A Response to: the Volitional Brain

A Response to: The Volitional Brain

The Libet Experiment was conducted in 1982, led by physiologist Benjamin Libet, to study the time of the onset electrical activity in the brain, or the Readiness Potential (RP), measured against the reported time a subject experienced an urge, or desire to act and then the time of the voluntary act itself. The results of the experiment showed the RP of a subject actually occurred 500 ms before the voluntary action took place and 350 ms before the subject was aware of any desire to act. With these results Libet came to the conclusion that the unconscious mind was indeed the actual cause of any voluntary action a person may perform and the initial conscious was just the awareness of the decesion. While these results were adopted by several incompatibilists as proof that free will does not exists, seeing how the conscious is not the cause of an action, Libet disputed this claim by arguing that the conscious can still control the outcome by vetoing the initial action created by the unconscious. With this “veto action” Libet brought the possibility of free will back into the game. I will begin my paper by discussing Benjamin Libet’s experiments with more detail and how he came to the conclusion that the unconscious is the actual cause of an action occurring and I will then argue that the unconscious is in itself a product of the conscious mind and that any mounting brain activity prior to conscious awareness could simply be the unconscious mind preparing options, based upon current environmental surroundings at that moment in time, for the conscious mind to freely choose from and act upon.

Benjamin Libet focused a great deal of career on the human conscious and the notion to act. Libet also understood that the concept of free will relied heavily on the human conscious being the cause of some voluntary action to occur. On the relationship of free will and the conscious Libet says, “free will process implies one could...