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date: 20 July 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article takes an experimental approach to the question of whether we have free will, with special reference to the role consciousness plays in free voluntary action. It shows that voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical charge in the brain (the “readiness potential”), which begins several hundred milliseconds before the human subjects become consciously aware of their intention to act. This suggests that the volitional process is initiated unconsciously. Some philosophers and scientists have been tempted to conclude that willed actions are determined by unconscious forces and hence that our awareness of conscious control is illusory. However, it is argued that there is still a role for consciousness in controlling the outcome of willed actions, since consciousness can veto the act once underway. Thus, free will is not necessarily excluded, though novel neuroscientific findings place constraints on how free will could operate and how we are to make sense of it in terms of current research on the brain.

Keywords: consciousness, conscious will, voluntary action, volition, brain

Benjamin Libet

Benjamin Libet is Professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received a Ph.D. in neurophysiology, supervised by Ralph Gerard (founder and Honorary President of the Society for Neuroscience). Libet also worked with K.A.C. Elliott on brain metabolism and with Sir John Eccles on synaptic mechanisms. In 1958 he began a series of highly influential experimental studies in human subjects relating brain activities to the appearance or production of conscious experience. Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143–0444.

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