Abstract
Experimental findings on the neurobiological roots of free will, pioneered by Benjamin Libet’s work in the 1980s, have been met with a mixture of acceptance and controversy. Discussions in both philosophy and cognitive neuroscience have indeed generated an active and at times polarized debate on whether such findings successfully disprove free will, which is the issue that is customarily considered to be at stake. In our view, this polarization often comes at the expense of genuine cross-disciplinary fertilization, which may turn into a mere attempt at bringing others round to one’s own positions. In this chapter, we argue for an alternative approach. In the first place, we claim that, in themselves, these findings do not address the problem of whether free will, as intended in the philosophical tradition, is illusory or not. However, we also claim that they should be taken as a valuable asset within a more comprehensive theory of human action, aiming to explain how individuals navigate the environment by means of a wide repertoire of more or less complex, flexible, and intelligent behaviors.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
For a meta-analysis of Libet-style experimental findings and a critical discussion of their solidity, see Braun et al. (2021).
- 2.
- 3.
In other passages, Libet is more cautious, e.g., he writes that his findings posit “certain constraints on the potentiality for conscious initiation and control of voluntary acts” (Libet et al., 1983, p. 623). As reported by Mele (2010), the skeptical conclusion has been drawn by many, including, e.g., Pockett (2006), Roediger et al. (2008), Shariff et al. (2008) and Wegner (2002).
- 4.
The main criticism has been that the experimental results in the Libet tradition can be easily accommodated by the compatibilists, who have no problem in granting that the generation of free actions may be determined by several prior factors, some of which might be unconscious (see Sect. 11.3).
- 5.
Whereas the notions of intentional and voluntary are usually used interchangeably in cognitive science, the distinction between the two is often much more nuanced in philosophy (see Anscombe’s classic essay Intention (1963)). Recently, the philosopher Yair Levy (2013) has distinguished between fully-fledged intentional actions (e.g., going shopping, cooking a meal) from mere voluntary behaviors (e.g., changing position, playing with one’s hair).
- 6.
Spontaneity is not to be understood as an indication of a commitment to metaphysical indeterminism: spontaneous actions are simply actions whose causes (whether deterministic or indeterministic) are not immediately detectable in the environment.
- 7.
For instance, as part of the instructions in Soon et al. (2013), participants were told that “the decision time and choice of task were completely up to them but that they should be as spontaneous as possible and execute their decision without hesitation once it was made”.
- 8.
For example, Mele has indicated the lack of compelling motivational states or coercion, reason-based deliberation, and the agent’s being a reliable deliberator as jointly sufficient for “psychological autonomy”, which is what is required for grounding responsibility (1995).
- 9.
It seems worth noticing that Aristotle’s distinction (2000) between involuntary and voluntary actions in the Nicomachean Ethics bears some resemblance with the couple externally/internally generated actions. In particular, Aristotle highlights that one feature of involuntary actions is that they are originated from without, with the agent remaining passive with respect to them.
- 10.
One historically controversial aspect of Libet’s view is the defense of our ability to consciously veto the action, just before execution. Libet described this as a power of “permitting or triggering the final motor outcome of the unconsciously initiated process” or “vetoing the progression to actual motor activation” (1985, p. 529). It has been plausibly suggested, however, that such last-moment inhibitory processes also depend on prior unconscious activity (Filevich et al., 2013), which makes negative volitions substantially analogous to positive volitions in terms of their potential for supporting free will (De Caro et al., 2019). For an interpretation of the veto power based on the metaphysics of power (Marmodoro, 2022, Chap. 1), see De Hann (2022, Chap. 8).
- 11.
- 12.
Nor it seems easy to rely on folk intuitions of what free will, or free action, stands for. In this respect, the consensus seems to be that folk intuitions about what free will/action entails are quite mixed (Roskies & Nichols, 2008).
- 13.
Here, we are just concerned with the phenomenology of Ralph’s decision-making process. Ralph sees the two options as equally attractive ending up with the feeling that the decision is not strongly biased by his prior preferences or future incentives. This does not imply that his final decision was not in fact determined by more subterranean determinants Ralph is not aware of. In this latter case, Balaguer’s reconstruction of indeterministic free choices would be incorrect in the sense that the choices can be determined by factors the agent is not aware of, independently of whether the agent has the subjective feeling of not being biased. If there is something that the literature on implicit biases and the automatic mind has shown, it is that people are not entirely aware of all the, more or less subterranean, determinants of their behaviors (see Holroyd, 2015).
