A critique on the falsification of free will by using Libet-style experiments

Xavier Meulders
E-mail: xavier.meulders[at]gmail.com
Abstract: From the late 20th century onwards, the idea of a free conscious will which we tend
to attribute to each rational human being is coming under serious pressure. It seems that with
the experiments of the psychologist Benjamin Libet and, more recently, John-Dylan Haynes,
the idea of free conscious will has to sing its final swan song. But if the idea of free will might
be a dogmatic relic from pre-scientific times, then this also counts for the famous proverb that
science always ought to have the right on a last, final judgement. In this paper, we will
examine both the 'weak' and 'hard' problem of experiments conducted in the positivist spirit of
Libet and Haynes. Do the experiments have much explanatory power? What about the issue
of causality and predictability? Can conscious experience be naturalized to its physical
substratum? And what about the nature of deliberate action? These are the main questions
that will be addressed in this paper.
In most contemporary debates on the issue of free will, the paradigm of physicalist
reductionism seems to conquer the minds and hearts of most scientists, and even a huge range
of philosophers. The latter is of course a pure embarrassment, since it ought to be one of the
ultimate tasks of philosophy never to lose its critical eye on the (recent) discoveries of the
positivist sciences, since positivism itself is a metatheoretical framework as well, that should
(and could !) severely be put into question.
In these reductionist times of scientism, as F.A. Hayek would have called it, the danger
seems to come from the current attempts of so-called neurobiology, trying to convince both
the scientific researcher and the interested layman that our current conception of free will is
nothing more but a premodern relic, stemming out of mystical traditions such as folk
psychology, or even religious beliefs, that cannot be sustained by the current discoveries in
neuroscience. It seems of course quite obvious that physical determinism seems to be a
welcome ally of already existing forms of cultural and/or anthropological determinism,
which states that each person is an object pushed and thrown in a pinball machine between
different forms of empirical parameters as income inequality, discrimination, Western
cultural prejudices, etc. ; factors, of course, that should be dealt with by implementing
extensive government programmes. Physical determinism also endorses this paradigm, and
some moral philosophers therefore even concluded albeit by using a non sequitur - that
our concept of personal liability, as it is widely used as an indispensable key concept in
most moral and legal theories and frameworks, should be abolished as well: if human beings
are nothing but bundles of matter determined by certain causal processes, then we could not
hold them accountable for anything they do. And yes, some scientists and philosophers
therefore even maintain that we should re-edit the whole corpus of Western legislation in
order to reduce the whole judicial investigation of guilt versus innocence to the pragmatic
questions which physical stimuli could be the most effective in order to transform the
criminals mind into something rather desirable by society, whatever that means.
How counter-intuitive the paradigm of scientistic (not scientific) physicalism may seem, and
how spurious the conclusions they draw from their investigations may be, it is nevertheless a
paradigm on the popular move, that seems very attractive to the latest generation of
psychological and social engineers applying to get a new job in order to implement their mad

behaviouristic ideas. But being a counterintuitive idea of course cannot count as a proof for its
intellectual and conceptual error. A more profound philosophical investigation is needed in
order to refute the intellectual heirs of B.F. Skinner and their dream of a society built along
the model of Walden Two.
I.

A brief overview of the used paradigm from Libet to now

The dream of a determinist view on the human kind first appeared on the philosophical scene
with the refreshed interest in atomistic explanations and descriptions of reality, which was
due to the final collapse of scholastic Aristotelian philosophy around the 14th century. Thomas
Hobbes, for instance, wrote of humankind not as a being guided by his reason or virtues, but
instead driven by immediately present emotions, passions and external causes. The 18 th
century philosophers conceived of the same human being as someone, or rather: something,
without an inherent, agent-relative telos, but instead a mechanical framework, hence
seducing thinkers such as Jullien Offray De la Mettrie to write treatises titled as LHomme
Machine (Man a Machine)
But the materialist universe, that already by the 19 th finally overthrew the idea of a divine
entity that even by someone as Isaac Newton ought to be needed as a first efficient cause to
put the universe into motion, still had to cope with the folk psychological idea of a first
cause in deliberate human action, i.e. the idea that there would exist something as a free
will, conceived by the materialists as a remnant of ancient thinking and definitely in need of
an immaterial soul in order to exist.
The 20th century with its rise in experimental psychology and the soaring interest for
research fields such as the cognitive sciences who finally detached themselves from the
philosophical (read as: speculative) faculties to whom they once belonged - could finally
give the fatal blow to the illusion of free will. This job seemed to have been done by the
notorious Libet-experiments, conducted in the early 1980s by the Californian psychologist
Benjamin Libet.
The setting of the experiment was quite simple1: the participants of the experiments were
sitting in front of a clock the Libet clock on which a red spot would turn clockwise with
a certain speed. The participants were then asked to choose to press a button at a certain
moment, which they may deliberately chose. Meanwhile, the participants were wired to a
number of electronic devices a rather technical issue on which I wont further elaborate for
present philosophical purposes that recorded the stimuli occurring in the brain while
performing the acts of conscious awareness, choosing and actually pressing the button.
Libet, then, famously argued that 0.5 second before actually pressing the button, there already
occurred an intensified neural activity which he called the readiness potential. The conscious
awareness of actually intending to press the button, then, occurred something like 0.2 second
before the action. Hence, the simplified scheme of Libets conclusions:

