Nathaniel Mauka, Staff Writer
Neuroscientists have argued whether we even have free will, but now they want to turn it off.
The Libet Experiment
In the 1980s scientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment. He ‘discovered’ that what seems to be free will or the conscious choice to do or not do something is really just the observance of something that has already happened. This completely rocked the foundations of what most thought of as a prerequisite for being human, and the long-held religious view that free-will must always be honored.
Libet recorded people’s brainwaves as they made spontaneous finger movements while looking at a clock. The participants in the study were to tell researchers the time at which they decided to wave their fingers. Libet found that there were several milliseconds of preparatory brain activity prior to the time that people reported the conscious act of waving their fingers. His findings were taken as gospel that free will did not exist. Now we call this preparatory action of the brain the ‘readiness potential.’
What Libet’s experiment failed to consider though, was manifold. It is possible that people were only conscious of an action milliseconds after a subconscious realization. It is possible that they could not indicate their intent as fast as their physical bodies could carry it out – a delay in physical vs. mental activity that has been well documented, and it is also possible that the cognition of an anticipated event is cognized well before the actual event, because the entire causal field is changed by our consciousness, as evidenced by recent experiments in physics. This is called the observer effect as it refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed.
Libet implies that the conscious decision act is divorced from fee will, in that it is acted out nonconsciously, and that the subjective feeling of having made this decision is tagged on afterward – however – we already know from vast amounts of research from Jung and others, that we know a lot more than we consciously allow ourselves to honor.
Nonetheless, Libet’s experiment has weathered such criticism and the implications have been replicated with even more advanced equipment including the use of FMRI technology and the direct recording of neuronal activity using implanted electrodes.
