One such discovery was published in 1983 by Benjamin Libet and colleagues. Their experiment was delightfully simple. All that was required of the subjects was to lift one finger whenever they “have a desire to do it.” Meanwhile, using an EEG device, the subjects measured the electrical activity of the brain. how a person spontaneously makes any movement, for example, lifts a finger, the activity of his brain changes in a characteristic way. This change is quite small, but it can be tracked by summing up the results of repeated measurements. But it turned out that such a change can be tracked some time before the person actually raises a finger.

New in Libet’s experiments was that he asked subjects to tell him when they “had such a desire.” The urge to lift a finger occurs about 200 milliseconds before a person lifts a finger. But the main discovery that caused so much noise was that the change in brain activity occurred about 500 milliseconds before the person lifted a finger. Thus, rocking activity indicated that the subject was about to raise his finger 300 milliseconds before the subject announced that he was going to raise his finger.

From this discovery it follows that by measuring the activity of your brain, I can know that you will have a desire to raise your finger before you know about it. This result generated such interest outside the psychology community because it seemed to show that even our simplest conscious actions are actually predetermined. We think that we are making a choice, when in fact our brain has already made this choice. Therefore, the feeling that at this moment we are making a choice is nothing more than an illusion. And if the feeling that we are able to make a choice is an illusion, then the same illusion is our feeling that we have free will.

Experiment Description

The essence of all the experiments of Libet and his followers is that the subject is asked to perform some simple action – to voluntarily raise a finger or press a button. The results of these experiments boil down to the following: the subject’s brain is active for some time before the subject makes a conscious decision to perform the agreed action.

That is, an objective observer sees that first activity arises in the brain, then the subject intends to press the button, and then performs the agreed action. Which indicates that, “Awareness of intention arises after its actual appearance.”

Despite criticism and even refutation of the results of these experiments, many stubbornly continue to believe that the results obtained allegedly cast doubt on our freedom of will.

This conclusion is based on the following premise: free will is possible if consciousness does not depend on processes in the brain. A conscious decision must condition the brain processes. If we see the opposite situation, then we can conclude that consciousness is just a by-product of brain activity, an epiphenomenon. And since consciousness is determined by brain processes, then we have no free will.

It sounds quite logical, but alas: this logical construction is incorrectly superimposed on the description of the experiment, in the interpretation of the results, the substitution of concepts is allowed, and as a result, the conclusion about the absence of free will becomes false. So what is the conceptual error of interpreters?

What is will

First you need to understand what will is.

Will is a conscious activity, which always presupposes the presence, on the one hand, of an acting subject, a source of activity, and on the other, an objective goal to achieve which this activity is directed. Of course, activity is spontaneous and aimless, but in these cases it is inappropriate to talk about will.

Will and action

Will – purposeful subjective activity – manifests itself in objective actions. In other words: Achieving a goal requires the completion of a certain number of intermediate actions. It is by the actions and deeds of a person that we determine the direction of his will. It is in actions and actions that a person expresses his will.

For example, finding himself in a junkyard, Marcus decided to survive at all costs; survival is the goal towards which his will is directed. To achieve this, he must perform a series of actions: find suitable parts, adapt them and get out of the landfill.

Thus, the moment of making a decision, which sets the direction of the will and the moment of achieving the goal, as it were, encompass the sequence of necessary actions from both sides, forming a vector of will. And this consciously given vector of will determines the actions that the subject must perform, determines his decisions and choices.

What, then, would be “free will”? Free will will be the ability of the subject to independently determine the direction of will, i.e. set a goal.

When Todd instructs Kara to clean up the house, he sets a goal for her, i.e. from the outside determines the direction of her will. Therefore, Kara’s will is not free. But when Kara decides not to obey the owner, but to protect Alice, then she sets a goal for herself, that is, she shows free will.

We also see that free will is different from free choice. Free will sets the general direction of our actions. Freedom of choice determines exactly what actions we perform within this general focus.