For a clearer overview of the Libet experiment, including an animation of the Libet clock, see
http://www.blutner.de/philom/consc/consc.html

Nevertheless, Libet made a modest attempt to uphold the idea of free will, by introducing the
concept of a veto right of the will: although the readiness potential seems to determine the
outcome of our actual decision, Libet argued that there nevertheless must exist a certain point
in time were conscious will can, indeed, deliberately choose not to follow the motoric input
provided by the readiness potential. However, this Libetian deus ex machina cannot count as a
staunch concept to preserve the idea of free will, since it is in fact the theoretical framework
of Libet-style experiments altogether that appears to be rather questionable.
Moreover, the Libet-experiment has been conducted again quite recently with more advanced
techniques by professor J.-D. Haynes, leading to the conclusion that the idea of a conscious
veto right is an abundant entity that could be easily ignored without losing explanatory
power2.
II.

The weak problem of the paradigm of Libet-style experiments: the enigma of

causal explanation

Both Libet and Haynes (hereafter abbreviated to LH) work within the explanatory
framework of, what we may call, linear causality. In short, linear causality presupposes
nothing else but the existence of a linear time continuum in which a certain cause A generates
or causes an event B. In such a case, the causal relation is linear, since for each causal
process A B, A is considered to be a sufficient reason leading inevitably to B, and in which
B always is a passive outcome of a certain cause A. Consider for example a wet street (B)
after a rainy day (A): the rain is sufficient (though, evidently, not necessary) reason for the
street to be wet, and the wetness of the street is an inevitable (deterministic) outcome of the
rainfall.
Now, according to LH, the same could count for free will: a certain motoric input (neural
states) leads inevitably to a certain mental state B (pushing the button or not). Now, here
already lies the first problem, which is even the weakest one of the whole LH-setting. As far
as linear causality is concerned, the word inevitable as I used it is not wholly
unambiguous. For the concept of necessary outcome is of course an empirical statement,
but if there is one thing that the history of the philosophy of science reveals is, then it is
exactly the fact that there does not exist an apodictic category of necessary outcome in the
empirical method. Hence, we rather ought to speak of gradations of plausibility, cf. the
paradigm of verificationism. In the case of the rain causing wet streets, we have indeed very
strong evidence that - seen the wet nature of rain drops and the general tendency of concrete
2

See John-Dylan Haynes et all., Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain, Nature
Neuroscience 11 (2008), p. 543 545 . For a short press release by the Max PlanckInstitute where the
experiment was conducted, see
http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2008/pressRelease2008041
4/index.html

and cobble-stones (materials by which most streets are paved) to be impermeable that rain
wet streets. We observe a certain amount of times X1, X2, X3, X4, - that rain, indeed,
does deliver wet streets as a result. But apodictically sure as in the case of the sum that two
and two always equals four we can never be, of course: there is still the hypothetical
possibility that once in a time streets will be dry after a rain shower, e.g. due to improved
drainage systems.
But whereas in the case of streets becoming wet, we indeed do have a large amount of
certainty (or, as we may say, confirmation) that this will be (say, in 99.9% of the cases rain
wet streets), what about the hypothesis as held by LH that a certain brain state will lead
to this or that behavioural outcome? Well, even in Hayness practically improved
experiment, Dr Determinist has to confess that in only 60% of the cases, he was able to
correctly predict whether the images on this or that fMRI-scan would lead to an action with
the right or left finger. And then the question may arise: is a 60%-level of prediction really
that much significant? It is of course up to the scientific world to decide whether or not a
certain hypothesis has been tested enough in order to gain credibility after all, this is not a
formal criterion on which the philosopher can deliver a useful contribution but Id certainly
doubt the theoretical unambiguity of, say, Newtonian physics if in only 60% of the cases, a
heavy object will fall back to the ground when it is thrown up, whereas in 40% of the cases,
the object may as well fly up in the air
This shows again the important distinction that should be made between sufficient and
necessary condition in order for each process occurring in time (in section III Ill further
elaborate on the topic of non-causal processes), including causal events. Take again the
example of wet streets into consideration: we stated that when it is raining, then the streets
will (again, almost) inevitably become wet. But then suppose that we walk through the street
on a sunny summer day, and notice that the streets are actually wet. One would not be really
persuaded that this is due to heavy rainfall. And indeed, after investigating into the causes of
the streets wetness, we conclude that its cause was, in fact, an industrious housewife
emptying a bucket of filthy water on the street after cleaning her house. As a result, there is
not one single necessary condition that can lead to the streets wetness: there are different
potential causes that may render it that way.
Tracing back deliberate human action to an alleged inevitable neural cause, would hence blur
the important distinction between necessary and sufficient condition. There may be other
causes as well, for example, deliberate action itself. Of course, a counterfactual argument to
mine might well be that neural stimulation is indeed a sufficient reason for conscious will to
emerge, but then of course one would not leave the framework of linear causality, which Ill
try to refute in section III.
Now, let us turn to some other weak problems of causal explanation. Let us sum up some
necessary (i.e. metaphysical) conditions for causality:
1) Temporal precedence: a certain event or cause A must always precede in time and
space in order for an event B to happen. Moreover, the spatiotemporal connection
between A and B should be obvious enough in order to make A a plausible cause for
B. E.g.: the famous example of a butterfly flapping with its wings in the woods
somewhere in, say, the Flemish Pajottenland, and causing a storm on the Pacific
Ocean. In this case, both the distance in time and space are far too huge to consider the
butterflys flapping even as a possible (sufficient or necessary) cause for the storm.

