Free Will: a new study, Libet refuted (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, September 14, 2019, 23:15 (1897 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Saturday, September 14, 2019, 23:22

A new article with new studies:

https://mindmatters.ai/2019/09/was-famous-old-evidence-against-free-will-just-debunked/

"In recent decades, debates about free will have always included discussion of Benjamin Libet’s “no free will but maybe free won’t” position, an (at best) minimized version of free will. But recent research suggests that the original experiment had a fatal error.

"As recounted at The Atlantic by Bahar Gholipour, the story begins in 1964, when two German scientists at the University of Freiburg monitored electrical activity in the brains of twelve study subjects every day for several months, via wires fixed to their scalps:

"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.

"They found that the brain waves “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 Bereitschaftspotential, or “readiness potential,” was recorded before the participants flexed their fingers.

"Two decades later, Libet (1916–2007) took that timing to mean that the decision to flex a finger had been made before participants were conscious of it. In other words, the participants did not really make the decision; their conscious experience of making a decision was an illusion.

***

"But Libet looked deeper. He asked his subjects to veto their decision immediately after they made it—to not push the button. Again, the readiness potential appeared a half-second before conscious awareness of the decision to push the button, but Libet found that the veto—he called it “free won’t”—had no brain wave corresponding to it.

"The brain, then, has activity that corresponds to a pre-conscious urge to do something. But we are free to veto or accept this urge. The motives are material. The veto, and implicitly the acceptance, is an immaterial act of the will.

***

"The problem is, Gholipour recounts, readiness potentials are not quite what Libet thought:
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", Schurger says.

"The Bereitschaftspotential does not necessarily signal the brain’s “brewing intention” but a noise wave pattern in a busy system:

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.

"In short, the classical pattern can be accounted for by assuming that the participants in the experiment did not sense that their decision mattered, so they went with the flow. But, according to more recent research, the subjective experience of making a decision is not an illusion at all. It is our experience of the actual moment when we finally decide to jump off the high diving board or ask for a raise.

***

"These observations point to a fundamental paradox about consciousness. We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions. Yet many of the ways we encounter the world don’t require any real conscious processing, and our feeling of agency can be deeply misleading.

"If our experience of action doesn’t really affect what we do in the moment, then what is it for? Why have it? Contrary to what many people believe, I think agency is only relevant to what happens after we act – when we try to justify and explain ourselves to each other." (my bold)

Commemt: Libet did not interpret correctly. The bold considers agency a feeling after we act. That sounds correct to me.