- 14.
That said, libertarian restrictivists, including Balaguer (2009), see libertarian free actions (i.e., thorn decisions that are indeterministic and sufficiently controlled) as just the opposite of irrelevant, Buridan ass-like, actions (see also the already mentioned Kane, 1996). Here, we discuss Ralph’s action as arbitrary in terms of the fact that it is not clearly driven by its prior causal antecedents (i.e., Ralph’s existing preferences), while Balaguer describes Ralph’s action as nonrandom since it represents the agent’s own decision (see also Dorato, 2022, Chap. 12).
- 15.
- 16.
In a similar vein, Pornpattananangkul and Nusslock (2015) showed that the RP is sensitive to the anticipation of future rewards, with the presence of reward-anticipation cues associated with a more negative RP.
- 17.
In moral philosophy, there is a vast debate (particularly alive regarding virtue theories) on whether habitual actions can be said to encompass deliberation and count as rational and virtuous: see De Caro et al. (2021).
- 18.
- 19.
This does not necessarily mean that all habitual behaviors should be seen as intentional. It might be controversial, for example, whether habitual, stereotyped behaviors (Holroyd, 2015) that stem from implicit biases can count as somehow intentional.
- 20.
On habitual actions being weakly intentional, see Martens and Roelofs (2019).
- 21.
For a classic model of how the brain can continuously switch between the automatic and the goal-directed mode, see Norman and Shallice (1986).
- 22.
For a discussion on how abstract intentions interlock with motor representations, see Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014).
- 23.
- 24.
More precisely, Fischer and Ravizza discuss guidance control in terms of (i) the possession of the mechanism from which the action flows and (ii) the subject’s sensitivity and responsiveness to reasons. See Mayr (2022, Chap. 7) for a discussion of the relationship between free will and rational abilities.
- 25.
For a non-causal view of action guidance, see Frankfurt (1978).
- 26.
Although this is typically defended within compatibilist accounts of free will (see Mele, 2010), see Bernáth (2019) for a discussion about whether some forms of libertarianism can be compatible with the Libet’s results. See Steward (2022, Chap. 9) about the wider issue of how libertarian free will can be compatible with the laws of nature. Concerning the compatibility between free will and the laws of nature in the context of a Humean or non-Humean ontology, see the contributions by Dorato (2022, Chap. 12), Esfeld (2022, Chap. 13), and Huttemann (2022, Chap. 10).
- 27.
This relationship is usually understood in terms of one of the following notions: supervenience, emergence, realization, or reduction (Kim, 2003).
- 28.
Haggard and Eimer (1999) showed that there is no structural relationship between the onset of the RP and the time of conscious awareness W. By contrast, they suggested that the time of conscious awareness might be causally determined by the so-called “lateralized RP” (LRP), which reflects the preparation of a specific bodily movement after the action has been already selected. From this, Haggard and Eimer drew the conclusion that W is linked to the specific bodily movement the subject is willing to perform rather than to a more general, unconscious motor preparation.
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1963). Intention. Blackwell.
Aristotle. (2000). In R. Crisp (Ed.), Nicomachean ethics. Cambridge University Press.
Baker, K. S., & Piriyapunyaporn, T. (2012). Neural activity in readiness for incidental and explicitly timed actions. Neuropsychologia, 50(5), 715–722.
Balaguer, M. (2009). Free will as an open scientific problem. MIT Press.
Bargh, J. A., & Chartland, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462–479.
Baumeister, R. F., Masicampo, E. J., & DeWall, C. N. (2009). Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 260–268.
Benecke, R., Dick, J. P., Rothwell, J. C., Day, B. C., & Marsden, C. D. (1985). Increase of the Bereitschaftspotential in simultaneous and sequential movements. Neuroscience Letters, 62, 347–352.
Bernáth, L. (2019). Why Libet-style experiments cannot refute all forms of libertarianism. In B. Feltz, M. Missal, & A. Sims (Eds.), Free will, causality, and neuroscience (pp. 97–119). Brill-Rodopi.
Björnsson, G., & Pereboom, D. (2014). Free will skepticism and bypassing. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: Freedom and responsibility (Vol. 4, pp. 27–35). MIT Press.