2) Constant connection: cf. the remarks made in condition (1): the connection between
A and B should be constant enough, inasmuch that one observes A, then B will happen
as well. This condition is also linked to condition (3)
3) Predictability: causality should be sharply distinguished from the idea of correlation.
Whereas there may be a correlation between the chilly temperature outside, and the
man walking down the street wearing a woollen coat but no necessary causal
connection; this connection is (quite) necessary between a cigarette butt smouldering
and the house catching fire. This implies, by the very nature of causality as a modal
relationship, that causal relationships are not events qualified by pure randomness.
Instead, all physical causal relationships are events that could be (hypothetically)
repeated. For example, by inductive reasoning we obtain the general law that when we
drop a stone, then it will fall (X1, X2, X3, general law). But on the other hand,
we could also apply a so-called deductive-nomological model and state that, taken into
account the general law and this particular stone Im currently holding in a firm grip,
that it will fall. Hence, we can predict, with a high amount of probability, that the stone
will fall.
Now, does LHs physicalist thesis meet these criteria? This seems to be far from obvious.
Concerning the criterion of so-called temporal precedence, we have to acknowledge that
there seems at first sight, indeed, reasons to accept that this is indeed the case: the readiness
potential occurs at a certain time t1, and is followed by a conscious state at a time t2 .
But what about the conditions of constant connection and predictability? As already pointed
out above, John-Dylan Haynes himself had to confess that he could only reach a degree of
predictability of 60%. But what does this rather low degree of predictability imply? Of course,
one could argue and say that this is due to some technical defaults of the measurement
devices, and once these technical problems are solved, then one could obtain a (theoretical)
probability degree of, say, 99.9%; and reach the same explanatory heights as Newtonian
physics.
Again, this argument does not seem very convincing. Scientists as Galileo and Newton in
their time were able to obtain much higher degrees of probability in order to verify their
physical theories, although the scientific methods, skills and devices were for quite obvious
reasons much less advanced in the 17th century than nowadays. And in fact, both for Newton
as for Haynes, exactly the same thing is investigated: the causal relationship between a certain
physical event A, leading to a mental event B. And of course, Haynes and others cannot refer
to an abundant entity such as consciousness or free will, which would require the
objective peering into anothers mind. Not only is this both a theoretical and practical
impossibility, but once we would even accept the existence of something like conscious free
will, we would abandon the paradigm of linear causality altogether. This is of course
something Haynes would not even consider doing so, but we will.

III.

The strong problem of the paradigm of Libet-style experiments: meaning

correlates, the error of causal explanation and the reduction of freely deliberated
processes to bivalent options.

