Home______Benjamin Libet & Free Won't

Hold out your arm. Look at it. Now bend your hand at the wrist. Do it whenever you want. Do it a few times.

How did this process begin? Was it you? Was it these words?

In 1985, neurosscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment similar to this. (See Free Will & Benjamin Libet's Experiments, 8 November 2003.)

Home_____Bad Religion Rocker Greg Graffin on Free Will

Frontman of Bad Religion, Greg Graffin purportedly started the band at age 15 after moving to the San Bernardino valley of California during the Carter era. Around him he beheld suburban sprawl and antiseptic value and his response was to form his group. Other bands of the era have fallen out of memory, but Graffin's remains. His songs include "Television," "21st Century Digital Boy," and "I Love My Computer," each about the electronic age and its dominance over consciousness. "Supersonic" is about the accelerated pace of modern living, the fast-lane life imposed by the modern, technological age.

The Illusion of Free Will: Physicist Amit Goswami, Sage Ramesh Balsekar, and Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet

The Illusion of Free Will: Physicist Amit Goswami, Sage Ramesh Balsekar, and Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet

Balsekar: [On free choice:] A personal awareness of that choice comes about 1/2 second later than a "readiness potentia" that appears in the brain wave, per brain surgeon Benjamin Libet. Thus there can be no free will, that most precious "possession" in the West.

Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

Nancey Murphy is a Christian theologian and philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary. Psychologist Warren S. Brown is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute there. He spent 11 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. As their background might suggest, their book, takes as key interests the physicalism of science and the room it leaves for the existence of God. I offer a review of the book, but do not want it to become overlong. For that reason, I do not develop explanations of some of their points.

David Hodgson: A Plain Person's Free Will

David Hodgson: A Plain Person's Free Will

David Hodgson is "a Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia" who is "also deeply interested in philosophy." He has published books through Oxford University Press (Consequences of Utilitarianism and The Mind Matters ), as wells as articles on consciousness, probability and plausible reasoning.

Here is an abstract of his "plain person's" thesis as found in the Journal of Consciousness Studies:

Benjamin Libet's Personal View of Free Will

Benjamin Libet's Personal View of Free Will.

"If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was travelling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will." (Attributed to Albert Einstein in the promotion site for Libet's The Volitional Brain. Perhaps from Einstein's autobiography, The World As I See It, in which he addresses his deterministic view of the universe.)

Most scientific thought concurs that the universe is deterministic and that the sense of free will is an illusion. That is, except for those who take into account chaos theory at the macro level, and quantum mechanics at the micro. The question remains, as posed by T.S. Eliot:

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

"The Hollow Men," 1925

Benjamin Libet conducted now famous experiments that seemed to light up the shadow. Essentially, they were that a subject thought he had made a decision to act, but instead the action occurred about a half second before the sense of a decision. The decision was illusory. The action involved no agent, no choosing person, but instead happened, with the sense of control ocurring afterward.

Despite the evidence of his own experiments, Benjamin Libet allows some room for free will in an otherwise deterministic world. He provides many of his arguments in The Volitional Brain (Libet, Freeman, & Sutherland, 1999).

Libet has this to say about his methods: "I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the 'readiness potential', RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350-400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act but it could control performance of the act. The findings also affect views of guilt and responsibility. But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro-deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, non-determined by natural laws and 'truly free'? I shall present an experimentalist view about these fundamental philosophical opposites."

He has several justifications, one of which is that many readiness potentials are produced by the brain although only one is acted upon. Another is that the conscious mind can veto actions before they are performed. Into this he tosses the notion of "consciousness fields," which is more supposition than evidence-based theory. I will add to that chaos theory and quantum mechanics.

Critics argue that he has created a homonculus, a little man inside, who over-rides unconscious urges to act, but his own experiments verify that such vetos do occur. In this regard, the burden of explaining away the evidence lies with his critics, for subjects are indeed able to stop actions within a very narrow window of time. This has been established by Libet's own experiments.

I should add that good Doctor Einstein was a determinist to the core, which was why he could never accept--call it what you will--quantum mechanics, wave funcion collapse, superposition theory, and especially Neils Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of what is happening at that level. He couldn't accept any of it but history has passed him by in that regard.

Paul Weiss: Common Sense & Beyond

Paul Weiss: Common Sense & Beyond

I found an old book of papers presented before the New York Institute of Philosophy on the issue of human freedom (or non-freedom, if you prefer). Edited by Sidney Hook, the papers reflect a broad diversity of opinion. In reading them, I could only conclude that philosophers today are no less divided on the issue than they were then, in the mid-1950s. One piece did stand out for its reductio ad absurdum of many philospher claims on the issue. By Paul Weiss and titled "Common Sense and Beyond," some excerpts from it are provided below.

Free Will & Consciousness Research: W. Grey Walter, Benjamin Libet, Hans Kornhuber, Lüder Deeke, & Risto Näätäen

Benjamin Libet is most frequently associated with the Readiness Potential and its implications for free will, but W. Grey Walter (1910-1977), did pioneering work that brought early attention to the phenomenon in Britain and America, although similar findings had been made in Germany and later in Finland.


W. Grey Walter: Background
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived in England from the age of five, and became interested in neurophysiology at King's College, Cambridge.

Steven Pinker & The Fear of Determinism

There was a young man who said "Damn!"

It grieves me to think that I am
Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram.
(Attributed to Maurice E. Hare, 1905)

"One fear of determinism is a gaping existential anxiety: that deep down we are not in control of our own choices. All our brooding and agonizing over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains. If you suffer from this anxiety, I suggest the following experiment.

Mindfulness Affects Brain Matter: Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

Mindfulness Affects Brain Matter: Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Mind over matter, anyone? The question would be rejected by those who endorse the modern view of consciousness, which appeals to hard-liners in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, or behavioral genetics, all of whom would support some material explanation for consciousness.