Bonicalzi, S. (2015). Libet-like experiments and the efficacy of the will. Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 6(1), 230–144.
Bonicalzi, S. (2019). Actions and intentions. In B. Feltz, M. Missal, & A. C. Sims (Eds.), Free will, causality and neuroscience (pp. 120–142). Brill – Rodopi.
Bonicalzi, S., & Haggard, P. (2019). From freedom from to freedom to: New perspectives on intentional action. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1193.
Bortoletto, M., & Cunnington, R. (2010). Motor timing and motor sequencing contribute differently to the preparation for voluntary movement. NeuroImage, 49(4), 3338–3348.
Bratman, M. E. (1987). Intention, plans, and practical reason. Cambridge University Press.
Bratman, M. E. (2007). Structures of agency: Essays. Oxford University Press.
Braun, M. N., Wessler, J., & Friese, M. (2021). A meta-analysis of Libet-style experiments. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 182–198.
Butterfill, S. A., & Sinigaglia, C. (2014). Intention and motor representation in purposive action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88(1), 119–145.
Carruthers, P. (2011). The opacity of mind. Oxford University Press.
Carver, C., Ganellen, R., Froming, W., & Chambers, W. (1983). Modeling: An analysis in terms of category accessibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 403–421.
Caspar, E. A., Vuillaume, L., De Saldanha, M., da Gama, P., & Cleeremans, A. (2017). The influence of (dis)belief in free will on immoral behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 20.
Chik, J. (2022). The temporal structure of agency. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Crockett, M. J., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Siegel, J. Z., Dayan, P., & Dolan, R. J. (2014). Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making. PNAS, 111(48), 17320–17325.
Cunnington, R. W., Windischberger, C., Deecke, L., & Moser, E. (2002). The preparation and execution of self-initiated and externally-triggered movement: A study of event-related fMRI. NeuroImage, 15, 373–385.
Davidson, D. (1978). Intending. In Y. Yovel (Ed.), Philosophy of history and action (Philosophical studies series in philosophy) (pp. 41–60). Springer.
De Caro, M. (2007). How to deal with the free will issue: The roles of conceptual analysis and empirical science. In M. Marraffa, M. De Caro, & F. Ferretti (Eds.), Cartographies of the mind studies. Philosophy and psychology in intersection (pp. 255–268). Springer.
De Caro, M. (2014). Analisi concettuale e scienza: il dibattito contemporaneo sul libero arbitrio. In M. De Caro, M. Mori, & E. Spinelli (Eds.), Libero arbitrio. Storia di una controversia filosofica (pp. 365–382). Carocci.
De Caro, M. (2020). Realtà. Bollati Boringhieri.
De Caro, M., Lavazza, A., & Sartori, G. (2019). Introduzione. In M. De Caro, A. Lavazza, & G. Sartori (Eds.), Siamo davvero liberi? Le neuroscienze e il mistero del libero arbitrio (pp. VII–XXX). Codice Edizioni.
De Caro, M., Marraffa, M., & Vaccarezza, M. S. (2021). The priority of phronesis: How to defend virtue theory from three potentially fatal challenges. In M. De Caro & M. S. Vaccarezza (Eds.), Practical wisdom. Philosophical and psychological perspectives. Routledge.
De Hann, D. (2022). The power to will freely: How to re-think about the problem of free will without laws of nature. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Dezfouli, A., Lingawi, N. W., & Balleine, B. (2014). Habits as action sequences: Hierarchical action control and changes in outcome value. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1655).
Dickinson, A., & Balleine, B. (2002). The role of learning in the operation of motivational systems. In Stevens’ handbook of experimental psychology. Wiley.
Dolan, R. J., & Dayan, P. (2013). Goals and habits in the brain. Neuron, 80(2), 312–325.
Dorato, M. (2022). The consequence argument and an ontology of dispositions. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Doris, J. M. (2015). Talking to our selves: Reflection, ignorance, and agency. Oxford University Press.
Duncan, J., & Owen, A. M. (2000). Common regions of the human frontal lobe recruited by diverse cognitive demands. Trends in Neurosciences, 23(10), 475–483.
Esfeld, M. (2022). Super-Humeanism and mental causation. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Feltz, B., Missal, M., & Sims, A. C. (Eds.). (2019). Free will, causality, and neuroscience. Brill – Rodopi.
