Libet’s Half a Second

Abstract

The demands of some contemporary neurophysiologists to revise the legal systems in the sense of cancellation of the concepts such as guilt, responsibility and free will, are based on the experiments which are supposed to prove that human consciousness is always behindhand with reality and that everything which is the content of consciousness, arises initially unconsciously in the brains – and finally that we people are completely determined. Our intention is to show that such experiments in their conceptualisation and implementation are not sufficient to be the base for aforementioned statements – which are already included in ideological presumptions of the experiments.We are going to examine in detail the experiments of Benjamin Libet, which have become a kind of constant as a reference against the human free will. We will try to show that opposition between Libet and his critics is just fictitious. They both base on the same ideological foundation. The real issue is namely the opposition between Libet's “dualism” and deterministic materialism of some of his critics.As a solution of this awkward situation we see the need to take in account the field of human experience in a shape and extent it is accessible to us. Exactly this is important for research of phenomena like consciousness and free will – to stay within the boundaries of the actual! It is true that Libet tried to include the consciousness into experiments but he reduced it to something which is not a reflection of the whole conscious experience. He reduced consciousness to a part of some mechanism which suits the design and purpose of his experiments.