The age-old debate on free will has taken a fascinating turn with the advent of neuroscience. For centuries, philosophers have pondered whether humans can truly choose freely what they do, or if our actions are predetermined by a sequence of cause and effect. However, recent scientific studies have brought us closer to understanding the intricate workings of the brain and its role in this philosophical conundrum.
In the 1960s, a groundbreaking discovery by German scientists Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke introduced the concept of “bereitschafts potential” or “readiness potential” (BP). This phenomenon indicated that the brain enters a special state immediately before conscious awareness of an action. Their experiments, which involved subjects moving their fingers at will, revealed a slow negative potential shift in the motor cortex just before the voluntary movement. This suggested that the unconscious mind might be initiating what we perceive as voluntary acts.
This discovery was initially met with skepticism, as it challenged the deterministic view of human decision-making that had been widely accepted since Freud. Most scientists chose to overlook it, but the work of Benjamin Libet in the 1980s brought the issue back into the spotlight. Libet’s experiments, which also involved finger movements and the observation of a clock, showed that the readiness potential started approximately 0.35 seconds before participants were consciously aware of their decision to move.
Libet’s conclusion was controversial: while we might not have free will in initiating our movements, we do possess a cognitive “veto” that allows us to stop these movements at the last moment. This implies that our subjective experience of freedom could be an illusion, as the brain seems to decide before we become consciously aware of it.
This explains why a psychiatrist friend of mine, who himself did fMRI brain research, once said that while we may not have certain kinds of free will, we do have “free won’t,” in other words, we can consciously decide what not to do.
In another study, neuroscientist Itzhak Fried put aside the fMRI scanner in favor of digging directly into the brain (so to speak). To that end, he implanted electrodes into the brains of participants in order to record the status of individual neurons — a procedure that gave him an incredibly precise sense of what was going on inside the brain as decisions were being made. His experiment showed that the neurons lit up with activity as much as 1.5 seconds before the participant made a conscious decision to press a button. And with about 700 milliseconds to go, Fried and his team could predict the timing of decisions with nearly 80% accuracy. In some scenarios, he had as much as 90% predictive accuracy.
Different experiment, similar result.
Fried surmised that volition arises after a change in internally generated fire rates of neuronal assemblies cross a threshold — and that the medial frontal cortex can signal these decisions before a person is aware of them.
“At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness,” he told Nature, suggesting that the conscious will might be added on to a decision at a later stage.
And in yet another study, this one by Stefan Bode, his detailed fMRI experiments showed that it was possible to actually decode the outcome of free decisions for several seconds prior to it reaching conscious awareness.
Specifically, he discovered that activity patterns in the anterior frontopolar cortex (BA 10) were temporally the first to carry information related to decision-making, thus making it a prime candidate region for the unconscious generation of free decisions. His study put much of the concern about the integrity of previous experiments to rest. …
via Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will.
The implications of these findings are profound. If our actions are initiated unconsciously, where does that leave our sense of moral responsibility? Can we be held accountable for actions that we did not consciously choose? These questions are not just philosophical—they have real-world implications for our justice system, our interpersonal relationships, and our understanding of ourselves.
Despite the challenges to the concept of free will, it remains a useful construct. As recent research suggests, our brain is incredibly complex, and the interplay between conscious choice and unconscious neural processes is not fully understood. While some actions may be initiated without our conscious intent, this does not necessarily mean that we are mere puppets to our brain’s workings. Instead, it highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of what free will means and how it operates in our lives.
In conclusion, the debate on free will is far from settled. Neuroscience has provided us with valuable insights, but it has also raised new questions. As we continue to explore the depths of the human mind, we may need to redefine what it means to choose freely and how we live with the consequences of our actions.
Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/free-will-is-only-an-illusion-if-you-are-too/
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[4] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/
[5] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887467/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
[8] https://spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/Benjamin%20Libet.pdf
[9] https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/
[10] https://pbs.dartmouth.edu/news/2013/03/neuroscientist-says-humans-are-wired-free-will
[11] https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(21)00093-0
[12] https://iep.utm.edu/freewill/
[13] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
[14] https://mindmatters.ai/2019/09/was-famous-old-evidence-against-free-will-just-debunked/
[15] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/determinism-classical-argument-against-free-will-failure/
[16] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsky.html
[17] https://www.lindau-nobel.org/de/blog-free-will-all-in-our-heads/
[18] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17393404/
[19] https://neurosciencenews.com/libet-free-will-23756/
[20] https://catholicscientists.org/articles/what-does-neuroscience-have-to-say-about-free-will/
[21] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/
[22] https://www.templeton.org/news/video-the-neuroscience-of-free-will
[23] https://www.bna.org.uk/mediacentre/news/has-neuroscience-disproven-free-will/
[24] https://media.christendom.edu/1978/03/free-will-theory-history-and-solution/
[25] https://bigthink.com/13-8/physics-neuroscience-free-will/