Filevich, E., Kuhn, S., & Haggard, P. (2013). There is no free won’t: Antecedent brain activity predicts decisions to inhibit. PLoS One, 8(2), e53053.
Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and control: A theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge University Press.
Fourneret, P., & Jeannerod, M. (1998). Limited conscious monitoring of motor performance in normal subjects. Neuropsychologia, 36, 1133–1140.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1978). The problem of action. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(2), 157–162.
Fridland, E. (2016). Skill and motor control: Intelligence all the way down. Philosophical Studies, 174(6), 1539–1560.
Fried, I., Mukamel, R., & Kreiman, G. (2011). Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition. Neuron, 69(3), 548–562.
Gallagher, S. (2006). Where’s the action? Epiphenomenalism and the problem of free will. In: W. Banks, S. Pockett, & S. Gallagher, (Eds.), Does consciousness cause behavior? An investigation of the nature of volition (pp. 109–124). MIT Press.
Ghahramani, Z., & Wolpert, D. M. (1997). Modular decomposition in visuomotor learning. Nature, 386(6623), 392–395.
Gold J. I., & Shadlen, M. N. (2003). The influence of behavioral context on the representation of a perceptual decision in developing oculomotor commands. The Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 632–651.
Gollwitzer, P. (2003). Why we thought the action mindsets affect illusions of control. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 259–267.
Haazebroek, P., & Hommel, B. (2008). Anticipative control of voluntary action: Towards a computational model. In I. G. Pezzulo & M. V. Butz (Eds.), Anticipatory behavior in adaptive learning systems: Foundations, theories, and systems (pp. 31–47). Springer.
Haggard, P. (2014). Intention and agency. In I. M. S. Gazzaniga & G. R. Mangun (Eds.), The cognitive neurosciences (Vol. V). MIT Press.
Haggard, P. (2017). Sense of agency in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(4), 196–207.
Haggard, P., & Eimer, M. (1999). On the relation between brain potentials and the awareness of voluntary movements. Experimental Brain Research, 126(1), 128–133.
Holroyd, J. (2015). Implicit bias, awareness and imperfect cognitions. Consciousness and Cognition, 33, 511–523.
Huttemann, A. (2022). The problem of radical freedom. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Jahanshahi, M., Jenkins, I. H., Brown, R. G., Marsden, C. D., Passingham, R. E., & Brooks, D. (1995). Self-initiated versus externally triggered movements. I. an investigation using measurement of regional cerebral blood flow with PET and movement-related potentials in normal and Parkinson’s disease subjects. Brain, 118(4), 913–933.
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310(5745), 116–119.
Kane, R. H. (1996). The significance of free will. Oxford University Press.
Kane, R. H. (2002). Some neglected pathways in the free will labyrinth. In R. H. Kane (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of free will (pp. 406–437). Oxford University Press.
Keramati, M., Smittenaar, P., Dolan, R. J., & Dayan, P. (2016). Adaptive integration of habits into depth-limited planning defines a habitual-goal–directed spectrum. PNAS, 113(45), 12868–12873.
Khalighinejad, N., Schurger, A., Desantis, A., Zmigrod, L., & Haggard, P. (2018). Precursor processes of human self-initiated action. NeuroImage, 165, 35–47.
Kim, J. (2003). Supervenience, emergence, realization, reduction. In M. J. Loux & D. W. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics (pp. 556–584). Oxford University Press.
Koechlin, E., & Summerfield, C. (2007). An information theoretical approach to prefrontal executive function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(6), 229–235.
Koechlin, E., Ody, C., & Kouneiher, F. (2003). The architecture of cognitive control in the human prefrontal cortex. Science, 302(5648), 1181–1185.
Kornhuber, H. H., & Deecke, L. (1965). Hirnpotentialänderungen bei Willkürbewegungen und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschaftspotential und reafferente Potentiale. Pflügers Archiv, 1–17.
Lau, H. C., Rogers, R. D., Haggard, P., & Passingham, R. E. (2004). Attention to intention. Science, 303, 1208–1210.
Lavazza, A., & De Caro, M. (2010). Not so fast. On some bold neuroscientific claims concerning human agency. Neuroethics, 3(1), 23–41.
Levy, Y. (2013). Intentional action first. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91(4), 705–718.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–566.
Libet, B. (2005). Mind time. The temporal factor in consciousness. Harvard University Press.
