I May Have Not Posted This (Or, Did Lord Jim Really Jump?)

These are strong arguments against free will; but recent scientific research has weakened it even more. In Benjamin Libet's work on 'the half-second delay', it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. We think of ourselves as deliberating what to do, then doing it. In fact, in nearly the whole of our lives, our actions are initiated unconsciously: the brain makes us ready for action, then we have the experience of acting. As Libet and his colleagues put it:

" . . . the brain evidently 'decides' to initiate, or, at the least, prepare to initiate the act at a time before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place . . . cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act . . . can and usually does being unconsciously."

If we do not act in the way we think we do, the reason is partly to do with the bandwidth of consciousness - its ability to transmit information in terms of bits per second. This is much too narrow to be able to register the information we routinely receive and act on. As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive.

The upshot of neuroscientific research is that we cannot be the authors of our own acts. Libet does retain a faint shadow of free will in his notion of the veto - the capacity of consciousness to stall or abort an act that the brain has initiated. The trouble is that we can never know when - of if - we have exercised the veto. Our subjective experience is frequently, perhaps always, ambiguous.

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002, 66-67.