Neuroscience and Libet E...

Neuroscience and Libet Experiments

(1:06:38) choose one way or the other a lot of these scientific tests that address neuroscience and how the brain works they're fascinating they tell us a lot about the brain they tell us that the brain is functioning at many levels not just at the conscious level however you define

(1:06:59) consciousness but also functioning at lower subconscious or unconscious levels as well and for example they do show that many of our decisions are made before we are consciously aware of them [Music] the classic study was the Benjamin liit study which was done in

(1:07:42) 1983 which basically showed that you had about 350 milliseconds before a person was even consciously aware of their intention to make an action and so that sort of concept has been looked at with more modern technology the way they do it is they give people two buttons to press they

(1:08:00) have a screen that the person looks at that allows them to denote what time they feel that they consciously decided which button they'll press and they were told that whenever they had the will or desire to push this button just record when it occurred on the clock and what

(1:08:19) they found is about 200 milliseconds prior to pushing the button individuals become aware of an intention to push the button you would see this what he called a Readiness potential which is like a sort of building up of brain activation about 350 milliseconds before they feel

(1:08:36) the intentions move and then it takes about another 200 milliseconds to actually make the movement and what it indicated to some is that the brain has already begun the process that will ultimately lead to the action before the individual has decided to push the

(1:08:50) button they can actually read the scan and before the person realizes they're consciously aware of which button they'll press they'll know which button they press with a certain degree of probability that's higher than chance [Music] basically and these Studies have come up

(1:09:18) with the same thing so in one study itak freed looked at you can actually just measure activation of individual cells when you're going into someone's brain for example to track where their epileptic seizure is coming from and you can look at brain activation that way

(1:09:34) they found the same thing you get this precursor before you're even aware of your own intention John zyan Haynes who's done work in in Berlin using fmri showed that you could predict up to 10 seconds before a person is consciously aware of their intention for example whether

(1:09:51) they're going to go left or right by basically decoding brain activation not in real time the analysis takes too much time these are retrodictions but they're scientific predictions because independently of knowing what the subject did you can say I predict that when we look at the data we'll find that

(1:10:08) the subject move the left finger [Music] say this throws into question the existence of free will because if our decisions are being made before we are even consciously making them then what is making them something impersonal seems to be making [Music] it what is the Readiness potential is it

(1:10:39) really a choice before a choice or is it like where there is this rehearsal whenever we're thinking about we might do something or we might not do something we rehearse it first and might the Readiness potential just be a rehearsal to form an intention can take

(1:11:01) time and it can be back and forth and back and forth and you can change your mind you can citate if I ask you to flick your wrist or say boo at some random point in the next 30 seconds how do you go about doing that you don't know at some point you'll say boo or you'll flick your

(1:11:24) wrist but how did you make that happen and how did you keep from making it coincide with something going on you don't know well in fact apparently what you do is when you're asked to do something like that some Subterranean process gets triggered in your brain and

(1:11:43) it it chugs along a little bit and you find yourself saying boo or raising your finger you can think of it like a sort of lots of noise happening in the brain and occasionally some of it rises above a certain threshold or you notice it when it's before the threshold and then

(1:12:00) you kind of enhance it till it gets to a point where you have the intention itself and it turns out that if you've got data from brain scanning of that process and you tweak it just right with a a deep learning algorithm you can tease out the information and say this

(1:12:17) person is going to say boo or it's going to say left or right going to push the left button or the right button there's been some controversy with this Readiness potential with Benjamin libbit cuz they're saying well it's not that the brain is sort of gearing up to make

(1:12:33) a decision but you're having all these random kind of patterns or sort of waves of activation and at some point especially if you're internally focused and waiting for a feeling or a cue to get you to move because that's what they were doing in that study they said you

(1:12:45) when you get the feeling make a move so you're actually focusing your attention inward sort of looking at those internal naturally occurring fluctuations and when one Rises a bit Above the Rest then you sort of no notice that and push it forward and say I have an intention now

(1:13:00) but all of this is that the brain activation is occurring and the thoughts are coming sort of after the fact or maybe even simultaneously but not [Music] before I have refuted the LA Bay studies in my book uh they don't prove anything like a lack of Free Will and I can make

