wonder: if who we are can be changed so dramatically by a blow to the head or a lesion in the brain, are we really in control of our personalities, virtues, and faults?

Sapolsky’s position on free will is difficult to counter, being backed by extensive neuroscientific, psychological, and genetic studies, all of which have become increasingly robust as research and technology have evolved. There are also other thoughtful considerations that Sapolsky applies to strengthen his deterministic position. For example, he acknowledges that luck massively dictates the families we are born into, communities we interact with, and genes we inherit, which can go on to afford us coveted privileges or unfathomable hardship. Therefore, he states, we do not really drive our own fate— in fact, a lot of it is just happenstance.

While Sapolsky’s argument is secure and well-defended, it is worth considering another complementary perspective offered by philosopher Saul Smilansky, who advocates for an ‘illusionist’ view . Taking an illusionist perspective, Smilansky proposes that although free will is a figment of our imagination, it is one that has predominantly positive effects on society. This is a reassuring view, as research shows that upwards of 82% of people endorse free will, and these beliefs are associated with better life satisfaction, gratitude, sense of meaning, and self-efficacy . It is plain to see that believing we have control over what unfolds in our lives grants us a sense of optimism about what comes next. On the other hand, stripping this belief is more destructive than one might imagine. Research shows that participants who read anti-free will passages before completing computer tasks are more likely to cheat , show aggression, and less likely to help others . These findings support the importance of illusionism, suggesting that it may be better to believe in free will regardless of how ‘factual’ it is, because it instils hope, ambition, and morality in our lives. Additionally, it is probably easier to intellectualise and condemn free will beliefs when determinism does not seem that heartbreaking. But what about those of us who face harsh and oppressive realities? Certainly, for at least some individuals, resignation to genes and fate only perpetuates misery.

…Smilansky proposes that although free will is a figment of our imagination, it is one that has predominantly positive effects on society.

This is not so much of an ‘ignorance is bliss’ situation, but rather one where we may benefit from persisting with hopefulness and conducting ourselves as if our actions matter. In my opinion, there is a balanced way of approaching this debate, and value to be taken from both sides. On one hand, believing that we can make decisions of our own volition drives us to reach our potential and to find comfort in trying, bit by bit, to make living more bearable, exciting, and meaningful. On the other, adopting Sapolsky’s takeaways can encourage us to be more forgiving, humane, and empathetic. It is true that not everything can be boiled down to choice, and the reality is that the things we accomplish and fail at are usually preceded by thousands of events that we often had no say over. This realisation also fosters humility and grace in how we perceive ourselves and the accolades we gather over the years.

Overall, there is no need for the findings of neuroscience to elicit alarm. Although a pure kind of free will likely doesn’t exist given the evidence we have, on a day-to-day level, it’s better to believe you have some power in how things unfold—both for your own sake and that of others. There’s not much we have absolute control over in life, but as Jean Paul Sartre elegantly wrote, ‘Freedom is what we do with what is done to us’.

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A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action.

The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential , or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement.

This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain’s wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. Suddenly, people’s choices—even a basic finger tap—appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition.

As a philosophical question, whether humans have control over their own actions had been fought over for centuries before Libet walked into a lab. But Libet introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will. His finding set off a new surge of debate in science and philosophy circles. And over time, the implications have been spun into cultural lore.

Today, the notion that our brains make choices before we are even aware of them will now pop up in cocktail-party conversation or in a review of Black Mirror . It’s covered by mainstream journalism outlets, including This American Life , Radiolab , and this magazine . Libet’s work is frequently brought up by popular intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari to argue that science has proved humans are not the authors of their actions.

It would be quite an achievement for a brain signal 100 times smaller than major brain waves to solve the problem of free will. But the story of the Bereitschaftspotential has one more twist: It might be something else entirely.

The Bereitschaftspotential was never meant to get entangled in free-will debates. If anything, it was pursued to show that the brain has a will of sorts. The two German scientists who discovered it, a young neurologist named Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his doctoral student Lüder Deecke, had grown frustrated with their era’s scientific approach to the brain as a passive machine that merely produces thoughts and actions in response to the outside world. Over lunch in 1964, the pair decided that they would figure out how the brain works to spontaneously generate an action. “Kornhuber and I believed in free will,” says Deecke, who is now 81 and lives in Vienna.

To pull off their experiment, the duo had to come up with tricks to circumvent limited technology. They had a state-of-the-art computer to measure their participants’ brain waves, but it worked only after it detected a finger tap. So to collect data on what happened in the brain beforehand, the two researchers realized that they could record their participants’ brain activity separately on tape, then play the reels backwards into the computer. This inventive technique, dubbed “reverse-averaging,” revealed the Bereitschaftspotential .

