Free Will , Libet Experiment

In the heat of daily life we don't even question rather we have free will or not. The Libet Experiment tries to be a beacon of light in order to examine this in a broader concept.

Experiment

This experiment caused a lot of people to be a little sceptical to the notion of free will. Libet instructed the subjects to raise their fingers , however there is only one twist in this scenario and subjects have to raise their finger whenever they feel like it. This type of application in experiment is the most understantable approach to evaluate the concept of free will.

There was a watch infront of the subjects which is moving quite fast. Libet said to subjects to tell them the exact moment when they wanted to raise their fingers , therefore the exact time when they wanted to raise their finger would be known. Also the subjects were wearing EEG devices so it was monitoring the changes in electrical activities in brain.

The subjects raise their fingers and indicate that they are willing to do this a quarter of a second before the raising movement and they showed it in fast moving watch. The most surprising part of this experiment is the brain activities were increasing before 1.5 seconds of raising hand activity , which is a quite long time to decide on something. Eventhough you don't want to raise your hand the things you have no idea about happens in brain and it ends before you notice it. 1.5 seconds after the activity started,you say that "yes, I wanted it." you make a decision at the level of awareness or assume that you make a decision, and then you actually raise your finger a quarter of a second later.

Libet wasn't satisfied after the results he got from this experiment and he admits that this is not broad enough to decode the free will problem.

The experiment got critized because of raising finger is not compatible to evaluate free will and they said that we need to create more complex experiment in order to observe the decision making in hard decisions.

The absence of free will means that the actions we consciously do are not actually conscious. The decisions we usually make in daily basis are actually connected with our body. The food , the amount of sleep we get , stressfull life it all affects this free will process.

Thanks for Reading & Hasta La Vista!