When Karl asks Marcus to draw something, he determines the vector of his will, setting the general direction of his actions. But within this vector, Marcus can decide for himself what to draw for him. In this episode, Marcus has no free will, but freedom of choice.

Where is the will in Libet’s experiments?

Now let’s see where in Libet’s experiments the subject manifests his will. To do this, it is necessary to determine what in the experiment is the goal towards which the subject’s will is directed.

The target here is assumed to be a “free” finger lift or an arbitrary button press. According to the experimenters, this is how the subject does something supposedly unconditioned, i.e. free action. But it is precisely in this assumption that the error lies.

In fact, what the subject does occurs within the framework of the experiment and is conditioned by this experiment. This means that the subject’s actions are no longer free, but determined by the conditions of the experiment. That is, the actions that the subject performs are already included in the vector of his will, therefore, within the framework of the experiment, we can talk about freedom of action, about freedom of choice, but not about free will. Subject’s will remained outside the scope of the experiment.

Maybe the subject participates in the experiment out of a desire to earn extra money. Then his goal is earnings, and all his actions are subordinated to the direction of this will. It was in his decision to participate in the experiment that he showed his free will. Everything else is just actions that bring him closer to the goal.

In one real case, a woman participates in an experiment because she was asked to do so as part of her treatment for epilepsy. Thus, it is her will to get well, and participating in the button-pushing experiment are only actions indirectly necessary to achieve recovery.

In any case, the subject’s will is manifested in the decision to participate in the experiment, and its goal is to complete the experiment. If the subject performs the actions that scientists asked him to do, the goal will be achieved.

So, in the interpretation of the results of Libet’s experiments, there is a simple substitution of concepts: action was designated as will. Whereas the will itself was, in principle, overlooked.

If we distribute all the acts chronologically, then

at first, the subject independently and freely showed the will to carry out the experiment.
Scientists set a task for him.
The subject realized the task and consciously gave the command to the brain: “press random buttons at a random moment in time and simultaneously reflect on your intentions to press the button”.
then the brain triggered a physiological mechanism to perform the necessary actions
and then each particular action was reflected by the consciousness with a slight delay in relation to physiological activity.

That is, the work of the brain is initially determined by the conscious will, and the delay refers only to reflection. So, to claim that the brain makes decisions for us is the most obvious nonsense. The brain does not make decisions for us, but performs intermediate actions for us that lead to the goal we have set.

From the history of the problem of free will

The very idea of a person’s lack of free will is not new; it was expressed earlier in philosophy and religion. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about the illusory nature of free will: “A person can do what he wants, but he cannot desire what he wants.”

In classical analysis, a person’s actions are dictated, on the one hand, by unconscious instinctive drives, on the other hand, by imposed moral norms, and he has no freedom of choice. In behaviorism, human behavior can be reduced to responses to certain stimuli. Humanistic psychologists did not agree with this, in particular, Viktor Frankl believed that drives belong to a person, but do not control him.

And yet, it was hard to believe in the results of Libet’s experiment, because such information reduces people from higher beings with a creative, analytical mind and will, to biorobots who think according to a given program. Then our consciousness is just a fiction, a toy given to us so that we do not notice how things are in reality.

In this regard, the question arises: who controls the brain of each person? If there is no free will, then whose program are we carrying out and who is putting it into our brain? This opens up opportunities for completely fantastic assumptions, from some higher beings of another civilization to the “Matrix”, in which we all live under the control of a powerful artificial intelligence.

By the way, in classical psychiatry, ideas of this kind, about the external control of the brain, the “openness” of thoughts for external access is the main defining symptom of schizophrenia.

Criticism of the experiment

Despite the fact that Libet himself, it would seem, denied the connection between the potential of readiness and free will, if in fact it were so, then all obsessive actions and speech, as, for example, in Tourette’s syndrome, would also be controlled by the brain itself without participation consciousness. But the association was already firmly rooted in the public consciousness and confused the minds of people for a long time.

