¿Los experimentos de Libet niegan la existencia de la voluntad libre?
Resumen
En su laboratorio, Benjamin Libet les pidió a algunos participantes apretar un botón cuando lo decidieran. Pretendía medir, con un EEG, la secuencia entre el deseo de mover la muñeca, la activación del área motora cerebral y el movimiento. Los resultados parecen negar la voluntad libre: primero se da la actividad cerebral, luego el deseo consciente de mover la muñeca y, finalmente, el movimiento. Nuestro cerebro —y no nuestra voluntad— decidiría nuestras acciones. En este artículo cuestiono el aparato conceptual de tal explicación, haciendo énfasis en las nociones de voluntad, la relación mente-cuerpo y, sobre todo, la estructura de la conciencia.Descargas
Citas
Husserl, Edmund (2001 [c. 1900-1901]), Logical Investigations, vols. 1 y 2, Londres/Nueva York, Routledge.
Jacobson, John (2005), Undefeatable Rock, Paper, Scissors. Demonstration at Vision Sciences Symposium, Sarasota FL, mayo, citado en Sarah Robbins, John Symons y Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Nueva York, Routledge, p. 605.
James, William (1950 [c. 1890]), The Principles of Psychology, Nueva York, Dover Publications, 2 vols.
Kandel, Eric (2010), The Age of Insight. The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present, Nueva York, Random House.
Knobe, Joshua (2014), “Free will and the scientific vision”, en Edouard Machery y Elizabeth O’Neill (eds.), Current Controversies on Experimental Philosophy, Nueva York/Londres, Routledge, pp. 69-85.
Knobe, Joshua y Shaun Nichols (2011), “Free will and the bounds of the self ”, en Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Nueva York, Oxford University Press, versión en línea [http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/Free-Self.pdf].
Kornhuber, Hans Halmut y Lüdem Deecke (1965), “Hirnpotentialänderungen bei Willkürbewegungen und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschaftspotential und reafferente Potentiale”,Pflügers Arch, núm. 284, pp. 1-17.
Kriegel, Uriah (2009), Subjective Consciousness. A Representational Theory, Oxford/Nueva York, Oxford University Press.
Libet, Benjamin (1999), “Do we have free will?”, en Benjamin Libet, Antony Freeman y Keith Sutherland (eds.), The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will, Exter, Imprint Academic,pp. 47-58.
Libet, Benjamin (1965), “Cortical activation in conscious and unconscious experience”, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 9, núm. 1, pp. 77-86.
Libet, Benjamin, Curtis A. Gleason, Elwood W. Wright y Dennis K. Pearl (1983), “Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness- potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act”, Brain, vol. 106, núm. 3, pp. 623-642.
Llinás, Rodolfo (2002), I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Mele, Alfred (2009), Effective Intentions. The Power of Conscious Will, Nueva York, Oxford University Press.
Metzinger, Thomas (2003), Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Moore, George Edward (1903), Principia Ethica, versión en línea [http://fair-use.org/g-e-moore/principia-ethica], consultado: 2 de marzo de 2015.
Murphy, Nancy y Warren S. Brown (2007), Did My Neurons Make Me do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Nelson, Katherine (2003), “Narrative and the emergence of a consciousness of self ”, en Gary Fireman, Ted McVay Jr. y Owen Flanagan (eds.), Narrative and Consciousness. Literature, Psychology and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 17-36.
Nieuwenhuis, Sander, Jon Voogd y Christian von Huijzen (2008), The Human Central Nervous System, Heidelberg, Springer.
Olivares, Franscico A., Esteban Vargas, Claudio Fuentes, David Martínez-Pernía y Andrés Canales-Johnson (2015), “Neurophenomenology revisited: Second person methods for the study of human consciousness”, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, artículo 673, pp. 1-12 [doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00673].
Platt, Michael y Paul Glimcher (1999), “Neural correlates of decision variables in parietal cortex”, Nature, vol. 400, núm. 6741, pp. 233-238.
Pockett, Susan (2009), “Brain basis of voluntary control”, en William Banks (ed.), Encyclopedia of Consciousness, vol. 1, Oxford, UK, Pomona College/Academic Press/Elsevier, pp. 123-133.
Prinz, Jesse (2007), “All consciousness is perceptual”, en Brian P. McLaughlin y Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishing.
Ramachandran, Vilaynur S. (2011), The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, Nueva York, WW Norton & Company.
Ryle, Gilbert (2009 [c. 1949]), The Concept of Mind, Nueva York, Routledge.
Rosenthal, David (2005), Consciousness and Mind, Nueva York, Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean Paul (1934), La transcendance de l’ego: Esquissed’une description phenomenologique, versión en línea [http://es.scribd.com/doc/91648997/Sartre-La-Transcendance-de-l-Ego#scribd], consultado: 6 de febrero de 2015.
Schurger, Aaron, Jacobo D. Sitt y Stanislas Dehaene (2012), “An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-intitiated movement”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol.109, núm. 42, pp. E2904-E2913.
Searle, John (2007), “Biological naturalism”, en Max Velmans y Susan Sohneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 325-334.
Soon, Chun Siong, Marcel Braas, Jochen Heinze Hans y John Dylan Haynes (2008), “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain”, Nature Neuroscience, vol.11, núm. 5, pp. 543-545.
Sperry, Roger W. (1969), “A modified concept of consciousness”, Psychological Review, vol. 76, núm. 6, pp. 532-536.
Strawson, Galen (2010), Mental Reality,Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Tancredi, R. Laurence (2005), Hardwired Behavior, What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Trevarthen, Colwyn y Vasudevy Reddy (2007), “Consciousness in infants”, en Max
Velmans y Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Oxford, Blackwell Pubishing Ltd., pp. 41-58.
Varela, Francisco (1999), “The specious present: A neurophenomenology of time consciousness”, en Jean Petitot, Franscico J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud y Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford, Stanford University Press, pp. 266-329.
Wegner, Daniel (2002), The Illusion of Conscious Will, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Zubiri, Xavier (1980), Inteligencia sentiente. Inteligencia y realidad, Madrid, Alianza Editorial.