So far, we only discussed the LH-paradigm from within a linear-causal approach. But what
we did in the previous section, was only a kind of skinning the fur of the dead sheep: going
through the flesh op to its very bones, is a more demanding job than that, and is the task that
will be set forth in this section.
To resume the whole point, to which this entire essay can be reduced, in one single aphorism,
we may simply state that the entire project to naturalize consciousness (and free will) to its
physical substratum, is a huge category mistake. As well conclude this essay, one therefore
does not need to adopt a dualist (sometimes dubbed a schizophrenic) framework in order to
explain free will: both substance and property dualism make the same mistake to explain one
(be it the physical or mental) realm of consciousness by referring to the former. But we will
discuss this later on.
What is needed, is a phenomenological approach to the problem of free will, and it is
(again) Edmund Husserl who therefore provides us with the solid rock on which our
Church shall be built. A central recurrent theme in Husserlian phenomenology is that of socalled material or regional ontology3. A material ontology should be distinguished from a
formal ontology: the latter could be best described as a formal theory of being and its
categories, or general metaphysics as it is understood since Aristotle. A material ontology, on
the other hand, is a highest region (therefore it could also be named ontological region) of
generality in which the objects of a particular science are investigated. In Ideas I and II ,
Husserl distinguishes between three material ontologies, namely Nature, Consciousness and
Culture. For example: a certain psychic event, such as joy or sadness, can for very obvious
reasons not be found into the physical world, but it exists inasmuch that it belongs to another
ontological region, i.e. consciousness. Or take a less trivial example: not only do we perceive
things, objects around us, in their different shades of colour, but we also maintain (at least
when one adheres to a realist account of it) that there exists (not in a Platonic heaven of
course) a certain ontology of the manifold of colours we can perceive in the world, and
attribute to it a general term: blue-ness, red-ness, yellow-ness, and so forth, than can even be
syntactically subdivided. E.g., the realm of blueness can be subdivided in other ontological
categories of indigo-ness, marine blue-ness, deep blue-ness, having the blue-ness, etc. (I
suppose you get the picture where Im pointing to) Hence, when we perceive a certain
(yellow) object, we say that the universal of yellowness is instantiated in the object itself.
For present purposes I wont go into deeper detail on the nature of universals, but want even
the nominalist reader to be convinced of something rather peculiar: in our daily language we
continuously speak about those attributes colour, brightness, shape, etc. but in what way
do they exist ? Since according to the physicalist paradigm, qualities such as colours cannot
exist, because they are nothing but manifestations of the physical world: in the physical
world, there exists no such a thing as a colour yellow, but only a certain set of light waves
that can be objectively measured. So for the Husserlian, the material ontology of, say, colours
would only hold when applied to a regional ontology of Consciousness, since it is only in
the world of consciousness-having creatures that things such as colours may exist.
It is of the utmost importance to stress that Husserls distinction between the threefold regions
may not seduce one to commit a certain kind of reductionism: it is not the case that there is
one region that would be ontologically supervenient on the other. They are three distinct,
irreducible realms. Of course, the distinction that Husserl has set forth so far does not come
3

For a very clear discussion of Husserls account of the regional ontologies, see David Woodruff Smith, Husserl,
London: Routledge, 2007, p. 142 148

out of thin air, but was introduced for very clear epistemological reasons that are inherent to
the phenomenological method, and are presented in his later works such as the Crisis of the
European Sciences and The Origin of Geometry , both published in the late 1930s. Herein,
Husserl unfolds his idea of the life-world (Lebenswelt), an epistemological idea that has
been unfortunately hijacked by a bunch of mostly French murky continental
philosophers, and is nowadays usually related to existentialist phenomenology (a
contradiction in terms). In its original (Husserlian) meaning, however, the idea of life-world
means the following: consider again the physicalist approach to the existence of colours. As
noted, the physicalist denies the existence of colours as we perceive them to be (red, blue,
yellow, etc.), and in the physicalists world, there only exists things such as light waves etc.
But this vision cannot be consistently maintained from a pure epistemological point of view!
How can the physicalist reasonably argue that this bundle of light waves produces the colour
red, without falling back to his own intentional (!) awareness of that very colour? He simply
cannot do that. Either he has to say: this bundle of waves A = colour B; but then he would
already have to admit that he (and only he? But who would take that for granted?) has
access to the information that that particular bundle means red. Epistemologically even
more ridiculous would be of course the claim that the colour red, even as an emergent
property, does not exist at all. As a result, even for the natural sciences an investigation into
the nature of the [inter(subjective)] life-world should be an epistemic starting point, for the
methodological reasons just explained above. Obviously, this does not imply that Husserl
or the author of this text would be committed to a kind of ontological idealism, in which
nature would be reducible to some conscious apprehension of it. This would namely again get
us involved into the paradigm of dualism, and lead us to the (seemingly) inevitable chickenor-egg-problem. Moreover, if one would neglect the primordiality of phenomenological
(inter)subjectivity, the frightening gaze of dangerous psychologism is again looming just
around the corner: we would have to justify the existence or emergence of ideal entities (one
must not only think of subjective qualities such as colours, but also of more epistemic notions
such as geometrical figures or the laws of logic) by reducing them to their physical
substratum, but this would inevitably lead, as pointed out above, to an epistemological
contradiction: one simply cannot reduce conscious experience to its psychophysical
underlying network, without first qualitatively designating what those conscious experiences
actually are or are about (intentionality).
The Husserlian account of regional ontologies could be, for present purposes, best be read
together with his conception of philosophy of language and the idea of ideal content:
according to Husserl, a sharp fourfold distinction must be made between a) the linguistic sign,
b) the intentional act, c) the meaning of the act and d) the outside world. This could be made
clear with an easy example: when I perceive a tree, Im immediately aware of it being present
over there in the field. However, I can turn away from the tree, but still think of it by using my
memory skills, and as such, the tree in the field can burn down meanwhile, but my intentional
content cannot burn down. On the other hand, when I say or refer to that tree, Im implicitly
acknowledging that the tree itself is an instantiation of a universal of tree-ness. Hence, the
meaning of the tree should not be confused with its linguistic sign (the word tree), which can
also be expressed in other words, such as Baum, boom, trd, etc.
So where do these Husserlian ideas about regional ontologies and ideal meanings lead us to?
This may not seem to be very obvious in an attempt to save the idea of free, deliberate will;
but the connection with it is more evident than it may seem at first sight. For the LH-thesis
maintains that there is a causal relationship between physical event A and mental action B. Let
us, for a very last time, this idea of causality be taken for granted, and considered to be true.