Libet, B., Wright, E. W., & Gleason, C. A. (1982). Readiness-potentials preceding unrestricted “spontaneous” vs. pre-planned voluntary acts. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 54(3), 322–335.
Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106(Pt 3), 623–642.
Logan, G. D., & Crump, M. J. (2010). Cognitive illusions of authorship reveal hierarchical error detection in skilled typists. Science, 330(6004), 683–686.
Maoz, U., Rutishauser, U., Kim, S., Lee, D., & Koch, C. (2013a). Predeliberation activity in prefrontal cortex and striatum and the prediction of subsequent value judgment. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 225.
Maoz, U., Shengxuan, Y., Ross, I. B., Mamelak, A. N., & Koch, C. (2013b). Predicting action content on-line and in real time before action onset – An intracranial human study. In Advances in neural information processing systems 25: 26th annual conference on neural information processing systems (pp. 872–880). Red Hook.
Maoz, U., Yaffe, G., Koch, C., & Mudrik, L. (2019). Neural precursors of decisions that matter—An ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice. eLife, 8, e39787.
Marmodoro, A. (2022). What’s dynamic about causal powers? A black box! In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Martens, J., & Roelofs, L. (2019). Implicit coordination: Acting quasi-jointly on implicit shared intentions. Journal of Social Ontology, 4(2), 93–120.
Mayr, E. (2022). Freedom of the will and rational abilities. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Mele, A. R. (1992). Springs of action. Oxford University Press.
Mele, A. R. (1995). Autonomous agents. Oxford University Press.
Mele, A. R. (2010). Effective intentions. The power of conscious will. Oxford University Press.
Mele, A. R. (2018). Free will, moral responsibility, and scientific epiphenomenalism. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2536.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority; an experimental view. Harpercollins.
Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167–202.
Moore, J. W., Wegner, D. M., & Haggard, P. (2009). Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Consciousness and Cognition, 18(4), 1056–1064.
Mylopoulos, M., & Pacherie, E. (2017). Intentions and motor representations: The Interface challenge. Review of philosophy and psychology. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 8(2), 317–336.
Nachev, P., & Hacker, P. (2014). The neural antecedents to voluntary action: A conceptual analysis. Cognitive Neuroscience, 5(3–4), 193–208.
Nachev, P., & Husain, M. (2010). Action and the fallacy of the ‘internal’: Comment on Passingham et al. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(5), 193–194.
Nahmias, E. (2014). Is free will an illusion? Confronting challenges from the modern mind sciences. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology (Freedom and responsibility) (Vol. 4, pp. 1–25). MIT Press.
Neal, D., Wood, W., Wu, M., & Kurlander, D. E. (2011). The pull of the past: When do habits persist despite conflict with motives? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(11), 1428–1437.
Norman, D. A., & Shallice, T. (1986). Attention to action: Willed and automatic control of behavior. In R. J. Davidson, G. E. Schwartz, & D. Shapiro (Eds.), Consciousness and self regulation: Advances in research (Vol. IV). Plenum Press.
Pacherie, E. (2008). The phenomenology of action: A conceptual framework. Cognition, 107(1), 179–217.
Pacherie, E. (2015). In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds.), Conscious intentions. The social creation myth. MIND Group.
Passingham, R. E., Bengtsson, S. L., & Lau, H. C. (2010). Medial frontal cortex: From self-generated action to reflection on one’s own performance. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(1), 16–21.
Pockett, S. (2006). The neuroscience of movement. In S. Pockett, W. Banks, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Does consciousness cause behavior? MIT Press.
Pockett, S., & Purdy, S. (2011). Are voluntary movements initiated preconsciously? The relationships between readiness potentials, urges and decisions. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong & L. Nadel (Eds.), Conscious will and responsibility: A tribute to Benjamin Libet (pp. 34–46). Oxford University Press.
Pockett, S., Banks, W. P., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.). (2006). Does consciousness cause behavior? MIT Press.
Pornpattananangkul, N., & Nusslock, R. (2015). Motivated to win: Relationship between anticipatory and outcome reward-related neural activity. Brain and Cognition, 100, 21–40.
Robinson, O. J., Frank, M. J., Sahakian, B. J., & Cools, R. (2010). Dissociable responses to punishment in distinct striatal regions during reversal learning. NeuroImage, 51(4), 1459–1467.