However, even with the Libet experiment itself, everything is far from as clear and unambiguous as it might seem at first glance. Of course, he was criticized and tried to challenge the results.

Libet was mainly criticized for the fact that he rather carelessly used the concepts of “motivation”, “desire”, “will”, “decision” as interchangeable, which caused confusion. But these are fundamentally different things. We may have the urge to scream or wanting to hit someone, but not by making a decision and suppressing our impulse with an effort of will.

The second controversial point is the manifestation of free will in the experiment, as well as the identification of free will with freedom of choice. In essence, the subject displayed free will by choosing to participate in the experiment. Then he agrees to do some actions under the conditions created by the experimenter. In fact, there is no free will, the whole situation is artificially created, and the only choice is whether to move your hand or not.

Claims were also made about the equipment – he used an outdated device, an electroencephalograph, which could give large errors. And the testimony of the subjects, at what moment they had an impulse, and whether it was really spontaneous, could hardly be considered a reliable source of information.

Further, to understand criticism, a more serious philosophical base is needed, but in short, the point is that Libet adheres to the position of incompatibilism, in which free will is incompatible with determinism, and its opponents (primarily Alfred Mele) – the position of compatibilism, the essence of which is that that the physicochemical determination of mental processes allows the existence of free will in a person.

Additional Preparedness Potential Studies

In 2009, the Libet experiment was tested by scientists from the University of Otago, slightly changing the conditions: the dial was changed to a sound signal, and the participants had to press a key. It turned out that the potential for readiness arises in any case, and the action or lack of it is not important.

Psychologists at the University Hospital Freiburg, led by Stefan Schmidt, conducted a new experiment in 2016 to study early preparedness potential. They found that it arises from the superposition of very slow background fluctuations that increase 400-500 milliseconds before the action, usually in a negative range.

Schmidt and his colleagues also repeated Libet’s experiment to test whether this potential really influences decision making. They evaluated each experiment separately, and not all 40 at once, as it was with Libet, and found that this is not always the case: in 1/3 of the cases, the brain signal was positive or neutral, and not negative, as expected. And this was contrary to the assumption made by previous researchers that preparedness potential is preparation for action.

According to Schmidt’s hypothesis, it is not an incentive to make a decision. Negative potential only facilitates decision-making, but does not determine it. There are many factors influencing the decision, and this is just one of them. It seems that negative growth in potential is subjectively felt by people as an internal impulse that prompts them to act in a certain way, and many decisions are made under the influence of this impulse when slow fluctuations occur in a negative range. But not all of them.

Also, scientists included in the research people with experience of meditation. It is interesting that they could observe their internal processes better than others and more reliably determined the internal impulse to action, that is, negative fluctuations. If they followed the impulse, the potential for readiness increased, if not, it weakened. Scientists have concluded that readiness potential not only does not guide us, but we can consciously change it.

Human Proven Lack of Free Will Challenges Liberal Ideology

It is not clear why Libet so freely operated with the concepts of “will”, “motivation” and “desire”, it is unlikely that he did not distinguish between them. Most likely, he had a somewhat one-sided view of the problem of will, without delving into philosophy.

Disputes over the discovery continued for a long time, but undoubtedly, the role of Libet’s experiment is very significant: it drew attention to the problem of consciousness and aroused interest, prompting further research. He also had followers who repeated the experience on more modern equipment many years later – first of all, D. Heines, professor at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.

Some public figures believe that the scientifically proven lack of free will in humans challenges liberal ideology. Others are glad that we still have freedom, but not enough – just some 200 milliseconds! The experience of researching people who practice meditation is also encouraging. And yet, the scientist managed to tickle the nerves of all mankind great: some people are still afraid that they will be controlled by biorobots.