What, then, does the physical correlate of consciousness, which causes certain mental
events, actually mean? In the case of light waves causing colours this is still obvious: there
is a meaning correlate between the conscious-intentional state of colour awareness on the one
hand, and its physical substratum on the other. But this seems very unlikely to be the case.
Unless
Unless one of course keeps on sticking with the whole setting of LHs quite treacherous
experiments!! And this setting is quite reductionist. It is as if it is taken for granted that each
deliberately chosen action is nothing but making a choice between just two possible options.
In LHs framework, the options are very simple: lifting a finger, or not lifting a finger;
pressing a button, or not pressing a button; lifting my right finger, or lifting my left finger, etc.
Now we may say and for explanatory reasons Ill even not take the quite suspicious 60%predictability as discussed in section II of this paper into consideration! that there are
actually meaning correlates between a certain kind of neural activity, and the action that
will happen. If Mr Haynes observes either a blue or yellow colour on his computer screen,
which is plugged on the experimental person, then he may either say that he will lift up his
right or left finger a few seconds later.
But this reduces the whole realm of human action to a kind of sequel of so-called bivalent
acts! The principle of bivalence is most widely known as a logical principle: a statement about
a certain state of affairs must be either true or false. Moreover, there is no third option given
(tertium non datur): either A must be true, and then B is false, or vice versa. But it can never
be the case that both A and B are true, or that both A and B are false. So take as a very simple
example: Edmund Husserl taught philosophy courses at the University of Freiburg, then we
can check whether he did or not. It seems that he did, which means that our proposition is in
accordance (or correspondence) with reality, so we may say that this proposition is true. But
suppose that we do not know anything about Husserls life, but we know at least that he was
not appointed professor at the University of Munich. Then the proposition Edmund Husserl
taught philosophy courses at the University of Munich would be rendered false. But
although we are now strictly obeying the laws of logic, we still do not know where he did
teach philosophy courses, since there were quite a lot of philosophy faculties in Germany in
the early 20th century (he could have been teaching in Berlin, Jena, Marburg, Kln,
Heidelberg, Gttingen (which he did), etc. ) .
This example implies that human action is always more than choosing from a range of
bivalent options (doing A, or not doing A; either doing A, or doing B) . While it is logically
and descriptively true that I am currently, say, not doing my dishes; then this logically true
proposition does not tell us anything about what I am actually doing.
In fact, in daily human action, the principle of bivalence in this case defined as: choosing
from a range of only two certain given options, no more nor less is rather an exception in
doing things. In short, Libet and Haynes opted for investigating one of the most primitive
kinds of human behaviour, as if they were merely investigating the reactions of bacteria to a
certain set of stimuli. In real life, mans way of choosing goes ways beyond this primitive
paradigm of lifting my finger or not. In fact, even when we may suppose that Haynes
would ever succeed in falsifying the notion of free will by actually 'proving' that the act of
lifting up one's finger is determined by certain neural events which, seen the objections
made in section II seems not much plausible even then its only a very partial refutation of
the idea of this concept.

