Episode 118

The third episode in a series discussing free will with Mark Taylor. Mark continues to talk about storytelling and narrative as ways of retrospectively making sense of events. We then go on to discuss Benjamin Libet's neuroscience experiments on voluntary muscle movement and their implications for the free will debate. Mark argues that even if the brain is capable of initiating actions before we consciously "decide" to do them, the notion of free will is not altogether lost. He invokes the ideas of philosophers Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, starting to explain some fascinating experiments involving the human field of vision, blindspots, etc. which undermine the idea of a "Cartesian theatre" from which a centre of consciousness operates.

---

• free will
• determinism
• Benjamin Libet
• Libet's free will experiments
• "You are Not Your Mind: Awareness knows before brain" (The Libet Experiment) [video]
• Sam Harris
• S. Harris, Free Will (2012)
• homunculus
• Daniel Dennett
• Cartesian theatre
• field of view
• (optical) blindspot
• flamboyant cuttlefish (Metasepia pfefferi)