The discovery garnered widespread attention. The Nobel laureate John Eccles and the prominent philosopher of science Karl Popper compared the study’s ingenuity to Galileo’s use of sliding balls for uncovering the laws of motion of the universe. With a handful of electrodes and a tape recorder, Kornhuber and Deecke had begun to do the same for the brain.

What the Bereitschaftspotential actually meant, however, was anyone’s guess. Its rising pattern appeared to reflect the dominoes of neural activity falling one by one on a track toward a person doing something. Scientists explained the Bereitschaftspotential as the electrophysiological sign of planning and initiating an action. Baked into that idea was the implicit assumption that the Bereitschaftspotential causes that action. The assumption was so natural, in fact, no one second-guessed it—or tested it.

Libet, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, questioned the Bereitschaftspotential in a different way. Why does it take half a second or so between deciding to tap a finger and actually doing it? He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate the act” before a person is even aware that decision has taken place, Libet concluded.

To many scientists, it seemed implausible that our conscious awareness of a decision is only an illusory afterthought. Researchers questioned Libet’s experimental design, including the precision of the tools used to measure brain waves and the accuracy with which people could actually recall their decision time. But flaws were hard to pin down. And Libet, who died in 2007, had as many defenders as critics. In the decades since his experiment, study after study has replicated his finding using more modern technology such as fMRI.

But one aspect of Libet’s results sneaked by largely unchallenged: the possibility that what he was seeing was accurate, but that his conclusions were based on an unsound premise. What if the Bereitschaftspotential didn’t cause actions in the first place? A few notable studies did suggest this, but they failed to provide any clue to what the Bereitschaftspotential could be instead. To dismantle such a powerful idea, someone had to offer a real alternative.

In 2010, Aaron Schurger had an epiphany. As a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, Schurger studied fluctuations in neuronal activity, the churning hum in the brain that emerges from the spontaneous flickering of hundreds of thousands of interconnected neurons. This ongoing electrophysiological noise rises and falls in slow tides, like the surface of the ocean—or, for that matter, like anything that results from many moving parts. “Just about every natural phenomenon that I can think of behaves this way. For example, the stock market’s financial time series or the weather,” Schurger says.

From a bird’s-eye view, all these cases of noisy data look like any other noise, devoid of pattern. But it occurred to Schurger that if someone lined them up by their peaks (thunderstorms, market records) and reverse-averaged them in the manner of Kornhuber and Deecke’s innovative approach, the results’ visual representations would look like climbing trends (intensifying weather, rising stocks). There would be no purpose behind these apparent trends—no prior plan to cause a storm or bolster the market. Really, the pattern would simply reflect how various factors had happened to coincide.

“I thought, Wait a minute ,” Schurger says. If he applied the same method to the spontaneous brain noise he studied, what shape would he get?  “I looked at my screen, and I saw something that looked like the Bereitschaftspotential .” Perhaps, Schurger realized, the Bereitschaftspotential ’s rising pattern wasn’t a mark of a brain’s brewing intention at all, but something much more circumstantial.

Two years later, Schurger and his colleagues Jacobo Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene proposed an explanation. Neuroscientists know that for people to make any type of decision, our neurons need to gather evidence for each option. The decision is reached when one group of neurons accumulates evidence past a certain threshold. Sometimes, this evidence comes from sensory information from the outside world: If you’re watching snow fall, your brain will weigh the number of falling snowflakes against the few caught in the wind, and quickly settle on the fact that the snow is moving downward.

But Libet’s experiment, Schurger pointed out, provided its subjects with no such external cues. To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants’ brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.

This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people’s brains “decide” to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there’s nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.

Other recent studies support the idea of the Bereitschaftspotential as a symmetry-breaking signal. In a study of monkeys tasked with choosing between two equal options, a separate team of researchers saw that a monkey’s upcoming choice correlated with its intrinsic brain activity before the monkey was even presented with options.

In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment.

In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision.

When Schurger first proposed the neural-noise explanation, in 2012 , the paper didn’t get much outside attention, but it did create a buzz in neuroscience. Schurger received awards for overturning a long-standing idea. “It showed the Bereitschaftspotential may not be what we thought it was. That maybe it’s in some sense artifactual, related to how we analyze our data,” says Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University.

For a paradigm shift, the work met minimal resistance. Schurger appeared to have unearthed a classic scientific mistake, so subtle that no one had noticed it and no amount of replication studies could have solved it, unless they started testing for causality. Now, researchers who questioned Libet and those who supported him are both shifting away from basing their experiments on the Bereitschaftspotential . (The few people I found still holding the traditional view confessed that they had not read Schurger’s 2012 paper.)

“It’s opened my mind,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London who collaborated with Libet and reproduced the original experiments.