Maybe this could be best illustrated by using an idea delivered by medieval scholastic moral
philosophy (oh yes, the dark ages...). Authors such as St Thomas Aquinas insisted to make a
distinction between the finis operis and finis operantis of a certain moral act. In short, the
latter is the ultimate moral goal of a certain acting subject, whereas the former concept
evaluates the moral goodness of the act itself. Hence, the finis operis is act-relative, whereas
the finis operantis is agent-relative. Take as a quite heroic example Robin Hood stealing from
the rich, and giving it to the poor and exploited. In this case, his ultimate goal ('finis
operantis') could be described as 'obtaining social justice', whereas the means to reach this
('finis operis') is stealing. But since this is not an essay on ethics or political philosophy, the
reader may make up his own mind about the good- and rightfulness of Robin Hood's both
fines.
But what could the philosophy of mind learn from this distinction? Well, we may argue that
each deliberate human action always involves this type of distinction. Take, as an example,
writing a dissertation: writing a dissertation is, in this case, the 'finis operantis' of the whole
action. But there are several 'fines operis' involved in here: going to the library and borrowing
some books, searching for relevant articles and papers on the subject matter, starting the
computer, opening a new document, etc. These are all separated actions that must be framed
into the ultimate goal of the finis operantis.
Genuine deliberate (free) action always involve the use of the setting of a finis operantis, or
ultimate goal. The reason why this distinction can shed a new light on Haynes's nave
rejection of free will is simply because we even do not need neuroscience to prove that
Haynes's experiments with lifting fingers are quite irrelevant. Daily experience can show this.
Suppose that you're cutting a piece of paper with a pair of scissors, which for very obvious
reasons involves the use of your fingers (and again: getting the paper cut through is the 'finis
operantis' in this example). Does one really intentionally think at each step during this
process, in a continuous line, that now I have to lift up my thumb, and now I have to pull
down my middle finger and so on, and so forth in order to get the job done? Of course
not! One cuts immediately through the piece of paper without intentionally thinking at each
step about the physical bodily processes that are involved with it. Intentionality, in this
example, is immediately focused upon cutting the paper; not on the different bodily
movements of the fingers. So yes, Haynes and his determinst fellows are in fact trying to
predict the weather for the next coming two weeks by looking at an old-fashioned
thermometer in grandma's garden...
So far we have stressed the importance of the finis operantis in deliberate human action.
But suppose, clever genius as he is, that grandma's old thermometer did its job quite well, and
Haynes would be an almighty Laplacian demon who can predict each different kind of human
'teleological' behaviour (which may be the case, since a famous French proverb says that it is
in the old saucepans that one can cook the best4 ). Even then, Haynes would be doing nothing
else but performing a nice magic trick. For not only the amount of 'fines operis' is,
theoretically, infinite; but settling final goals is an infinite potentiality as well! But this
requires of course the final abandonment, not only of human action as a set of 'bivalent
options', but of its very predictability as well. Predictability, in fact, always requires the
theoretical assumption that there is a finite amount of possibilities or potentialities that could
be actualized. Consider a dice with an infinite amount of sides, which would take the form of
a geometrical ball. Although the amount of sides - fines operis - is infinite, one could still
make a mathematical formula calculating on which exact side the dice would fall. But even
4

C'est dans les vieilles casseroles qu'on fait les meilleurs plats.

this is not an adequate metaphor in order to illustrate the nature of human action, since
throwing the ball-formed dice would be still subject to the physical laws of gravity, speed, and
so on and so forth (hence the theoretical assumption that its outcome could still be calculated.
In order to get rid of this view, we have to further improve our view on human action.
Consider again our remarks on bivalence: It is possible that I am not at a certain place, say,
New York, on this very moment. But if I am not in New York, where, then, am I? Maybe in
Los Angeles? Maybe in London? Maybe in Madrid? Or a trip to Australia would also be nice
(or Nice, in Southern France, yes indeed!), seen the cold weather these days in Belgium. So
far, the amount of possible places where I could actually be, is infinite. But this still involves
the metaphor of the 'round dice', since one could indeed actually investigate on the place
where I am actually located. And suppose Mr Haynes finally snatched me in, say, Paris. But
then new questions arise: for what purpose am I visiting France's capital city? What kind of
attractions will I visit there? The Louvre Museum? The Eiffel Tower? The Moulin Rouge?
King Louis XIV's palace in Versailles? And then: wherefore? Why? What will I do next? And
so on, and so forth.
Once we abandon both the framework of bivalence and predictability, we could conceive
human deliberative action as an infinite process: not only the amount of potential actions that
could be done is infinite, its motivations are infinite as well!
So let us turn now to the problem of 'neural activity'. So far, we discussed the following topics
that are quite devastating for Haynes's theoretical setting:
1) the problem of 'meaning correlates', drawn from Husserl's account of regional
ontologies, between a certain neural activity or so-called 'readiness potential' on the
one hand, and a conscious outcome on the other hand.
2) The problem with Haynes's option to take only bivalent actions into consideration
3) Seen (2) that human action could not be conceived of as a mere choice between only
two options A and ~A or A and B, but should be instead be conceived of as an infinite
process in which an infinite amount of potentialities could be actualized, both on the
level of (subconscious) acts ('finis operis') and intentionally conscious acts (ultimate
goals; 'finis operantis')
Let us counter the quite simple scheme that is often used in the LH-paradigm (see section I of
this paper), with a new one that represents human deliberate action in a more accurate way:

This scheme definitely needs come clarification. First of all, seen our remarks on human
action as an infinite process, we conceive of the LH-thesis as a grave epistemological mistake,
since they take it for granted that they can lift out one single piece of a whole process of
human action, and put it in a linear one-dimensional schema. This is, given our remarks,
bluntly wrong, and in most all cases of deliberate human action, they even are not
investigating genuine free action (consider again the example of cutting a paper with a pair of
scissors: intentional aboutness simply does not occur on the level of lifting the fingers up and
down, but on the level of interaction with the paper!). In his magnificent essay The
Phenomenon of Freedom5, the Flemish philosopher and scientist Jos Verhulst points out to
the, widely misunderstood, ancient paradox of Zeno of Elea. In most contemporary
philosophy handbooks, the paradox is illustrated by using the story of a race between the
athletic Achilles and a slow turtle. The turtle may, seen his slowness, start first and runs (well
yes...) a certain distance d1. A few moments later say, a minute it is up to Achilles to start
his marathon. But according to Zeno, Achilles first has to catch up with the turtle by running
through d1, and when he finally arrives at the end of the distance d1, the turtle already
proceeded by making a new (smaller) distance d2, which Achilles again has to catch up, and
so on and so forth, up to the infinite. Conclusion, according to Zeno: Achilles can and will
never move past the slow turtle!
One may indeed laugh and ridicule the imagination of the ancient presocratic philosophers,
but of course, it was not Zeno's attempt to prove the impossibility of actual physical motion.
Its grain of truth lies on a more epistemological level: we conceive of motion as being a linear
5

Jos Verhulst, Het Verschijnsel Vrijheid, 56 p., publication forthcoming

process in which an object moves from a certain point A to another point Z, and in which the
objects passes through different observable points B, C, D, E, F, G, etc. But observation
requires that there are a finite amount of 'points' that can be actually 'seen', and this is not the
case at all: when one would observe the object at a certain point, say, K, it is already on
another point L, for the very reason that it is in motion: if the object could be actually
observed, than it would be (temporally) be stationary, which would of course contradict the
very nature of its being in motion. Hence derives the theoretical impossibility to 'observe' the
different points through which the object is moving, for it would imply a contradiction!
The reason why Zeno's paradox (and Verhulst's account of it) are of such a tremendous
importance, is because Haynes does conceive of human action (the object going from A to
Z) as being something that could be dissected and analysed in its different constituent parts!
And this would equally lead to the same contradiction as sketched above, since being
involved into such a process of human activity, requires the constant sequence of different
actions.
This is the reason why the scheme, as illustrated above, reveals a dynamic conception of free
will. Whereas it is simply nave and deceitful to consider the free will to be something that
could be investigated as a (bivalent) action, our conception as scheduled above takes the
thesis of human action as a sequence of different sorts of acts, or the process, into account.
One may be of course be misleadingly seduced to conceive of the green arrow going from
RP1 to CO1 as a kind of diagonal draw of the original linear LH-scheme, moreover since I
purposefully put CO1 on a point later in time (= the horizontal blue arrows on which both
physical and conscious activities occur). But the green arrow going from RP1 to CO1
may not be conceived of as a relation indicating causality! This is, indeed, just because human
action is a process; so CO1 is immediately followed by CO2 (read as: second conscious
state), and then CO3 (third conscious state), CO4, and so on and so forth. And the same also
holds for the infinite amount of physical readiness potentials (RP's): taken for granted that
each conscious event is preceded by a readiness potential, and seen the fact that deliberate
human action is a process, this amount is indeed infinite. But the (i.e. my) scheme which is,
how ingenious it may look like of course just a scheme, and in any case a reduction of
conscious activity, and hence quite deceptive: the reason why one may not conceive of RP1
CO1 , or RP2 CO2, and so on, is because of the already illustrated problem of meaning
correlates: there is in fact not a single reason why we should attribute a 'meaning correlate' to
RP1, RP2, or RP(n) . It might be well the case that the real meaning correlate must be found
between, say, RP1 and CO3. Or between RP2 and CO1. And so on, and so forth. And even
then, seen our discussion of the theoretical impossibility to dissolve human action into
isolated acts (as Haynes did), it is simply obsolete and impossible even to try to attribute such
a meaning correlate between the different RP's and their conscious pendants. Rather, it would
be more accurate to speak of a (meaningless) stream of physical events on the one hand,
and a meaningful stream of consciousness on the other. As such, each attempt to try to reduce
a certain conscious event or the idea of free will to its physical substratum, is nothing else but
a huge category mistake.
These meaning correlates are nevertheless a necessary condition in order to grasp the structure
of the physical and natural world. In our discussion on Husserls outline of the life-world we
already noted that without this very concept, even natural science would be rendered obsolete,
since it is, at least, an epistemological fallacy to think that we could ever gain any knowledge
about this world: the natural scientist at least has to take his life-world as a tacitly

