Page 6
As for neuroscience, in a series of experiments with subjects wired up to an electro encephalogram, EEG, Benjamin Libet, a University of San Francisco neuroscientist, discovered that unconscious brain activity related to some action preceded conscious awareness of the decision to act by a third to a half a second. In other words the unconscious brain knows what we're doing before we do.
I can't see any other interpretation of these results than that the conscious brain is the last to know, sitting there and making up stories about what is already going on. We're like the subjects in a hypnosis show, who having been given a posthypnotic suggestion to get up and walk around clucking like chickens, and then doing so, explain apparently lucidly that they are rehearsing for a new production of "Chicken Little."
There is a very fine description of this work and its implications, by the way, in Timothy Ferris' The Mind's Sky, available in paperback from Bantam.
Dr. Libet has gone on to champion a sort of limited free will that he says is supported by the data, in which we are at least free to veto what we find ourselves to be doing. You can read about it in his books, The Volitional Mind, Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will, published by Imprint Academic in 1999, and Mind Time, The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, (Harvard, 2004).
I find this thin gruel, but obviously the discussion is just beginning.
I do want to make one more general point. I never said I didn't believe in free will, only that my belief flouts what I understand to be physical reality. I feel like a free man, within constraints. I'm stuck with the personality I was born with, there are fewer and fewer things I want to eat in the company cafeteria. When I go out to a French restaurant, even if I don't know it, Nancy knows that I am going to order the duck.
I think believing in free will despite all this is one of the tragic necessities of life. After all we all know that we and our children and the whole human race is going to die. Why bother getting out of bed in the morning, let alone composing screeds like this that will only invite even more and longer and more abstruse email in return?
The first part is easy. I get up about 6:30 most mornings because that is when a certain spoiled and rather fat cat begins to yowl to be fed. If I don't get up she won't stop and she will wake up the rest of the family, who will then yell at me.
And so, on to the barricades…