It’s still possible that Schurger is wrong. Researchers broadly accept that he has deflated Libet’s model of Bereitschaftspotential , but the inferential nature of brain modeling leaves the door cracked for an entirely different explanation in the future. And unfortunately for popular-science conversation, Schurger’s groundbreaking work does not solve the pesky question of free will any more than Libet’s did. If anything, Schurger has only deepened the question.

Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world? The topic is immensely complicated, and Schurger’s valiant debunking underscores the need for more precise and better-informed questions.

“Philosophers have been debating free will for millennia, and they have been making progress. But neuroscientists barged in like an elephant into a china shop and claimed to have solved it in one fell swoop,” Maoz says. In an attempt to get everyone on the same page, he is heading the first intensive research collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers, backed by $7 million from two private foundations, the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute. At an inaugural conference in March, attendees discussed plans for designing philosophically informed experiments, and unanimously agreed on the need to pin down the various meanings of “free will.”

In that, they join Libet himself. While he remained firm on his interpretation of his study, he thought his experiment was not enough to prove total determinism—the idea that all events are set in place by previous ones, including our own mental functions. “Given the issue is so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim that our free will is illusory should be based on fairly direct evidence,” he wrote in a 2004 book. “Such evidence is not available.”

About the Author

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The libet experiment and its implications for conscious will.

Dr Peter Clarke considers whether the experiments of Benjamin Libet call into question the reality of human will. Although quite a technical paper, Dr Clarke makes it clear that there is far more to the discussion, and far more uncertainty, than is allowed in the popular interpretations of these experiments. Whether or not you hold the same philosophical position on monism and dualism as Dr Clarke, this paper will help you challenge interpretations of Libet's experiments that deny the reality of human conscious will.

Summary: A famous experiment of Benjamin Libet and his colleagues has been interpreted as showing that our brains initiate voluntary movements before we are aware of having decided to move, and that this calls into question the efficacy of our wills. These claims have been contested by many neuroscientists and philosophers. This paper provides an introduction to the controversy.

The neurophysiological experiments of Benjamin Libet and his collaborators in the 1980s [1] have been interpreted by the authors and many others as showing that our brains initiate conscious voluntary movements as well as the will to move before we are consciously aware of the will to move. I shall refer to this claim as the Libet claim for brevity. It is controversial, but if valid would have important implications for our understanding of how the mind relates to the brain and for the role of conscious will in the performance of voluntary actions. Before going into details about the Libet experiment, I must first provide some information about the mind-brain relationship and the neurophysiology of voluntary movement.

The Mind-Brain Relationship and the Libet Claim

It is generally accepted that the electrical activity of our brains underlies our conscious thought, including our decision making. How a physical thing, the brain, can be the basis of consciousness is a subject of debate that has given rise to many different philosophical positions, but these can be grouped in two main categories: dualism and monism.

So great was the influence of Descartes on western philosophy that, from the late seventeenth century until around 1950 or so, most westerners accepted some form of interactive dualism, involving an immaterial soul acting on a material brain. Since then this view has lost favour, for a variety of reasons, including the arguments of philosophers such as Ryle, Place and Feigl. In addition, atheistic materialists rejected it because it invokes a nonmaterial entity, but so did most Christian academics, because advances in the analysis of biblical texts in the mid twentieth century and since tended to support a monistic conception of man, not a dualistic one. [2] This realisation was not entirely revolutionary, because there had always been a monistic strand in Christian thought due to the influence of Thomas Aquinas. Thus, during his Gifford Lectures in 1956-57, Anglican theologian Austin Farrer criticised the dualistic views of neurobiologist (and future Nobel prize-winner) John Eccles, writing:

We will have nothing to do with the fantastic suggestion, that what the supersensitive ‘reactors’ in the cortex react to, is the initiative of a virtually disembodied soul. To what, then, are we to say that they do react? What else, than to the motions of the embodied soul, that is to say, other motions in the same nervous system? [3]

For these reasons, with a few exceptions, [4] most modern philosophers and neuroscientists, whether theist or atheist, accept some form of monism, but this does not have to involve eliminative materialism that rejects mind as illusory. Many theists, agnostics and atheists adopt more moderate monist positions such as two aspect monism, according to which our subjective, first-personal, account of our inner life and neuroscience’s objective, third-personal account of our brain’s activity refer to complementary aspects of a single entity. [5] An alternative view is the mind-brain identity theory, according to which the mind and the brain’s activity are considered to be the same entity, not two aspects of the same entity. I prefer two-aspect monism because mind-brain identity seems to me linguistically problematic, but the two formulations make identical predictions at the level of brain function.

if brain events come first, this would support epiphenomenalism, the view that mind events are mere by-products of brain events, with no causal role.

