| Rosenberg, A. (2018). How history gets things wrong: The neuroscience of our addiction to stories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. |
 
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 08/06/2020, 17:29 |
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The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke suggested that we have free will in willing our arms to raise – think, I will raise my arm and then it raises and so there is causation. This was disagreed with by David Hume – as Rosenberg states, all you notice is "the feeling of deciding to raise your arm, and then slightly later, your arm going up" (p.99). See (Libet 1985). In the 1980s, it was shown through neuroscience techniques that the decision to raise the limb occurs after the brain signal to raise it and before that signal reaches the arm (p.100).
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–566. |
| Westerhoff, J. (2011). Reality: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 20/07/2021, 11:22 |
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Discussing Libet's (1985) experiment. While we prefer to believe that we have willed our hand to rise, our intention, there is a precursor in the subconscious, the readiness potential, that can be measured using EEG and that precedes the hand movement and the reported time at which subjects noted their intention to lift the hand. The conclusion is that intention (and thus free will?) is manufactured after the event. See also (Rosenberg 2018, p.99).
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–566.
Rosenberg, A. (2018). How history gets things wrong: The neuroscience of our addiction to stories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. |
