The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Hanoch Ben-Yami (CEU)
on
Libet’s Confusions
Tuesday, 3 March 2015, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412
ABSTRACT
I try to demonstrate a possible contribution of philosophy to the
sciences by exposing conceptual confusions in Libet’s empirical work on
free will. The elimination of these confusions show that his research
failed to establish what he claimed it does.
Libet measured patterns of electric potential in subjects’ brain while
asking them to report when they became conscious of an urge or decision
to perform a certain action. Relying on the results he concluded that
the urge or decision does not affect action, and hence that we have no
free will. However, his research relies on a false picture of what free
action involves. Libet thought that free action should be caused by a
mental event – an urge or decision – which is the cause of action. But
this mechanical picture of the mental is not entailed from our criteria
for classifying an action as voluntary, free, intentional and so on. An
action is free if the agent would have done something else in the same
circumstances had he been given a good reason for that, if he knew what
he was doing, if he didn’t act under duress, and so on. Accordingly,
Libet’s experiment was irrelevant to the question, whether the subjects
acted out of their free will. And moreover, of course they acted freely:
had they had a good reason to act earlier or later, say, they would have
done so.
Krisztina Biber
Department of Philosophy
Coordinator
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Central European University
Nador u. 9. | 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Office: + 36.1.327.3806 | biberk(a)ceu.hu |
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