A striking aspect of the Libet claim is that it goes against the main versions of both dualism and monism. Cartesian dualism predicts that mind events should precede brain events, since the nonphysical mind (or soul etc.) is considered to be the real source of our decisions. Two-aspect monism and mind-brain identity theory both predict that mind and brain events should be synchronous, since mind-level descriptions and brain-level descriptions are considered complementary (and equally valid) accounts of the same processes. But if brain events come first, this would support epiphenomenalism, the view that mind events are mere by-products of brain events, with no causal role. This would deny the causal efficacy of conscious will.

The Neurophysiology of Voluntary Movement

It is important to be clear about what is, and is not, being claimed when a movement is called voluntary. Even though these movements involve, by definition, an act of conscious will, that is not to say that every aspect of the movement is conscious or willed. For example, the movements of a tennis player as she serves are voluntary, but their control involves many automatic subroutines in the cerebellum and elsewhere. Furthermore, to claim that conscious acts of will initiate voluntary movements is not to deny that the acts of will arise out of brain processes that are largely unconscious. [6]

What is the nature of the ‘I’ (or self) that willed the movement and performed it? The use of such terms does not imply dualism. The ‘I’ (or self, or mind etc.) is generally conceived as being embodied in (or emerging from) the brain’s activity.

The neural circuits involved in voluntary motor control are exceedingly complicated, and I here give only some simplified information that is necessary for understanding the Libet experiment. Voluntary movements are controlled primarily by the motor cortex (in the back part of the frontal lobe – Fig. 1) but in cooperation with many other motor centres including the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. Motor commands are sent from the primary motor cortex (and to some extent from other areas) to motoneurons in the brainstem and spinal cord, which in turn control the muscles. The initiation and programming of movements depend on activity in many areas including the supplementary motor area (Fig. 1) and the preSMA, and several areas in the parietal cortex. These areas feed directly or indirectly into the premotor cortex and motor cortex. Electrical stimulation of the motor areas produces movements, but not the will to move. In contrast, electrical stimulation of areas BA-39 and BA-40 in the parietal lobe (Fig. 1) elicits the will to move, but does not cause a movement. [7]

The Libet Experiment, a Challenge to the Role of Conscious Will

An important background to the Libet experiment was the discovery in the 1960s that, before people make a voluntary movement, there is a slow build-up of electrical potential measured from the skull over the motor cortex, beginning as much as a second earlier for simple movements and even longer for complex series of movements. [8] This electrical change is called the readiness potential (RP).

Libet was interested in the relative timing of the RP compared with the movement and the conscious decision to move. He therefore asked his experimental subjects to perform simple movements, in most cases flexion of the fingers or wrist, and to estimate the time of conscious awareness of the urge (or will or decision) to move (W) by reporting the position of a spot moving in a circle on an oscilloscope screen. They were told to perform the movement whenever they felt like doing so, and to pay close attention to the time when they were first aware of the ‘urge to move’. He also recorded the RP by electroencephalography, and the time of the movement itself was estimated from the electromyogram [ measurement of the electrical impulses in muscles - ed] . Libet found that time W came only about 200 msec before the movement, whereas the RP began much earlier, usually about 550 msec before the movement (Fig. 2). The fact that the change in brain potential occurred before the conscious decision was interpreted by Libet and by many commentators to imply that our conscious decision to act is not the true cause of the movement. They deduced that conscious will is too slow to make things happen, and that volitional acts must result from unconscious processes in the brain, not from conscious willing. This seemed to imply that our intuitive notion of conscious will must be an illusion.

There appeared to be a small loophole in that Libet’s subjects still had the power to veto a movement in the 200 msec between time W and the movement. He therefore argued that even though the initiation of the movement was not the result of conscious will, its vetoing was. This argument has not attracted great interest, but was supported by eminent free-will philosopher Robert Kane. [9]

The Libet experiment provoked considerable interest and intense controversy, and stimulated further experimentation.

Single Neuron Recordings During the Libet Experiment

The overall conclusion on timing has to be that the problems have not so far been resolved.

It is rarely possible to record from single neurons in the brains of humans, but this can occasionally be done in epilepsy patients using electrodes that have been implanted to localise the zones that cause seizures. Thus, remarkably, Itzhak Fried and his collaborators managed to record from more than 1,000 neurons in the medial frontal cortex of epilepsy patients (and especially in the supplementary motor area, which generates most of the early part of the RP) as they performed the Libet experiment. It was found that a few neurons changed their firing rate (by an increase or a decrease) almost 1.5 sec before time W, and more and more neurons did so over the following 1.5 sec, with about 25% of the neurons firing several tenths of a second before W. The authors conclude that their findings support the view that the experience of will emerges as the culmination of premotor activity starting several hundreds of msec before awareness. [10]

Criticisms of the Libet Claim

Despite the fame of the Libet experiment and its frequent acceptance in popular and semi-popular writings, it has been the subject of intense controversy. Indeed, most specialists in the philosophy of free will who have addressed the Libet claim have rejected it. [11] Most of the criticisms focused on difficulties of judging the time of awareness, of interpreting the RP, or of philosophical interpretation, as is discussed below.

