I had an interesting email from a juggler recently. He was interested in the subject of free will – specifically the Libet experiment where the activation of the brain’s action (more usually readiness) potentials, which prepare us for movement seem to pre-empt any conscious desire to move. He had this to say:
I would love to see what my action potentials look like when i am juggling, especially when the balls are moving very fast. an interesting thing that I have experienced is the feeling that there is "someone else" inside me doing the juggling. It happens only rarely, and only after I have been juggling for at east 30-45 minutes and have entered "the zone." My conscious thoughts can wander while the juggling just happens.
I too would like to see what his action potentials look like, but neuroscience is nowhere near sophisticated enough to deal with all the information.
It strikes me that this must be like a great guitarist who doesn’t need to think about what notes to play during a solo. That must feel, in a sense, like “someone else” is playing.
This divide between a conscious self and the brain/sensor/motor mechanism in certain tasks – driving a car is another, I guess – is fascinating. But at any point, the conscious mind can choose to stop what’s going on in the “background”, which makes me think that perhaps it’s not related to the Libet action potentials.
I think the waters on free will are really muddy. A recent experiment claimed to have disproved Libet’s result, for example, but others say the new result can’t even be related to the Libet experiment, because the new setup “changes the paradigm”.
What it seems you’re not allowed to say is “who needs free will anyway?” I don’t exist as anything other than some emergence from the cells that make up my body and brain, and my brain’s “thoughts” are a mess of chemical and electrical signals that do various things, including create that nebulous thing we call a consciousness. Why do I need to think that something in me has “free will”?
It seems obvious to me that, even if it does somehow exist, it can only be an incredibly weak and rather inconsequential factor in the path we follow. Genetic studies that show predisposition to addictions, or marital unfaithfulness, to choose two examples, make that painfully clear. We are carbon-based machines controlled by chemistry. Get used to it. Or ignore it. But don’t worry about it.
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