Metaphysics: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides) by Nikk Effingham & Helen Beebee & Philip Goff

Author:Nikk Effingham & Helen Beebee & Philip Goff [Effingham, Nikk]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2010-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

NEUROSCIENCE AND FREE WILL

In recent years, there has been some debate about whether there is neuroscientific evidence that free will is, in fact, an illusion (see illusion of free will). In a 1999 article provocatively titled ‘Is free will an illusion?’, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet provides experimental data which, he claims, shows that the role for what he calls ‘the conscious will’ is extremely limited.

Libet’s basic experiment works roughly as follows. Experimental subjects had their scalps wired up to a monitoring device, which tracked electrical changes in the brain. (Note, this is an actual experiment and not a thought experiment! The similarity to Frankfurt’s nefarious neurosurgeon ends here.) They were asked to say when they experienced an ‘urge’ to flex their wrist, by looking at a clock with a fast-moving hand and saying where the hand was when they experienced the urge. These timings were then compared with ‘spikes’ in electrical activity (called ‘readiness potentials’ or RPs) in the brain.

Libet found that in general the RPs occurred about 350 milliseconds – that is around a third of a second – before the subjects felt the urge to flex and he concluded that the initiation of voluntary acts occurs unconsciously in the brain; hence, what we would like to think is the ‘conscious will’ turns out to be no more than the awareness of a ‘choice’ that one’s brain has already made. (Actually things are more complicated than this, because Libet allows that the conscious will may still have a ‘veto’ function: we may be able to consciously suppress intentions that have already been formed by our brains. However, we will ignore that complication.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.