Problems of judging the time of awareness

It was central to Libet’s claim that the readiness potential began distinctly before time W. The published data of several groups do indeed support this claim, but critics have objected to the use of subjective recall after the event, because there is evidence that this can be very unreliable. Furthermore, those such as Alfred Mele [12] who have tried the experiment for themselves have found that W is difficult to define. I have done this too, and you may wish to try it using a ‘clock’ available on the web. [13] When I try this, I find it very hard to judge the precise time when I decided to move my finger / wrist. It would be useful to quantify the reliability of our judgements, but this is difficult for a purely subjective decision. For this reason, several research groups have instead measured the reliability of timing judgements for perceptual events, which is easier to do. Results have been variable, but several groups found serious biases, [14] raising doubts about the interpretation of the Libet experiment. A different critique of the timing was made by Dennett and Kinsbourne, [15] who point out that Libet’s experiment involves an attention shift from the participants’ subjective intention to the clock, which may have introduced temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand.

To try to solve these problems, Matsuhashi and Hallett devised an alternative methodology for estimating time W. They found that the RP (which they called BP1) occurred before W in only about two thirds of the subjects; worse, the lateralised RP (LRP) that we shall discuss below, always occurred after W. [16]

In view of the controversy about the measurement of subjective timing, considerable attention was devoted in the public media to a paper published in Nature Neuroscience that used brain scanning technology (functional magnetic resonance imaging – fMRI) in a Libet-like experimental paradigm, and included in the summary a claim that a "decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex almost 10 sec before it enters awareness" . [17] After all the subtle debate about a few hundreds of milliseconds, 10 sec was an enormous amount of time, and the wording of the abstract gave the impression that the temporal priority of the neural decision with respect to the subjective one was finally established. I assume that some journalists and bloggers only had access to the abstract (available free on the web) and not to the full paper, because the main text made only the much weaker claim that the activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex was correlated with the decision (to use the left or right hand) with 60% prediction accuracy, up to 10 sec before the conscious decision. That is very different! To reflect a neural decision, the correlation would need to be at 100%, not 60%. The paper provided valuable information about brain activity leading ultimately to a decision, but did nothing to rescue the Libet experiment from the criticisms about timing.

Doubts as to whether the readiness potential reflects a decision to move

The Libet claim assumes that the RP reflects a neural ‘decision’ to move, and that the neural activity underlying the RP causes both the will to move and the movement. Even if such causality could be demonstrated, this would not strictly be sufficient to validate the Libet claim, because the decision must presumably be caused by a chain of preceding neural events, and the RP might reflect some of these. But the Libet claim certainly assumes causality. This is part of the claim, and it has never been proved.

Libet et al. explicitly pointed out that their conclusions applied only to spontaneous, rapidly performed movements

To be precise, we are really talking about the earliest part of the RP, because the timing argument focuses on the RP’s onset. To attribute such a decisional and causal role to this earliest part of the RP seems surprising, because it originates mainly in the SMA (Fig. 1), which has been known for more than thirty years to be strongly activated when subjects ‘programme’ (imagine) a complex movement without actually performing it. [18] This is not to deny that activity in SMA can cause movements in some cases, such as when it is stimulated electrically, but it cannot be assumed that the earliest part of the RP necessarily reflects neural processes underlying a decision to move. And there are at least six specific reasons to doubt this.

First, even though electrical stimulation of the SMA can cause movements, it does not cause a will to move, which requires stimulation of parietal areas. [19] This suggests that the RP does not cause the will to move.

Second, if the RP truly caused the conscious will and the movement, one would expect trial-to-trial variations in the onset of the RP to correlate with trial-to-trial variations in time W; that is to say that trials with an early RP should also have an early W. Haggard and Eimer tested this, using a variant of the Libet experiment, and found there was little correlation, ruling out the RP as a cause of the will or decision to move. They did, however, find that the ‘lateralized readiness potential’ (LRP: i.e. the RP from the cortex on the opposite side relative to the movement minus the RP from the same side) gave a positive correlation, suggesting that the brain processes underlying the LRP might cause the will to move. [20] At the time, their paper did not seem to challenge the Libet claim, because the LRP seemed to fulfil the role formerly attributed to the RP. However, the LRP occurs later than the RP, and subsequent experiments have sometimes found that the LRP occurs even after time W as is discussed above, [21] so the LRP seems a fragile candidate to replace the RP.

