8 ms·

In his classic 1980s experiments, University of California, San Francisco, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet noted a consistent change in brain wave activity (a

In his classic 1980s experiments, University of California, San Francisco, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet noted a consistent change in brain wave activity (a so-called “ready potential”) prior to a subject’s awareness of having decided to move his hand. Libet’s conclusion was that the preceding activity was evidence for the decision being made subconsciously, even though subjects felt that the decision was conscious and deliberate. Since that time his findings, supported by subsequent similar results on fMRI and direct brain recordings, have featured prominently in refuting the notion of humans possessing free will. and it's probably a data processing bug in the analysis! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

a1369209993 7y ago
Or, you know, human brains being systematically bad at a specific kind of timekeeping that they've never evolutionary-historically had a reason to be good at? T+0: decision is made and brain waves change T+?ms: decision is reported to sensory systems and associated with a wall-clock time.
AlexCoventry 7y ago
Oh, wow. That's bigger news than the OP.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 7y ago
  read the article linked above, it debates the conclusion stated in the quotes.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    Yeah, I meant the article.
- buboard 7y ago
  To be clear, there are other types of experiments providing evidence for the absence of deliberate free will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unconscious_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unco...
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    You can't prove that something does not exist if you can't directly inspect it. "Free will" falls into this pit where it has a fuzzy definition in the first place and can't be directly looked at in any way. Plus, we already know that much of human functions are not based on Free will (how most of our organs function for one), but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior (which we constantly need to study to understand its complexity). If there was no such thing akin to Free Will we would have cracked human psychology for centuries already.
    - acqq 7y ago
      > but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior Where do you draw the line between a "very simple animal" and "non-simple animal"? Because there enough animals that have the behavioral patterns completely matching these of humans. Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction.
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        > Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction. Most human behavior is not particularly exceptional. The tiny sliver that is exceptional is really exceptional though.
    - buboard 7y ago
      Biology is driven by complex but precisely known rules (from molecular dynamics down to quark-gluon interactions). That doesn't mean we know how biology works , not even for a single person, because it's complex. Psychology attempts to do something much harder, understand the behavior of entire populations of nervous systems. Both are complex, but in principle not uncomputable. And there's a definition of free will: that actions of humans axiomatically cannot be precomputed.
richk449 7y ago
Nice article. I don’t believe in free will, but I never liked that Libet experiment. So many tenuous connections had to be made to connect electrical signals with free will, and most of the time people didn’t even bother trying - they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.
- PixelOfDeath 7y ago
  I prefer Hitchens answer to the question: "We have free will, we have no choice."
  - richk449 7y ago
    Sounds like sophistry to me.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    Try choosing to not be yourself or like the things you like or do the things you do. We're not so free. I've always worked off a model of "constrained will". We have will, it is just subject to a large number of constraints with a few degrees of freedom.
    - apocalypstyx 7y ago
      "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." --Arthur Schopenhauer
      - hprotagonist 7y ago
        so much for propaganda, then!
- raverbashing 7y ago
  > they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me. I feel the exact same way. It's like saying because a pain signal takes some time to come from your foot to your bran that then the pain is not real, when it is merely delayed. It seems to me it's only natural that there's a delay between the decision being made and the perception of the decision happening. Doesn't absolutely mean the decision was "illegitimate" and certainly that can't be deduced from the delay.
kijin 7y ago
It doesn't even need to be a data processing bug. There's nothing surprising about the experiment's results in the first place! Just because A happened a few milliseconds before B doesn't mean that A caused B. Both could have been caused by a third event that wasn't observed. Or maybe they actually happened at the same time but B had a higher latency to the observer. It's just bad science to assume otherwise and jump to conclusions. The latency difference is actually quite a reasonable thing to suspect, since it probably takes much longer for an "I hereby make this decision" transaction to be committed to the brain's data store than it takes for an fMRI machine to detect electromagnetic signals. There's no evolutionary advantage in waiting for your logs to sync to disk before you initiate run_away_from(lion);
- buboard 7y ago
  You can read the original experiments for these questions. They were carefully designed and the latencies are accounted for. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h...
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > They were carefully designed and the latencies are accounted for. "Free will" is a philosophical term. Brain waves and chemical latencies are not, they're in the realm of biological sciences. Explanations of how chemical and electrical reactions occur before a person is aware of their own conscious decision does not negate their consciousness or any aspect of their free will. Similarly, if you put your hand over a flame and it takes a half second before you consciously feel pain, the pain is still just as real. In a more extreme example, suppose we could perfectly model the human brain and could explain every sensation you've ever felt by mapping every chemical and electrical reaction in your brain, such an explanation would not make the sensation any less real. In fact, our own consciousness is the only thing we can authoritatively know for sure is real. When you dig deep enough, "I am" is the only thing we know for certain.
    - ppod 7y ago
baxtr 7y ago
Interesting article! ”Now, researchers who questioned Libet and those who supported him are both shifting away from basing their experiments on the Bereitschaftspotential. (The few people I found still holding the traditional view confessed that they had not read Schurger’s 2012 paper.)”
glandium 7y ago
Related Mind Field episode (from Vsauce, coincidentally available for free as of writing): https://youtu.be/lmI7NnMqwLQ https://youtu.be/lmI7NnMqwLQ (from 13:50 onwards)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

a1369209993 7y ago

Or, you know, human brains being systematically bad at a specific kind of timekeeping that they've never evolutionary-historically had a reason to be good at? T+0: decision is made and brain waves change T+?ms: decision is reported to sensory systems and associated with a wall-clock time.

