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.

" A good deal of contemporary discussion of the problem of determinism and freedom rests on a number of unexamined but rather dubious assumptions. Not until these are brought to the fore, and either modified or replaced, can there, I think, be much hope of progress toward the solution of this perplexing basic issue. . . .

. . . . Any view that wholly abandons common sense is at least a fiction or a fantasy. Any view that refuses to examine it is at best uncritical and dogmatic. Reflection and reason require one to stand somewhere between these two extremes. . . .

. . . Most discussions of freedom do not distinguish among (1) freedom from, (2) freedom to, (3) freedom for, and (4) freedom with.

1. Whenever men are subject to unusual or unconventional restraints we think of them as being compelled; when those constraints are removed we think of them as freed, and speak of them as free. Thus we say that the released slave is a free man.
2. Freedom to is the power to act either inwardly as a being of intent or outwardly as one who can publicly express his wishes or carry out his obligations. Thus we say the he who wishes to take drugs, and can, is free to take them; and that he who out to pay his debts and has the money to so is free to pay them.
3. Freedom for is the power to commit oneself to an end and to work to bring it about. This end may be set by society or the state; one’s commitment to it might be a function of heredity and training. But the capacity to put oneself in a position to focus on this end and engage in activity to bring it about is to have a freedom for. Thus we say that men are at their best when they have been made free for a civilized life of leisure.
4. Finally, we are men in a society and men in a cosmos, and whatever freedom we may express is largely futile or frustrated if it does not intermesh with that exercised by others. Thus we say that we are genuinely free only when we are in harmony with equally free fellow men.

. . . . We cannot settle the problem of determinism and freedom until we have decided just what type of freedom, and thus what antithetical sense of determinism, we wish to consider.

. . . . Yet a scientific account that requires the acknowledgement of determinacies or indeterminacies in the world tells us nothing about the nature of things, but only about that phase of existence isolated and pursued in common ways by a community of thinkers. In the end we have no right to say that anything beyond all knowledge is real. [Inveterate Bystander emphasis] . . . .

. . . The wise scientist makes no claim that he is able to deal with or to know anything about the universe outside the scope of his language, instruments, or criteria. [Inveterate Bystander emphasis] . . . . " (From Determinism and Freedom in The Age of Modern Science, Sidney Hook, ed., Collier, 1979)

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.

W. Grey Walter

Failing to obtain a Cambridge research fellowship, he did research at various London hospitals. This interest led him to work elsewhere in Europe as well as in the United States and the Soviet Union. He was not a communist party member but as a fellow traveler (so-called in that era) he had clear far-left sympathies and is the father of Nicholas Walter (1934-2000), a prominent English anarchist.

W. Grey Walter was a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. Between 1948 and 1949. he devised autonomous machines, robots Elmer and Elsie, that mimicked human behavior, which paved the way for popularization of cybernetic theory. Claiming his self-help teachings as founded on cybernetics principles, Maxwell Maltz, MD, a cosmetic surgeon, sold many books on Psycho-Cybernetics, essentially advising how the mind can be programmed. (A Biblical phrase puts it tersely, although with other intentions: As a man thinketh, so is he.)

By using Elmer and Elsie, W. Grey Walter established that consciousness complexity can arise out of simplicity in the brain--that a small number of brain cells can give rise to very complex behaviors. This, he felt, would establish that human consciousness is not immeasurably complex and can be studied by scientific means. By doing so, he wanted to demonstrate that human brain hard wiring could provide researchers with understanding of consciousness operations. Called tortoises because of their slow pace on three wheels, Elmer and Elsie provided models to understand brain organization. Capable of photo taxis (movement toward a light source), they could maneuver to a stationed battery charger when running low on power.

He conducted a "self-awareness test" on one robot by placing a light on the "nose" of a tortoise while he watched as the machine observed itself in a mirror. "It began flickering, twittering, and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus", he wrote. He held that this "might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness" if observed in an animal.

Hans Berger

The electroencephalograph (EEG) machine, invented by Hans Berger, became a key instrument in his work. (In 1929, Berger, a German, discovered brain waves when he attached electrodes, one to the forehead, the other to the rear of the skull of a human subject. Because an EEG measures brain electrical activity, Walter revised the device so to detect a variety of brain waves, from alpha (high speed) to delta (low speed) as observed during sleep. By triangulating with the brain occipital lobe (at the back of the brain) he located the source of alpha waves. Delta waves were used to locate tumors or epilepsy lesions.

His work with EEG electronics led him in WW2 to help develop radar technology. In Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War, the former Prime Minister wrote about the debt Britain owed to the developers of radar, a system that was a key tool in scrambling RAF Spitfires aloft to intercept Luftwaffe bombers steady-on for England. Walter was one of those developers.


Free Will: W. Grey Walter, Benjamin Libet, and Other Experimenters

Benjamin Libet

He paved the way for Benjamin Libet when in the 1960s Walter discovered the Readiness Potential, termed by him as contingent negative variation (CNV), which described a negative electrical spike appearing in the brain a half second prior to subjects becoming consciously aware of movements they are about to make. He gave his subjects a dummy button--it would not work--to change slides they viewed. They were told to press the button to change to the next slide. An electrode was attached so that their brain was wired to the slide changer. In fact, the slides were changed via the electrode by the Readiness Potential area of their brain, and before they could push the dummy button. Unaware their own brains had been the agent, the subjects complained that the slides were changing before they could push the button. They thought they had not actuated the change when in fact they had, but not by any decision on their part. The sense of decision came after their brains had already effected the change to the next slide. The slide changed before they had decided to change it. Thus decision, that to which we attribute deeds, was an illusion. This, of course, has far-reaching ramifications for what is loosely termed free will.

It suggests that free agency is an illusion and that we assume we choose when in fact we don't. Instead, we are creatures of cause and effect, determined by stimuli and forces in the environment.

The basic findings have been repeated by various experimenters as the concept is straightforward and its

Hans Kornhuber

protocols are simple to devise. The term Readiness Potential has come into wide use because of translation of a German term with the same meaning, Bereitschaftpotential, as named by German researchers, Hans Kornhuber and Lüder Deeke. Kornhuber and Deeke had findings in a comparable behavioral context as a Finn, Risto Näätäen (image not found) later had. Because various experiments have been conducted on the Readiness Potential with consistently similar results, we must conclude that the findings are not an anomaly.

Nor can their implications for consciousness and free agency be lightly dismissed, given the consistency in the experiments--that the decision to act follows the action. In effect, the observer can predict what the subject will do before the subject knows his own response.

Lüder Deeke

Articles on Benjamin Libet can be found , Libet and Free Won't, 15 March 2004, The Illusion of Free Will, 28 December 2003 & at the link devoted to free will, found at the top of the home page.