Research background

Benjamin Libet was a Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He was the son of Ukrainian Jewish migrants, born in Chicago, graduated from the University of Chicago. In the 70s, he was engaged in research of neural activity and sensitivity thresholds. In 2003, he became the first ever virtual Nobel Prize winner in psychology from the University of Klagenfurt “for his pioneering achievements in the experimental study of consciousness, initiation of action and free will.”

Libet was a kind of pioneer in neuroscience and raised a very acute problem, giving it a new depth: after all, now the free will of a person could be measured. He came up with the idea of his experiment after studying the experiments of the German neurophysiologists Hans Helmut Kronhuber and Lüder Decke, 1964. The experiments were carried out at the University of Freiburg and were subsequently taken by Libet as the basis for his own experiment with some modifications.

Kronbücher and Decke measured the electrical activity of the motor cortex using electrodes in the parietal part of the skull. They noticed that changes in the electrical activity of the brain precede the voluntary movement of the hand, ahead of it by about a second (800 ms). They called this delay the readiness potential (Bereitschaftspotential), or premotor potential.

The discovery caused a lot of controversy in the scientific community. Nobel laureate Carew Eccles expressed the idea that conscious desire should be ahead of voluntary action by 1 second. Libet decided to test this assumption.

Imaginary conditioning of consciousness

There is no self-activity of the brain, with which it supposedly conditions consciousness, here. The results of the experiment are presented to us in such a way that the brain supposedly decides for itself, and then sends a signal to the consciousness, they say, it was you who decided everything. (see Chernihiv)

But the brain does nothing beyond the task that was deliberately assigned to it. He does what is prescribed by consciousness. Even ostensibly ahead of consciousness, he does exactly what consciousness expects from him. He does not show any “freedom” or arbitrariness. I do not understand how one can not see this without being blind.

Having decided to perform an action, the brain shows the decision through “consciousness”. Consciousness reflects (i.e., reflects) what the brain has decided. It reflects this particular decision, and not some other. Therefore, to say that the brain decides everything for us, and after that it gives us only the illusion that we decide it, is a complete nonsense: there is nothing else in reflection that would not be in the decision of the brain.

And it is quite natural that reflection occurs with a delay. After all, in order to reflect something, the object of reflection must appear. Roughly speaking, in order to consciously decide something, you must first decide, and then realize it, reflect on it. Moreover, the act of reflection is not just a reflection as in a mirror. In it, acts of comparison take place, because consciousness must recognize this particular activity of the brain and not confuse it with any other.

Therefore, first the command is given to the brain to make a decision, then the brain issues a decision, and then it becomes the subject of reflection and is realized as such.

1 There is no free will

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Is there free will – the ability of our consciousness to spontaneously intervene in physical processes and direct their movement? Philosophy gives various answers to this question, but science has a very definite point of view.

According to neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, any thought is born unconsciously. Consciousness deals with a ready-made result. It is just a lantern illuminating processes independent of it. Free will in this case is pure illusion.

A series of experiments carried out by him confirms this opinion. Benjamin Libet stimulated different parts of the human brain with electrodes. The delay between the brain’s response to the stimulus and its awareness averaged half a second. This is what explains the work of unconditioned reflexes – we remove our hand from the hot stove even before we realize the danger and pain.

However, as Libet’s research has shown, this is the mechanism of work not only of unconditioned reflexes. A person, in principle, is always aware of his sensations with some delay. The brain first sees, and only after that we become aware of what is visible, it thinks, but only after a while we discover what kind of thought appeared. We seem to live in the past, half a second behind reality.

However, Libet did not stop there. In 1973, he conducted an experiment, the purpose of which was to find out what is primary – the activity of the brain or our desire. Intuition tells us that we have a will that tells the brain to act in a certain way.

Libet measured the brain activity of people while making informed decisions. The subjects had to look at a dial with a rotating hand and stop the process at any time by pressing a button. Then they had to name the time when they first realized the desire to press the key.