Third, Alfred Mele has pointed out a flaw in Libet’s experimental paradigm that vitiates attempts to deduce a causal influence between the RP and the movement (and the will to move). [22] In all Libet’s experiments, the permanent storage of electroencephalographic data was triggered by the finger / wrist movements. This was necessary as part of the averaging procedure that is necessary to detect the RP, which would otherwise be masked by other concurrent activity in the EEG. If there was no movement, the data were not stored, so any RPs that occurred without being followed by movements would not have been detected. If such RPs without movement did occur, then RPs are not sufficient to cause movements, and more probably reflected brain activity occurring prior to the decision to move. This possibility is difficult to evaluate, because the averaging procedure has to be triggered at a moment defined by the movement.

Fourth, experiments by Hermann et al. cast further doubt on the interpretation of the RP as causally related to the decision and movement. [23] These researchers used a modified version of the Libet experimental paradigm, in which the participants were instructed to press one of two buttons, depending on a presented stimulus. An RP occurred well before the motor response, as in the Libet experiment. But, importantly, it occurred even before the stimulus presentation, so it clearly did not reflect a decision as to which button to press. The authors argue that the RP does not specifically determine the movement, but may reflect a general expectation (which is indeed what the RP was initially thought by Kornhuber and Deecke to reflect, not a decision but a state of readiness, hence its name).

Fifth, Trevena and Miller devised a modified version of the Libet experiment in which participants made spontaneous decisions to move, or not, and found that the RP was no stronger before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, which is not what one would expect if the RP reflected a neural decision to move. [24]

Sixth, computational analysis suggests that the neural decision to move occurs only very late during the time-course of the RP, not at its onset. [25]

Debate about the philosophical interpretation

Even if the Libet claim is accepted – which is very controversial, as we have seen – there is also debate about the philosophical interpretation.

Libet ... maintained that conscious will can still play a genuine role in the vetoing of initiated acts.

I have here used systematically the term ‘conscious will’ rather than ‘free will’ to avoid the broader philosophical associations of the latter term. Nevertheless, many supporters of the Libet claim, including Libet himself [26] , have used the term ‘free will’. This has aroused further controversy, because many critics have argued that Libet’s experimental paradigm was irrelevant to the question of free will. When we talk about free will, we are usually referring to choices among a variety of options, often with moral implications, and this may require careful deliberation over a period of minutes or hours or days. The Libet experiment is just the opposite. The subject was not making a moral decision, and was not even deciding whether to move, but only when. Moreover, the subjects were specifically instructed not to deliberate but to act spontaneously, and in their original 1983 paper Libet et al. explicitly pointed out that their conclusions applied only to spontaneous, rapidly performed movements. [27] Thus, even if we accept the debatable claim that the finger / wrist movements in the Libet experiment were not the result of conscious will, this conclusion cannot automatically be extended to situations for which the term free will would normally be applied.

Another problem is that those who support an anti-free-will interpretation appear to have in mind only rather marginal notions of free will. For example, in a review on the neuroscience of volition, neurobiologist Haggard, a former collaborator of Libet and leading protagonist of the anti-free-will interpretation, mentions the possibility that the brain’s circuits might be influenced by "an unspecified and uncaused cause (the 'will')" . Haggard rejects this view, and concludes the article by stating that "modern neuroscience is shifting towards a view of voluntary action being based on specific brain processes…" . [28] This gives the impression that ‘modern neuroscience’ is gradually triumphing against the illusion of free will, but this is confusing for at least two reasons. First, only a tiny minority of modern philosophers conceive of the will as an ‘uncaused cause’, so why use such a marginal definition? Second, the words about modern neuroscience’s "shifting towards a view of voluntary action being based on specific brain processes" are strange, because this has been the standard view in neuroscience for over half a century. In the same review, Haggard states that the Libet experiment "seems to disprove the everyday concept of 'free will'" ; his reference to ‘everyday concept’ suggests that he recognises that this challenge does not extend to more sophisticated concepts of free will.

Libet’s 1983 experiment reported that brain activity (the RP) reflecting a decision to flex a finger or wrist occurred several hundred milliseconds before the subject became aware of her decision (or urge or will) to move. This has been interpreted, controversially, to suggest that our subjective impression that our conscious wills initiate the movement is illusory. Libet accepted this interpretation, but maintained that conscious will can still play a genuine role in the vetoing of initiated acts.