AlexCoventry 7y ago

Oh, wow. That's bigger news than the OP.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 7y ago
read the article linked above, it debates the conclusion stated in the quotes.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  Yeah, I meant the article.
buboard 7y ago
To be clear, there are other types of experiments providing evidence for the absence of deliberate free will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unconscious_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unco...
- ekianjo 7y ago
  You can't prove that something does not exist if you can't directly inspect it. "Free will" falls into this pit where it has a fuzzy definition in the first place and can't be directly looked at in any way. Plus, we already know that much of human functions are not based on Free will (how most of our organs function for one), but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior (which we constantly need to study to understand its complexity). If there was no such thing akin to Free Will we would have cracked human psychology for centuries already.
  - acqq 7y ago
    > but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior Where do you draw the line between a "very simple animal" and "non-simple animal"? Because there enough animals that have the behavioral patterns completely matching these of humans. Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      > Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction. Most human behavior is not particularly exceptional. The tiny sliver that is exceptional is really exceptional though.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Biology is driven by complex but precisely known rules (from molecular dynamics down to quark-gluon interactions). That doesn't mean we know how biology works , not even for a single person, because it's complex. Psychology attempts to do something much harder, understand the behavior of entire populations of nervous systems. Both are complex, but in principle not uncomputable. And there's a definition of free will: that actions of humans axiomatically cannot be precomputed.

richk449 7y ago

Nice article. I don’t believe in free will, but I never liked that Libet experiment. So many tenuous connections had to be made to connect electrical signals with free will, and most of the time people didn’t even bother trying - they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.

PixelOfDeath 7y ago
I prefer Hitchens answer to the question: "We have free will, we have no choice."
- richk449 7y ago
  Sounds like sophistry to me.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Try choosing to not be yourself or like the things you like or do the things you do. We're not so free. I've always worked off a model of "constrained will". We have will, it is just subject to a large number of constraints with a few degrees of freedom.
  - apocalypstyx 7y ago
    "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." --Arthur Schopenhauer
    - hprotagonist 7y ago
      so much for propaganda, then!
raverbashing 7y ago
> they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me. I feel the exact same way. It's like saying because a pain signal takes some time to come from your foot to your bran that then the pain is not real, when it is merely delayed. It seems to me it's only natural that there's a delay between the decision being made and the perception of the decision happening. Doesn't absolutely mean the decision was "illegitimate" and certainly that can't be deduced from the delay.

kijin 7y ago

It doesn't even need to be a data processing bug. There's nothing surprising about the experiment's results in the first place! Just because A happened a few milliseconds before B doesn't mean that A caused B. Both could have been caused by a third event that wasn't observed. Or maybe they actually happened at the same time but B had a higher latency to the observer. It's just bad science to assume otherwise and jump to conclusions. The latency difference is actually quite a reasonable thing to suspect, since it probably takes much longer for an "I hereby make this decision" transaction to be committed to the brain's data store than it takes for an fMRI machine to detect electromagnetic signals. There's no evolutionary advantage in waiting for your logs to sync to disk before you initiate run_away_from(lion);

buboard 7y ago
You can read the original experiments for these questions. They were carefully designed and the latencies are accounted for. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h...
- speedplane 7y ago
  > They were carefully designed and the latencies are accounted for. "Free will" is a philosophical term. Brain waves and chemical latencies are not, they're in the realm of biological sciences. Explanations of how chemical and electrical reactions occur before a person is aware of their own conscious decision does not negate their consciousness or any aspect of their free will. Similarly, if you put your hand over a flame and it takes a half second before you consciously feel pain, the pain is still just as real. In a more extreme example, suppose we could perfectly model the human brain and could explain every sensation you've ever felt by mapping every chemical and electrical reaction in your brain, such an explanation would not make the sensation any less real. In fact, our own consciousness is the only thing we can authoritatively know for sure is real. When you dig deep enough, "I am" is the only thing we know for certain.
  - ppod 7y ago

baxtr 7y ago

Interesting article! ”Now, researchers who questioned Libet and those who supported him are both shifting away from basing their experiments on the Bereitschaftspotential. (The few people I found still holding the traditional view confessed that they had not read Schurger’s 2012 paper.)”

glandium 7y ago

Related Mind Field episode (from Vsauce, coincidentally available for free as of writing): https://youtu.be/lmI7NnMqwLQ https://youtu.be/lmI7NnMqwLQ (from 13:50 onwards)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]