Libet’s Experiments and Free Will

Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments, which showed that brain activity precedes the awareness of the intention to carry out simple voluntary motor acts, have forced philosophers to reexamine free will.  Many have taken Libet’s experiments to confirm incompatibilist hard determinist accounts of free will, in which free will is an illusion, or at best compatibilist accounts, in which free will is not what we commonly intuit it to be.  However, others, including Libet himself, have reconciled experimental results with libertarian incompatibilist accounts of freedom.  In this blog post, I present an interpretation of Libet’s experiment which reconciles his experiment with libertarian freedom.  (This is fairly long)