A few years ago, I read Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.
In the book, Harari uses an experiment from Benjamin Libet to argue against the existence of free will.
In the study, participants—who were hooked up to EEG to measure brain activity—were asked to perform a simple voluntary action (e.g. move their arm) at a moment of their choosing.
Using a fast moving clock, they reported the exact moment they became consciously aware of their intention to act.
The EEG results showed that brain activity changed approx. 300-500 milliseconds before participants reported consciously deciding to move.
Harari—and many others—have since used this to argue “free will is an illusion” and that we are simply acting out the impulses of the brain. After all, if the neural activity precedes the intention, then surely the idea of a conscious, decision making agent must be an illusion.
Interestingly, this was not Libet’s interpretation.
The main conclusion that Libet drew from his extensive research into this area isn’t exactly that we have free will.
It’s more that we have “free won’t”.
He discovered that there was a slight “window” between the moment when brain activity changed and the action that followed.
In this interval, the individual can veto or accept the brain’s impulse.
In other words, your brain is constantly bombarding you with subconscious and pre-conscious motives.
You don’t have any control over these. They just happen — sort of like the weather.
According to Libet, the most important thing is our relationship to these impulses.
If we simply act them out, then Harari and his colleagues are right.
But if you take seriously Victor Frankl’s insight that:
“There is a gap between stimulus and response. And in this gap we find our ability to choose our response. And in this response lies our growth and freedom.”
Then free will is better thought of as a capacity to be cultivated.
Rather than a binary either/or phenomenon.
The more we are able to “veto” the brain’s impulses and consciously widen the gap between stimulus and response, the more growth and freedom we will experience in this life.
