Free Will and the Cognitive Mechanism of Choice

The article deals with two scientific experiments on free will recently conducted by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. The experiments go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and were based on the results of measurements of the relationship between brain activity and voluntary motion explored by German neuroscientists in the middle of the 20th century. What they found was that there was a reliable pattern of electrical activity in the motor area of the brain that preceded electrical activity in the muscles (the brain activity that they identified started less than a second before the activity in the muscles). A famous neuroscientist Benjamin Libet used these results in order to explore the problem of free will. As in the earlier experiments, Libet found that muscle activity was preceded by increasing activity in the motor area of the brain, and the average time difference was about 550 milliseconds. With regard to participants' conscious awareness to move their body, they reported it as being only 200 milliseconds before muscle activity occurred. Libet's own interpretation is that what happens here is that the brain unconsciously initiates the process of voluntary action. Libet's experiments generated an enormous discussion among researchers from many disciplines and encouraged neuroscien-tists to conduct new experiments on free will, one of which was made by a group of neuroscientists in Berlin. John-Dylan Haynes from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and his colleagues imaged the brain of volunteers while they were performing a decision-making task. The volunteers were asked to press one of two buttons when they felt the urge to. Each button was operated by a different hand. When the researchers analysed the data, the earliest signal the team could pick up started six seconds before the volunteers reported having made their decision. The delay of a few seconds in the imaging means that the brain activity could have begun as much as ten seconds before the conscious decision. Some contemporary philosophers and scientists claim that the above-mentioned experiments provide strong evidence that free will is an illusion. The author of the article claims that the experiments were aimed at the cognitive mechanism of choice and are not directly related to the problem of free will.

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