Many neuroscientists and most philosophers contest the claims about the supposed inefficacy of conscious will, and this paper summarises their arguments. At the neurophysiological level, it has not been shown convincingly that a neural ‘decision’ sufficient to cause the movement occurs before the time of awareness of the decision to move. Even if this could be shown, it would not undermine the conceptions of free will that are defended by most philosophers.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Martyn Frame and Stuart Judge for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

[1] Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W. & Pearl, D.K. ‘Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act’, Brain (1983) 106: 623- 642. [2] Green, J.B. Body, Soul and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible , Carlisle: Paternoster (2008). [3] Farrer, A. The Freedom of the Will , London: A & C Black (1958), p.87. [4] Goetz, S. and Taliaferro, C. A Brief History of the Soul , Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell (2011). [5] Nagel, T. The View From Nowhere , Oxford: Oxford University Press (1986), chap.3, p.28; Jeeves, M. & Brown, W.S. Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion , West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press (2009). [6] Gomes, G. ‘The timing of conscious experience: a critical review and reinterpretation of Libet's research’, Consciousness & Cognition (1998) 7: 559-595. [7] Desmurget, M., Reilly, K.T., et al. ‘Movement intention after parietal cortex stimulation in humans’, Science (2009) 324, 811-813. [8] Kornhuber, H.H. and Deecke, L. ‘Hirnpotentialänderungen bei Willkürbewegungen und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschaftspotential und reafferente Potentiale‘, Pflügers Archiv (1965) 284: 1-17. [9] Kane, R. The Significance of Free Will , New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996), p.232. [10] Fried, I., Mukamel, R. & Kreiman, G. ‘Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition’, Neuron (2011) 69: 548-562. [11] Bayne, T. ‘Libet and the case for free will scepticism’, in Swinburne, R. (ed.) Free Will and Modern Science , Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011). [12] Mele, A. R. Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will , New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009). [13] There is a suitable clock at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/libet_experiments.html . [14] Danquah, A.N., Farrell, M.J. & O'Boyle, D.J. ‘Biases in the subjective timing of perceptual events: Libet et al. (1983) revisited’, Consciousness & Cognition (2008) 17: 616-627. [15] Dennett, D.C. & Kinsbourne, M. ‘Time and the observer’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1992) 15: 183–247. [16] Matsuhashi M. & Hallett, M. ‘The timing of the conscious intention to move’, European Journal of Neuroscience (2008) 28: 2344-2351. [17] Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.J. & Haynes, J.D. ‘Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain’, Nature Neuroscience (2008) 11: 543-545. [18] Roland, P.E., Larsen, B., Lassen, N.A. & Skinhoj, E. ‘Supplementary motor area and other cortical areas in organization of voluntary movements in man’, Journal of Neurophysiology (1980) 43: 118-136. [19] Desmurget et al. op. cit. , (see [7]). [20] Haggard P. & Eimer M. ‘On the relation between brain potentials and the awareness of voluntary movements’, Experimental Brain Research (1999) 126: 128-133. [21] Matsuhashi & Hallett op. cit. , (see [16]). [22] Mele op. cit. , (see [12]). [23] Herrmann, C.S., Pauen, M., Min, B.K., Busch, N.A. & Rieger, J.W. ‘Analysis of a choice-reaction task yields a new interpretation of Libet's experiments’, International Journal of Psychophysiology (2008) 67, 151-157. [24] Trevena, J. & Miller, J. ‘Brain preparation before a voluntary action: evidence against unconscious movement initiation’, Consciousness & Cognition (2010) 19, 447-456. [25] Schurger, A., Sitt, J.D. & Dehaene, S. ‘An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-iniated movement’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1210467109 (2012). [26] Libet, B. Mind Time , Cambridge Mass. / London, UK: Harvard University Press (2004). [27] Libet et al. op. cit. , (see [1]). [28] Haggard, P. ‘Human volition: towards a neuroscience of will’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2008) 9: 934-946.

The Libet experiment and its implications for conscious will FARADAY PAPER NO 17

© 2013 The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion This article is Faraday Paper No. 17 and appears on bethinking by the kind permission of the author and the Faraday Institute .

Faraday Papers

The Faraday Papers are published by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion , St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, CB3 0BN, UK, a charitable organisation for education and research ( www.faraday-institute.org ). The opinions expressed are those of authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute. The Faraday Papers address a broad range of topics related to the interactions between science and religion. A full list of current Faraday Papers can be viewed at www.faraday-institute.org from where free copies can be down-loaded in pdf format. Print copies can also be obtained in bulk quantities of ten or more at £1.50 per 10 copies + postage (check current rates). Secure on-line ordering details are at www.faraday-institute.org .

Peter G.H. Clarke

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How Libet’s Free Will Research Is Misrepresented

In a recent podcast, “Free Will or Free Won’t?”, Robert J. Marks (left) and Dr. Michael Egnor discussed free will, free won’t, predestination, and the brain , as seen from the perspective of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet ’s findings about brain activity when people make decisions (partial transcript here ).

