Carey Goldberg: A question of will
Carey Goldberg, Boston Globe: “What [University of California professor emeritus of physiology, Benjamin Libet] did was to measure electrical changes in people’s brains as they flicked their wrists. And what he found was that a subject’s “readiness potential” – the brain signal that precedes voluntary actions – showed up about one-third of a second before the subject felt the conscious urge to act. [–––] [Harvard psychology professor Daniel M. Wegner] argues that “the feeling of will is our mind’s way of estimating what it thinks it did.” And that, he said, “is not necessarily a perfect estimate.” It is “a kind of accounting system rather than a direct read-out of how the causal process is working.” In Libet’s interpretation, free will could still exist as a kind of veto power, in the fractions of a second between the time you unconsciously initiate an action and the time you actually carry it out.” (Via Mark Frauenfelder.)