Okay. So, now onto the scientific studies. The first study I'll talk about is by Benjamin Libet. It was done in the early 1980s. It is the neuroscience study that got the no freewill ball rolling in neuroscience, a very influential study. Here are some quotations from the literature, some from Libet, most from Libet and some from elsewhere. So, the first one, "The brain decides to initiate or at least prepare to initiate certain actions before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place." So, the brain decides things unconsciously, the person becomes aware of it later. Next quotation, "Because brain activity in the supplementary motor area consistently preceded the conscious decision, it has been argued that the brain had already unconsciously made a decision to move even before the subject became aware of it." So, that's basically the same point. It's from a paper published in 2008, and the technology used there was different from Libet's. It was FMRI, and I'll talk about that shortly. Now, back to Libet, "If the 'act now' processes initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing it." Then, another quotation from Libet, it's a generalization he makes, "Our overall findings do suggest some fundamental characteristics of the simpler acts, that may be applicable to all consciously intended acts, and even to responsibility and free will." So, what is being claimed here is that they have evidence that the brain unconsciously makes decisions that the person then becomes aware of later, and then there's a claim that if something is produced unconsciously, it's not produced freely. That is, free will is not involved in its production. Then, we get the generalization claim that we can say, based on what goes on in these experiments, that all decisions are made unconsciously. In which case, no decision is made freely. So we don't ever exercise free will in making decisions. Then, the thought is, if a decision isn't freely made, any action that proceeds from that decision, that executes it, that flows from it, is not a free action. So you don't get any free action at all. So, this is how Libet's study went, the main study he did. So, subjects are seated in chairs, and their task is to flex the wrist whenever they want. They're watching a very fast clock. It makes a complete revolution in two and half seconds. What they're supposed to do is flex whenever they want, and then after they flex, they're supposed to report where the hand was on the clock when they first became aware of their urge, or wish, or will, or intention, or decision, different terms were used, to flex right now. They're hooked up two machines. So, EEG readings are taken from the scalp. These are readings of electrical conductivity on the scalp. Readings are taken from the wrist muscle. So, what you can do then is see when the EEG ramp up started and then do some comparisons. What they discovered when subjects were regularly reminded to be spontaneous, that is, not to plan in advance or think in advance about when to flex, is that you got an EEG ramp up about 550 milliseconds that is a little more than half a second before muscle motions started. So, muscle motion starts at zero, the ramp-up starts a little over half a second before zero, and the average time of first reported awareness of the urge, or decision, or intention was about 200 milliseconds before muscle motion. So, the conclusion that was drawn is that the brain is making the decision to flex the wrist now, a little more than half a second before the muscle starts moving, the wrist muscle, and the person doesn't become aware of that intention or decision for another third of a second after it's made, and so the claim is the decision isn't made freely, and then, of course, they generalize. Now, I should make a couple of points before moving on to the next experiment. So, Libet, unlike almost all of his followers, thought that once you became aware of your intention, or decision, or urge to flex now, you had time to veto it. So, you had a kind of veto power. The window of opportunity for an exercise of veto power is about a 10th of a second, he thought. After that time, we're going to hit the point of no return, so it's going to be too late to cancel the urge, and muscle motion will be generated. Libet thought he had two different kinds of evidence for veto power. So, one kind was that after the experiment, many of the subjects said to him, "Sometimes I had an urge to flex right away, but I didn't do it. I just waited for the next one to come along, and I acted on that, or waited for two more to come along, and I acted on those." So, that's kind of anecdotal evidence of veto power. But Libet also did a veto study. In the veto study, the subjects were told to prepare to flex when the spot hit a certain point on the clock. Libet actually used a spot. These days we use hands. So, prepare to flex when the spot hits a certain point on the clock, but don't do it. So, just to select a point, let's say the nine O'clock point on the clock. So, prepare to flex when the spot hits there, but don't do it. What Libet discovered is that subjects in that condition displayed a different EEG. So, we could imagine it like this. Their instruction is to prepare to flex when the spot hits the nine O'clock point, but don't do it. What Libet discovered is that when subjects were given that instruction, you got an EEG ramp up that started earlier, started about a second before the designated time, like the nine O'clock time on the clock, and then petered out a 150-250 milliseconds before the designated time. Libet said, "Look, I found it. Now we have evidence of veto power." Okay. So, now I have described to you Libet's veto experiment, and there is a problem with it that I would like to describe to you now, and I'll get on to the next two science studies, and then I'll move on to the critique. So, what Libet thought he showed with this veto study is that people actually had the power to veto intentions to do a thing at a certain time. So, his thought was, well, these subjects, given the instructions I described to you, intended to flex when the spot or hand hit the nine O'clock point, and then vetoed that intention, and did not flex. But there's a problem with Libet's reasoning here. I could give you a complicated explanation of the problem, or we could do our own hands-on experiment, you and I together. So, let's do the hands-on thing. It's way simpler. So, what I want you to do is to prepare to snap your fingers, like this, when I get to three. I'm going to count one, two, three. So, prepare to snap your fingers, like this, when I get to three, but don't do it. Don't actually snap. So, now if you're preparing, you've got your fingers together like this. What I want you to do is to pay close attention to what's going on in your head, be very introspective and just see how it feels, and then now we'll do the experiment to see what happens. So, once again, you prepare to snap like this when I get to three, but you don't do it, you just prepare. Okay. Here we go, one, two, three. How many of you snapped? Usually, nobody does. Sometimes when I give a talk on this, one or two people might. Sometimes they do it by accident, they say, and sometimes they're just trying to cause trouble. But probably, you didn't snap. So, what was going on? Did you intend to snap your fingers when I got to three? No, you didn't. What you intended to do is what I asked you to do, that is, to prepare to snap them, but not to do it. If that's right, then you weren't vetoing any intention to snap your fingers, you had no such intention. Something else was going on. So, one thing that should make you wonder is, what does the new curve, that I drew for you, that Libet got in the veto experiment represent? We'll come back to that later. Okay. So that is my presentation of Libet's main study and then also the little veto study, which is a kind of sidebar but is relevant