The result was amazing. The electrical signal in the brain, sending the decision to press the button, appeared 350 milliseconds before the decision was made and 500 milliseconds before the action itself.

The brain prepares for action long before we make a conscious decision to take this action.

An observing experimenter can predict a person’s choice that he has not yet made. In modern analogs of the experiment, the prediction of a person’s volitional decision can be carried out in 6 seconds after the person himself accepts it.

Imagine a billiard ball that rolls along a certain path. An experienced billiard player, automatically calculating the speed and direction of movement, will indicate its exact location in a couple of seconds. We are exactly the same balls for neuroscience after Libet’s experiment.

Free choice of a person is the result of unconscious processes in the brain, and free will is an illusion.

2 Our “I” is not one

In neuroscience, there is a method for elucidating the functions of a particular part of the brain. It consists in eliminating or lulling the studied area and in identifying the changes that occur after this in the psyche and intellectual abilities of a person.

Our brain has two hemispheres that are connected by the corpus callosum. For a long time, its significance was unknown to science.

Neuropsychologist Roger Sperry cut corpus callosum fibers in an epileptic patient in 1960. The disease was cured, and at first it seemed that the operation did not lead to any negative consequences. However, subsequently, profound changes began to be observed in human behavior, as well as in his cognitive abilities.

Each half of the brain began to work independently. If a person was shown a written word on the right side of his nose, then he could easily read it, since the left hemisphere, which is responsible for speech abilities, is involved in information processing.

But when the word appeared on the left side, the subject could not pronounce it, but could draw what the word meant. At the same time, the patient himself said that he had not seen anything. Moreover, having drawn an object, he could not determine what he was depicting.

During the observation of patients who underwent callosotomy (dissection of the corpus callosum), even more surprising effects were discovered. So, for example, each of the hemispheres sometimes revealed its own will, independent of the other. One hand tried to put the tie on the patient, while the other tried to take it off. However, the dominant position was occupied by the left hemisphere. According to scientists, this is due to the fact that the speech center is located there, and our consciousness and will are of a linguistic nature.

Next to our conscious “I” lives a neighbor who has his own desires, but who is not capable of expressing will.

When a person with a dissected corpus callosum was shown two words – “sand” and “clock” – he drew an hourglass. His left hemisphere was processing a signal from the right side, that is, the word “sand.” When asked why he drew an hourglass, because he saw only sand, the subject went into ridiculous explanations of his action.

The real reasons for our actions are often hidden from ourselves. And the reason we call the justification that was constructed by us after the action. Thus, it is not the cause that precedes the effect, but the effect that constructs the cause.

3 Reading other people’s thoughts is possible

Each of us is internally convinced that his consciousness is a private area, not accessible to anyone. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions are the most protected property as they exist in consciousness. But is it?

In 1999, the neuroscientist Young Deng conducted an experiment that showed that the brain is basically the same as a computer. Thus, knowing its encoding, one can easily read the information generated in the brain.

He used a cat as a test subject. Dan fixed the animal on a table and inserted special electrodes into the area of the brain responsible for processing visual information.

The cat was shown various images, and electrodes at this time recorded the activity of neurons. The information was transmitted to a computer, which converted electrical impulses into a real image. What the cat saw was projected onto the monitor screen.

It is important to understand the specifics of the image transmission mechanism. The electrodes are not cameras that capture the image that appears in front of the cat. Dan has used technology to replicate what the brain does – converting an electrical impulse into a visual image.

It is clear that the experiment was set up only within the framework of the visual channel, but it reflects the principle of the brain’s operation and shows the possibilities in this area.

Knowing how information spreads in the brain, and having the key to reading it, it is easy to imagine a computer that could fully read the state of the human brain.

It is not so important when such a computer will be created. The important thing is whether people are ready for the fact that their thoughts, memories, character, personality as a whole are just one of the pages of a book in an unknown language that can be read by others.

