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So in our current understanding of science, we can’t find the physical gap in which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts. Everything stated here is predicated on what we know at this moment in history, which will certainly look crude a millennium from now; however, at this point, no one can see a clear way around the problem of a nonphysical entity (free will) interacting with a physical entity (the stuff of the brain). But let’s say that you still intuit very strongly that you have free will, despite the biological concerns. Is there any way neuroscience can try to directly test for free will? In the 1960s, a scientist named Benjamin Libet placed electrodes on the heads of subjects and asked them to do a very simple task: lift their finger at a time of their own choosing. They watched a high-resolution timer and were asked to note the exact moment at which they “felt the urge” to make the move. Libet discovered that people became aware of an urge to move about a quarter of a second before they actually made the move. But that wasn’t the surprising part. He examined their EEG recordings—the brain waves—and found something more surprising: the activity in their brains began to rise before they felt the urge to move. And not just by a little bit. By over a second. (See figure on the following page.) In other words, parts of the brain were making decisions well before the person consciously experienced the urge.14 Returning to the newspaper analogy of consciousness, it seems that our brains crank away behind the scenes—developing neural coalitions, planning actions, voting on plans—before we receive the news that we’ve just had the great idea to lift a finger. Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?

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