Roediger, H. M., Goode, M., & Zaromb, F. (2008). Free will and the control of action. In J. Baer, J. Kaufman, & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Are we free? Psychology and free will. Oxford University Press.
Roskies, A. L. (2010). How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition? Annual Review of Neuroscience, 33, 109–130.
Roskies, A., & Nichols, S. (2008). Bringing moral responsibility down to earth. Journal of Philosophy, 105(7), 371–388.
Rowe, J. B., Toni, I., Josephs, O., Franckoviak, R. S., & Passingham, R. E. (2000). The prefrontal cortex: Response selection or maintenance within working memory? Science, 288(5471), 1656–1660.
Sanfey, A. G., Loewenstein, G., McClure, S. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2006). Neuroeconomics: Cross-currents in research on decision-making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 108–116.
Schultze-Kraft, M., Birman, D., Rusconi, M., Allefeld, C., Görgen, K., Dähne, S., … Haynes, J. D. (2016). The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 113, 1080–1085.
Schurger, A. (2018). Specific relationship between the shape of the readiness potential, subjective decision time, and waiting time predicted by an accumulator model with temporally autocorrelated input noise. eNeuro, 5(1), e0302.
Schurger, A., & Uithol, S. (2015). Nowhere and everywhere: The causal origin of voluntary action. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 6(4), 761–778.
Schurger, A., Sitta, J. D., & Dehaene, S. (2012). An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 109(42), E2904–E2913.
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality. An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge University Press.
Shariff, A., Schooler, J., & Vohs, K. (2008). The hazards of claiming to have solved the hard problem of free will. In J. Baer, J. Kaufman, & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Are we free? Psychology and free will. Oxford University Press.
Shepherd, J. (2014). The contours of control. Philosophical Studies, 170, 395–411.
Shepherd, J. (2017). Skilled action and the double life of intention. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 170(3), 395–411.
Shibasaki, H., & Hallett, M. (2006). What is the Bereitschaftspotential? Clinical Neurophysiology, 117(11), 2341–2356.
Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127–190.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Nadel, L. (Eds.). (2011). Conscious will and responsibility: A tribute to Benjamin Libet. Oxford University Press.
Skinner, B. F. (1948). “Superstition” in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168–272.
Slobounov, S., Hallett, M., & Newell, K. M. (2004). Perceived effort in force production as reflected in motor-related cortical potentials. Clinical Neurophysiology, 115(10), 2391–2402.
Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J., & Haynes, J.-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11, 543–545.
Soon, C. S., He, A. H., Bode, S., & Haynes, J.-D. (2013). Predicting free choices for abstract intentions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 110(5), 6217–6222.
Steward, H. (2022). Laws loosened. In Powers, time and free will. Springer, this volume.
Travers, E., Khalighinejad, N., Schurger, A., & Haggard, P. (2020). Do readiness potentials happen all the time? NeuroImage, 206, 116286.
Trevena, J. A., & Miller, E. K. (2010). Brain preparation before a voluntary action: Evidence against unconscious movement initiation. Consciousness and Cognition, 19(1), 447–456.
Ulrich, R., Nitschke, J., & Rammsayer, T. (2006). Perceived duration of expected and unexpected stimuli. Psychological Research, 70(2), 77–87.
Verleger, R., Haake, M., Baur, A., & Śmigasiewicz, K. (2016). Time to move again: Does the Bereitschaftspotential covary with demands on internal timing? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 642.
Vul, E., Harris, P., Winkielman, P., & Pashler, H. (2009). Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(3), 274–290.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press.
Funding
S. B. and M. D. C. benefitted from the PRIN grant 20175YZ855 from the Italian government. S.B. further benefitted from a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France), with the financial support of the French State, programme “Investissements d’avenir” managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+). M. D. C. further benefitted from the project ‘Dinamiche pubbliche della paura e cittadinanza inclusiva’ financed by Università Roma Tre in the framework of the call ‘Azione 4: azione sperimentale di finanziamento a progetti di ricerca innovativi e di natura interdisciplinare’.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bonicalzi, S., De Caro, M. (2022). How the Libet Tradition Can Contribute to Understanding Human Action Rather than Free Will. In: Austin, C.J., Marmodoro, A., Roselli, A. (eds) Powers, Time and Free Will. Synthese Library, vol 451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-92485-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92486-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)