#benjamin libet

*does an awesome ass backflip breaks neck and fucking dies*

We have discussed “free will” several times: An interesting take on “Free Will vs Will Power”, and ” For those who still believe in free will, and “Read about the strange relationship between opposites: Consciousness and free will,” and “More about non-existent free will.” And elsewhere. It is a subject that fascinates me. I hope you feel the same. Here is what CHAT GPT says: “Free will is…

Introduction For millennia, humanity has wrestled with a fundamental question: Do we genuinely have free will, or are our lives governed by destiny? Are we the authors of our own stories, or merely actors following a pre-written script? This debate cuts across philosophy, science, and spirituality, influencing how we view ethics, responsibility, and the meaning of life. Let’s embark on a…

Free Will, the Self and Quantum Theory

“Benjamin Libet” In the 1970s, the neurologist Benjamin Libet sought to determine the precise timing between conscious awareness of a voluntary decision and electrical activity in the brain.iCommon sense normally expects that the awareness of a decision to act precedes the neural activity allowing the action itself. The very surprising result of Libet’s experiments is that it seems to be the…

Théorie Quantique du Libre-arbitre

“Benjamin Libet” Dans les années 70, le neurologue Benjamin Libet a cherché à déterminer précisément la chronologie entre la prise de conscience (‘conscious awareness’) d’une décision volontaire, d’une part, et l’activité électrique dans le cerveau, d’autre part.i Le sens commun s’attend normalement que la prise de conscience d’une décision d’agir précède l’activité neuronale permettant…

Robert J. Marks: You mentioned that Libet’s experiment of free won’t is actually misrepresented by materialists. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Michael Egnor (right): Yes, the misinterpretation is very common and it’s almost routine to read or to hear Libet’s work being described as scientific evidence for the absence of free will. Which is bizarre because Libet himself explicitly endorsed the reality of free will, emphatically he endorsed the reality of free will. And Libet point out that his research unequivocally supports the reality of libertarian free will. But his experiments are described very often both in the scientific literature and in the popular press as supportive of materialism—which is something that they don’t support and something that Libet made very clear was not his conclusion.

Some titles of articles in recent years give a sense of what Michael Egnor means here:

“Benjamin Libet and the Denial of Free Will: How did a flawed experiment become so influential?” (Psychology Today, September 2017) (Whether the experiment was flawed or not, academics and professionals have interpreted it as telling them what they wanted to hear, not what Libet said.)

“Does Free Will Exist? Neuroscience Can’t Disprove It Yet … A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked” (The Atlantic, September 2019) (Here, the assumption seems to be both that Libet thought he’d disproved free will and that, even if he didn’t, it is only a matter of time.)

“How a Flawed Experiment “Proved” That Free Will Doesn’t Exist. It did no such thing—but the result has become conventional wisdom nevertheless” (Scientific American, December 6, 2019) (It became conventional wisdom with a great deal of help.)

Robert J. Marks: It seems that in order to do that, they would have to exclude the part of the “free won’t” in the experiment.

Michael Egnor: Yes, and undoubtedly, in some situations, it would be the result of ignorance on the part of the person making the claim. The person may just not know much about Libet’s work. Or may have no insight into the original research and may have just heard about it or heard wrongly.