Do I have free will, or does my body just do things and let me notice later? I ask this because of something that recently happened to me.
I am recovering from diabetic amyotrophy, which wasted away my muscles and stopped my nerve signals from working. While spending months in hospital, and after I returned home, I had to physically lift my legs into and out of bed with my hands.
Then one morning, months after returning home, I woke up and swung my legs out of bed without even thinking about it. I know I was not consciously thinking about doing this, as I had adapted to not being able to do so.
Presumably this was able to happen because nerves were regrowing, but I didn’t consciously decide to try it that morning. It just happened and then I noticed it. And I wondered: what did this mean for the idea that I take decisions by free will? And how did it fit in with brain experiments I had read about?
Libet’s half-second head start
Back in the 1980s, Benjamin Libet used EEG to record the brain activity of people who were asked to press a button when they felt the urge to do so. They watched a clock with a rotating dot, and reported the position of the dot when they became aware of their intention to act.
Libet found brain activity started about half a second before the person moved their finger, and about a fifth of a second before they thought they decided to move it.
This suggests the physical brain “decided” to press the button, before the conscious mind caught up and thought it was making the decision.
Some years later Chun Soon did a similar experiment using fMRI. In this, the people had to choose between pressing one of two buttons, one under either index finger.
They pressed a button on average every 22 seconds. But the brain activity, that predicted which button would be pressed, began seven seconds before the person was conscious of the decision.
Since fMRI takes a few seconds to detect brain activity, the real start of the process could be up to ten seconds before the person thought they’d made a decision.
My legs suddenly moving
How does this fit in with my legs suddenly moving without me consciously telling them to? Well, it is similar in that both events involve physical brains starting to move body parts before the person consciously notices that the process has started.
But it is different in that I wasn’t consciously thinking about pressing a button. Indeed, I wasn’t thinking at all about my legs moving, because it had been impossible for many months. Also, I had mentally adapted to having to use my hands to move my legs.
Presumably what happened is something like this. As I recovered from my illness, the nerves that tell my legs to move recovered so that they could react to signals from my brain.
My physical brain then sent a signal that caused my legs to move and swing out of bed. My conscious mind then noticed this had happened and went ‘Wow! I just moved my legs!’ I then beamed like a deaf baby on a TikTok video hearing for the first time.
But nowhere during the process was my conscious mind in control of, or even involved in, what happened. It just noticed that my legs had done something, and in circumstances where I could not confuse it with my conscious mind taking a decision.
My physical brain versus my conscious mind
Does this mean my physical brain generates and controls my conscious mind? Or are the two just different aspects of the same thing? That’s something I want to explore more.
Even before this, I was skeptical of free will. I could not imagine how an immaterial mind could interact with a physical body to cause things to happen.
I didn’t believe (and still don’t believe) that this means everything is predetermined. A being could do different things in the same circumstances without taking a conscious decision.
But I now lean more to believing that the “decisions” are ultimately made by my physical brain, rather than by my conscious mind.
That said, maybe my brain and my conscious mind are different parts of the same entity. That combined entity would then collectively be ‘me’.
And it would be accurate to say that ‘I’ make decisions, just in a different way.
Is that still free will? Or just an attempt to explain an illusion? More soon.