(1:13:20) a lot of points but I'll make just a central the essential Point uh the L Bay experiment starts with a conscious decision which is the purpose assigned by the experimentor to bend your wrist okay so that's the starting point without which there'd be no laay studies okay if you they didn't bring

(1:13:42) them into the lab and say I didn't they had a purpose no if you're doing experiments on trees or rocks you don't have to whisper in the laboratory that no matter what you say in the presence of a rock or a tree it's not going to affect the experiment but it does in the case of a human being

(1:14:02) well what's going on there is that human beings are by that very fact demonstrating their free will their capacity to be counter suggestive to be obstreperous to resist manipulation and it is built into the scientific method in the human subjects in the human sciences that you have to

(1:14:27) guard against this you have to go to Great Lengths to neutralize the autonomy of the subjects autonomy is real how they can then say think that it isn't is uh I think a really interesting question then at the end of all this they said well do you have any choice

(1:14:52) and he said said yeah you can choose not to respond well wait a minute so you have free will to respond but you don't have free will not to respond but that's a choice so that's a contradiction how can you have no free will to choose to do it and then you have free will to choose

(1:15:10) not to do it that's a choice so the whole thing is a mess so I don't buy any of that stuff oh so you want me to press the button when I have the urge to press the button is that what you want in in the experiment to say yes that's what I want you to do I want you to freely press

(1:15:27) that button when you have the urge see that's a poorly designed experiment why because Free Will is being able to do something that your urges don't want you to do right you're having an urge to do something Free Will is the ability not to do what your urges

(1:15:45) tell you to do that's what free will is all about so that experiment is not testing free will it's testing something else some people try to argue for free will by saying well maybe we have free want like maybe in between the period between which we have the intention and before

(1:16:02) we actually do the action we have the capacity to sort of stop ourselves free want which I think is a very very nice phrase for the whole idea but the The veto thing is rather controversial Patrick Haggard has this study called there is no free want where they show that there's precursors in

(1:16:23) terms of brain activation to our decision to inhibit a behavior as well so you can't get around this cycle compatibl would just say well that's just consistent with the idea that our actions are causally determined and as long as they're determined by agents that involve certain kinds of

(1:16:48) mental activity there's enough free will to hang your hat on I don't think it's going to change the traditional line that compatibl would take it might be more troubling for Libertarians however if you want to impart to the agent a kind of libertarian control or agency that

(1:17:03) intervenes at a point a kind of topown causation where the agent is able to cause various neural processes that will ultimately lead to action if this finding indicates and it holds up that the brain States actually initiate the action prior to the conscious awareness

(1:17:22) it leaves little room for that kind of libertarian free will to enter the picture there is no material thought without activation of the brain so first comes brain then comes thought or subjective experience so subjective experience either is the brain's actions or it's a product of the brain's actions

(1:17:42) um or it's a product of the sort of calculations that are happening in the brain but you can't have thought first because people often say well where does a thought begin where is the origin of a thought um and it's just basically there's a lot of random firing in the brain it's

(1:17:56) always on it's always moving and at some point a certain type of interaction um creates a thought and then that thought can have an effect on another thought but they're all based on underlying brain [Music] activation it could very be the case that the way the brain works is that

(1:18:20) that there something goes on unconsciously before it actually becomes conscious that's the way the physical body works I I don't have a problem with that at all but that doesn't negate the possibility that this that there's a non-physical free will that we have if you say an immaterial mind does

(1:18:43) it just like Kant said a nual self does it the question is how and that's the old problem of inter action right of Mind and Body which has always been the problem that sort of view would put us outside of nature now is it plausible that we're outside of nature well maybe if dualism is true

(1:19:04) Renee deart famously was a Libertarian who believed in Mind Body dualism deart believed that uh there's the physical Universe on the one hand and there also minds and Minds aren't in the physical world so you might believe that Minds aren't in the physical world and they're

(1:19:23) not governed by any sort of law whether that law be probabilistic or deterministic however we're physical agents and at a certain point there has to be interaction between the decisions that the Mind makes and the body if the mind isn't governed by any law at all

(1:19:42) and the body is governed by laws say deterministic laws we're going to see violations that the deterministic laws at that interface between mind and body we could in principle discuss C anomalies maybe violations of the natural laws at the interface of mind and body are we going to find those