A brief look at what I mentioned in class earlier about free will possibly being an illusion. Touching upon Plato’s idea of the cave.

Experiments, pioneered by Benjamin Libet into human consciousness raise some interesting, and frankly terrifying insights into our nature.

The free will illusion.

In the 1970s, Libet was involved in research into neural activity and sensation thresholds. His initial investigations involved determining how much activation at specific sites in the brain was required to trigger artificial somatic sensations, relying on routine psychophysical procedures. This work soon crossed into an investigation into human consciousness; his most famous experiment demonstrates that the unconscious electrical processes in the brain called Bereitschaftspotential (or readiness potential) discovered by Lüder Deecke and Hans Helmut Kornhuber in 1964 precede conscious decisions to perform volitional, spontaneous acts, implying that unconscious neuronal processes precede and potentially cause volitional acts which are retrospectively felt to be consciously motivated by the subject. The experiment has caused controversy as it challenges the pre-scientific philosophical and religious views of “free will”. It has also inspired further study.

In layman’s terms, what these experiments found were that the brain made a decision before you consciously thought of it. This raises very interesting questions about what one can think of as the self, and renders things like morality far more complex than they already are.

More about this another day.