The Long Way Back to Ourselves

8.3

Free Will Under Pressure

This episode tests the popular reading of Benjamin Libet's experiment, published in 1983, in which a rising readiness potential in the brain supposedly makes a decision before conscious will does, and rejects it. One reason is a 2012 reinterpretation by Aaron Schurger and colleagues, showing that the same curve also arises from random neural fluctuations with no decision at all. Daniel Wegner's experiments add that the feeling of authorship of an action can be separated from its actual cause. You then hear two opposing positions: Robert Sapolsky's hard determinism and Daniel Dennett's compatibilism, which defines freedom as acting from your own reasons, without outside coercion.