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Summary: Shaky 1983 experiment that is grossly misquoted as proving the absence of freewill is challenged by a 2008 experiment with results that don't outright
by electromagnetic 17y ago
Summary: Shaky 1983 experiment that is grossly misquoted as proving the absence of freewill is challenged by a 2008 experiment with results that don't outright contradict the 1983 but apparently manage to disprove the falsely attributed claims with new falsely attributed claims!
It's hooey on top of hooey basically. From what I can tell by reading up on Libet's work (the 1983 guy) is that he established that when we're anticipating an action (in the experiments case it was pushing a button, but could for instance be catching a ball or anything) our brain is aware of it's decision ~2 seconds before the person actually states they've made the decision, when the action is in the pre-frontal cortex it can apparently be up to 10 seconds. However our consciousness can kick in to stop the action.
Libet's research doesn't claim we lack free will, it's actually evidence of the delay our consciousness receives compared to our subconscious. It's been shown that our subconscious will pick up on a pattern three-times faster than our conscious; one example of this was a card game where a player was rewarded for turning over a black-card and punished for a red-card, it took the subconscious 5 cards before it started anticipating the results where as it took roughly 18 cards before the actual player announced the pattern (IIRC this wasn't a timed experiment, the cards were dealt as fast as the human player wanted).
I wouldn't say any of these experiments show a lack of free will, I'd say it gives proof of the incredibly complex machine that our brains are and that our consciousness is actually an evolutionary advancement to conserve energy. Libet showed that our consciousness has a veto over an anticipatory action, our biggest anticipatory actions are fight and flight both of which consume massive amounts of energy that if we used every time they were called upon would be wasteful.