It seems obvious to many people that they have free will, for example, say you have just made a decision to go to the library, and you feel as if you could have chosen to do something else. Yet many philosophers state that this instinct is wrong and according to them free-will is just a part of our imagination. According to Shaun Nichols, “No one has it or ever will. Rather our choices are either determined—necessary outcomes of the events that have happened in the past—or they are ¬random” (Nichols 1). Institutions about free-will however change this view. Say you don’t know the answer to a question on a test; your first guess is more likely to be correct. “In both philosophy and science, we may feel there is something fishy about an argument …show more content…
Libet was a neuroscientist at the University of California and did pioneering research on the neurobiology of consciousness. Mainly, Libet was mostly interested in correspondence of signals from the brain and the essence of the consciousness. Libet’s most impactful experiments involved the measuring of electrical activity in the brain when volunteers were told to move their wrists. The volunteers would look at a moving clock and note the exact timing. The timing of the brain activity was compared with the volunteer’s time of movement. It was consistently discovered that the brain activity came before the conscious awareness of the decision to react in movement by milliseconds. According to this article by Michael Egnor, “The timing typically went like this:
Readiness potential... 400 milliseconds... awareness of intent to move... 200 milliseconds... move wrist.” (Egnor 3).
Libets experiments were repeated many times with similar results and recently fMRI was used by researchers to carry out experiments that were very similar to Libet’s. As said in this article, “The fMRI studies show that there are often brain activations that precede the conscious decision by several seconds.” (Egnor 4). With the use of this new technology it is much easier to determine the outcome of these experiments by …show more content…
While philosophers are continuing to argue about the issue, neuroscientists decided to start addressing the issue as the only way they know how to, experimenting. Some of the neuroscientists believe that their experiments prove that peoples instinctive thought of freedom may be a complete hoax and just a mere illusion. This is where Bereitschaftspotential comes into play. Bereitschaftspotential is defined as “In neurology, the Bereitschaftspotential or BP (from German, "readiness potential"), also called the pre-motor potential or readiness potential (RP), is a measure of activity in the motor cortex and supplementary motor area of the brain leading up to voluntary muscle movement.” (Wiki 1). According to George Dvorsky, “Neuroscientists first became aware that something curious was going on in the brain back in the mid 1960s.” (Dvorsky 7). “German scientists Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke discovered a phenomenon they dubbed "bereitschaftspotential" (BP) — a term that translates to "readiness potential." (Dvorsky 8). These scientists discovery set off an entirely new field of