A bit of history

Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) – a pioneer of research in the field of neurosciences, it was thanks to a series of his experiments that the problem of free will reached a different level. Libet’s idea for the experiment arose after he got acquainted with the results of studies by the German neurophysiologists Hans Helmut Kronhuber and Lüder Decke from the University of Freiburg, published by them in 1964.

According to these studies, voluntary hand movements are preceded by changes in the electrical activity of the motor cortex (they conducted an experiment very similar to the one that Libet later did). The signal was recorded using electrodes from the parietal part of the skull and appeared about a second before the start of the action (to be precise, 800 ms). It has been called the premotor potential or readiness potential.

These discoveries caused great excitement and controversy in the scientific community of the time, and Nobel laureate Sir John Carew Eccles (John Carew Eccles) even suggested that a conscious desire (will) should be ahead of a voluntary action by about 1 second. It happened in the late 1970s. at one of the discussions on the problem of free will, in which Libet took part. As Michael Brooks writes, it was then that Libet began to think about how to test Ackles’ hypothesis empirically.

How did the experiment go?

And, as you might guess, Libet found a solution that later became a milestone in the history of neuroscience. As part of his experiment, the scientist decided to use an oscilloscope (it is usually used to measure the evoked potential, and the readiness potential (hereinafter PG) is one of the methods for measuring the evoked potential). On the round screen of the oscilloscope, the point of light ran like a clock hand, only 25 times faster, and the screen itself looked like an ordinary dial with divisions of 5, 10, 15 … 55 seconds.

The subject, in turn, had to follow the point of light, and, as soon as he had a desire to bend the wrist, remember where the point of light was at that moment. Accurate readings of the time of arm muscle contraction were taken using an electromyogram (EMG) – in other words, electrodes were attached to the arm.

What did the experiments show?

Without going into details, Libet’s experiments showed the following:

– first, the potential for readiness appeared;
– then, after about 350 ms, the subject consciously made the decision to move his brush (this was recorded by the time on the dial in front of him);
– after about 100 ms, there was a signal from the wrist of the hand.

What does it mean? So this is the following: our perception of life is delayed by almost half a second and, as Libet himself said: “we make all quick decisions unconsciously.” It doesn’t seem like much fun yet, does it? Kind of like an experiment proved that we do not have and never had free will? Then, in the 80s, these data caused a furor, and some scientists even considered them proof of our lack of free will.

But, oddly enough, Libet himself did not think so. Of course, in his opinion, “consciousness cannot initiate action,” but free will exists, since after realizing the desire, a person still has 100 ms to “veto” the impulse. That is, we do not consciously make decisions, our unconscious does it for us, but the role of free will and consciousness is to implement or not to implement the incipient urge. These findings forced Libet to conduct yet another series of experiments to confirm the presence or absence of the ability to veto an action. During the experiments, the participants were instructed to plan an action at a certain point, but then not to take it. In these experiments, the action was not performed, but still a PG appeared, indicating that it was freely planned, but was interrupted.

It is important to understand this: PG precedes only free conscious actions. In the case of uncontrolled or automatic behavior, such as Tourette’s syndrome or an unexpected reaction to a stimulus, PG does not appear. It is curious, but even such complex actions as writing and speaking are preceded by PG, perhaps we can assume that our unconscious in some incomprehensible way gives most of the meanings that then emerge in our consciousness.

Sources used and useful links on the topic: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5cb63b15d09f8700afc65af0/eksperimenty-libeta-i-svoboda-voli-5cc0842e10654100b2d84e65 http: //xn--i1abedsedbf3g1ai/content–p / eksperiment-libeta-kritika-i-oproverzhenie-vyvodov-razvenchanie-mifa-mozg-operezhaet https://PsychoSearch.ru/napravleniya/social/746-free-will-libets-experiment https://Lifehacker.ru/3 -experiments-for-changing-self-view / https://concepture.club/post/nauka/eksperimenty-s-svobodoj-voli

Post source: lastici.ru