Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet [' bɛndʒəmɪn ' lɪbət ] ( born April 12, 1916 in Chicago, Illinois, † July 23, 2007 in Davis, California ) was an American physiologist.
Life
Libet studied until 1936 at the University of Chicago physiology and a doctorate in 1939 in this subject. After working at various American universities, he was from 1949 until his retirement Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. 1956/57, he traveled to Canberra to research there together with John Eccles.
In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Virtual Psychology.
Libet experiment and free will
Awareness about the professional audience also gained Libet early 1980s due to a known as the " Libet experiment " experiment to measure the timing of conscious decisions on actions and their motor implementation. This sparked a controversial discussion about possible conclusions about the freedom of the human will.
Libet himself was an advocate of free will, but he zubilligte only a veto function. By this he meant the ability to suppress emerging unconscious impulses to act on moral considerations. He pleaded also for indeterminism, whom he regarded as a condition of free will.
Individual voices argue that Libet's experiments unmasked the free will as an illusion and Libet just do not dare to accept the full consequences of his results. Many philosophers, however, point out that Libet's experiments were not designed for the exploration of free will, are still capable of methodically. Libet himself admitted that his position on free will is shaped by personal conviction and goes beyond what can be scientifically justified by its results.