In the transcribed portion below (the second half), they looked at how Libet’s findings have been misrepresented to suit doctrines of naturalism/materialism:

10:00 | The misrepresentation of Benjamin Libet’s experiments

Robert J. Marks: You mentioned that Libet’s experiment of free won’t is actually misrepresented by materialists. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Michael Egnor (right): Yes, the misinterpretation is very common and it’s almost routine to read or to hear Libet’s work being described as scientific evidence for the absence of free will. Which is bizarre because Libet himself explicitly endorsed the reality of free will, emphatically he endorsed the reality of free will. And Libet point out that his research unequivocally supports the reality of libertarian free will. But his experiments are described very often both in the scientific literature and in the popular press as supportive of materialism—which is something that they don’t support and something that Libet made very clear was not his conclusion.

Some titles of articles in recent years give a sense of what Michael Egnor means here: “Benjamin Libet and the Denial of Free Will: How did a flawed experiment become so influential?” ( Psychology Today, September 2017) (Whether the experiment was flawed or not, academics and professionals have interpreted it as telling them what they wanted to hear, not what Libet said.) “Does Free Will Exist? Neuroscience Can’t Disprove It Yet … A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked ” ( The Atlantic, September 2019) (Here, the assumption seems to be both that Libet thought he’d disproved free will and that, even if he didn’t, it is only a matter of time.) “How a Flawed Experiment “Proved” That Free Will Doesn’t Exist. It did no such thing—but the result has become conventional wisdom nevertheless” ( Scientific American, December 6, 2019) (It became conventional wisdom with a great deal of help.)

Robert J. Marks: It seems that in order to do that, they would have to exclude the part of the “free won’t” in the experiment.

Michael Egnor: Yes, and undoubtedly, in some situations, it would be the result of ignorance on the part of the person making the claim. The person may just not know much about Libet’s work. Or may have no insight into the original research and may have just heard about it or heard wrongly.

Note: The video below summarizes Libet’s work but fails to make clear that he himself believed that free will is a real factor in decisions:

Michael Egnor: And other times, I have to say that maybe the misrepresentation is deliberate because it doesn’t support a materialist perspective.

Robert J. Marks: So you think the ideology is actually trumping objectivity there.

Michael Egnor: Oh yeah. That goes on lot.

11:44 | Reproducing Benjamin Libet’s experiments

Robert J. Marks: Has Libet’s experiment been reproduced and confirmed by different researchers?

Michael Egnor: Yes, certainly the existence of the brain wave that occurs before a decision is made has been shown many times. And in fact Libet wasn’t the first one to show that. It was called the “readiness potential” [Bereitschaftspotential] and it was shown a couple of decades earlier by some German researchers. Libet was the first person to look at it in the kind of detail he did but it was known that there was a potential in the brain that happened before decisions were made by about half a second

Recently, functional MRI imaging has been used, which has shown perhaps even a longer interval between the brain activity and the decision. Even a matter of several seconds before the decision is made, one can see activity in the brain. I don’t believe that anyone, though, has looked at the veto part of it, that is, Libet’s “free won’t” aspect has been looked at again. Because, by and large, it has been denied or ignored.

Determinism has on the whole, worked well for the physical observable world. That has led many scientists and philosophers to regard any deviation from determinism as absurd and witless, and unworthy of consideration. But there has been no evidence, or even a proposed experimental test design, that definitively or convincingly demonstrates the validity of natural law determinism as the mediator or instrument of free will. Benjamin Libet Do We Have Free Will? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8–9, 1999, pp. 47–57

00:40 | Introducing Dr. Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook 01:04 | Free will vs. predestination 01:49 | The research of Benjamin Libet 07:07 | Overcoming addictions 08:01 | Rewiring your brain 09:13 | Hebb’s Law 10:00 | The misrepresentation of Benjamin Libet’s experiments 11:44 | Reproducing Benjamin Libet’s experiments

Previous: How a neuroscientist imaged free will (and “free won’t”) At first, Libet thought that free will might not be real. Then he looked again… Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet (1916–2007), who studied and measured brain activity as people make decisions, came across the power of “free won’t”: an apparently free decision NOT to do something we had decided on earlier.

Further reading on free will and free won’t:

Can free will really be a scientific idea? ( Eric Holloway ) Yes, if we look at it from the perspective of information theory

Why do atheists still claim that free will  can’t exist?  Sam Harris reduces everything to physics but then ignores quantum non-determinism  (Eric Holloway)

Was famous old evidence against free will  just debunked?  The pattern that was thought to prove free will an illusion may have been noise

Younger thinkers now argue that  free will is real.  The laws of physics do not rule it out, they say.

Also by  Dr.  Michael Egnor  on free will:

Can physics prove there is no free will?

Does  “alien hand syndrome”  show that we don’t really have free will?

How can mere  products of nature  have free will?

Does brain stimulation research  challenge free will?

Is free will  a dangerous myth?

But is determinism true?

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