acknowledged background into account. And even the physical world itself seems to be full of
intelligible meanings: not that we have any commitment to make any mystification about this
statement (as if the physical world could be studied as the expression of the Will of a certain
Divine Entity), but instead, we should conceive of the world as it is investigated, as being
more than an indefinable whole of kaleidoscopic chaos. For example: when one sees the
leaves of the trees turning into different shades of dark colours, then this means that it will be,
or that it already is, Autumn (not that the brown leaves cause the Autumn, of course). Or if a
smoke plume is observed, then this means that is has been caused by a fire. As it is very
unlikely that brown leaves will show up in the middle of April, or that the object on the roof
will fly up in the air, or that the smoke came out of thin air. The category of meaningfulness
is thus of a huge importance of the world for us to be appearing (as has been most notoriously
stressed by Immanuel Kant, with whose impositionist stance toward the a priori of causality
and necessity we are, however, not likely to concur), and we simply could not do without. But
once this meaning correlate between certain physical events cannot be found anymore, as is
the case for the physicalist trying to determine which particular physical neural event will
cause this or that particular conscious outcome, one should question the whole paradigm of
physical causality altogether.
Hence, since the meaning correlate is absent in our alleged causal explanation of
consciousness, then the reader should not be misled to read the time interval between a
conscious event and a readiness potential noted as (COn RPn) in our scheme as a
causal relation (cfr the condition of temporal precedence) between them but as events that
may occur at different points in time, but cannot be investigated due to this problem of
meaning correlates.
IV. A short note on the compatibalist versus incompatibilist debate, or why I am not a
libertarian.
For those who are acquainted with my writings and thoughts on political philosophy, there
really is no need to worry that I would have changed my opinion on these issues. The culprit
in this brief section are the so-called libertarians in the compatibalist/incompatibilist
discussion on free will. In short, incompatibilists maintain that the idea of free will and
physical determinism are not compatible, hence crediting an ontological priority to either the
mental, as libertarians do, or the physical, as determinists do. On the other hand are the
compatibalists, who maintain that both categories do not exclude one another.
In fact, it is again the whole paradigm that leads to those kind of debates that is spurious from
its very starting premises. Its main default? Dualism. For what both libertarians and
determinists share in these issues, is the dualist view that there exist two different,
ontologically distinct, realms. Hence libertarian philosophers of mind, such as Roderick
Chisholm, introduced with reminiscence of Aristotle the notion of a prime mover
unmoved as a first ontological category that puts the whole machine or chain of
mental/deliberate events in motion. But the determinst will of course reject that view due to
reasons of parsimony. As such, the whole debate tends to be stuck in an eternal rhetorical
game of cat and mouse, one side of the debate accusing the other that they introduce an
ontological category too much or too less to explain the existence of free will.
Working within the Husserlian-phenomenological framework we put forward in our
considerations, these struggles could be easily avoided. For the classification of different

'regional ontologies' does not imply this dualist view: taking intentional experience as a
starting point, does neither imply that it could be merely reduced to its physical substratum,
nor that the natural world would be a mere (ontological) correlate of the mental. They are in
fact all manifestations of one and the same world we observe and live in, although the
description of each ontological region requires its own method of investigation. Or as J.R.
Searle put it:
I do not think we are forced to either dualism or materialism. The point to remember is that
consciousness is a biological phenomenon like any other. It is true that it has special features,
most notably the feature of subjectivity, as we have seen, but that does not prevent
consciousness from being a higher-level feature of the brain in the same way that digestion is
a higher-level feature of the stomach, or liquidity a higher-level feature of the system of
molecules that constitute our blood. In short, the way to reply to materialism is to point out
that it ignores the real existence of consciousness. The way to defeat dualism is simply to
refuse to accept the system of categories that makes consciousness out as something
nonbiological, not a part of the natural world6
Indeed, once we get rid of the blurred distinction between 'the mental' and 'the physical' and
the cartesian riddle about how to cope with its interaction that has been inherited from the
dualist framework pervading contemporary epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of
mind; the method of a descriptive psychology or phenomenology is handed us as a powerful
tool to rigorously investigate on the issues of intentional consciousness and deliberate human
free will.

Acknowledgement: For many of the insights delivered in this essay, I am tremendously

indebted to Michal Bauwens and Tuur Demeester, two friends of mine working dedicatedly
within the same framework of metaphysical freedom and moreover: philosophical clarity and
truth. It was Michal who draw my attention to the idea of freely chosen human action as an
infinite and unpredictable process; whereas Tuur provided me with the scholastic light I
mentioned as well. Without their insightful comments, for which I want both to thank
gratefully, this paper would never have seen the (digital) daylight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haynes, John-Dylan et all., Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,
Nature Neuroscience 11 (2008), p. 543 545
Searle, John R., Mind, Language and Society, New York: Basic Books, 1999, 175 p.
Smith, David Woodruff; Husserl, London: Routledge, 2007, 467 p.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Phenomenological Approaches to SelfConsciousness, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/
6

See John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society, New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 51 52

Verhulst, Jos; Het Verschijnsel Vrijheid, 56 p., draft essay