Q&A: Haynes Experiments
Haynes Experiments
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to know what the Rabbi thinks about the Haynes experiments, which showed that it is possible to predict whether a person will choose the right button or the left one by looking at unconscious neural activity in two different areas of the brain, which predicted whether the subjects were about to press the left button or the right button.
Moreover, he found that this activity occurred seven to ten seconds before the person made a conscious decision to press the given button.
Answer
I don’t know what the Haynes experiments are. Maybe you mean Libet? I wrote about this at length in my book The Science of Freedom, and showed why they are not at all relevant to the discussion, and even after all the improvements they still will not be relevant. In addition, I wrote there that in my view, if they did a similar experiment on choosing instead of picking (as Libet did), they would discover that prediction is impossible. A year after my book came out, a large-scale experiment was conducted and got exactly those results. There is a lecture about this by Liad Mudrik:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%97%D7%A7%D7%A8-%D7%94%D7%97%D7%93%D7%A9-%D7%A2%D7%9C-%D7%91%D7%97%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%94-%D7%97%D7%95%D7%A4%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%AA