Three New Studies Complicate the Case Against

In 1983, the neurologist Benjamin Libet reported that brain activity predicted a finger movement before participants said they had decided to move it. For four decades, that result has been reproduced and cited as the closest thing neuroscience has to a verdict on free will: your brain starts the action, your conscious mind gets notified after the fact, and the feeling of choosing is a press release issued by a decision already made.

A new video from physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder argues that verdict is now in trouble, and she has three recent papers to back it up. Her summary of the situation, delivered with her usual economy: "40 years of philosophical panic and in the end the discovery was latency."

The claim deserves scrutiny, because the stakes here are unusually concrete. Courts weigh responsibility. Psychologists run experiments on whether doubting free will makes people behave worse. If the founding evidence for the anti-free-will position was misread, a lot of downstream arguments wobble with it. So let's look at what the new work actually shows, and where it still doesn't settle anything.

The Experiment that Started It All

Libet's setup was simple. Participants flexed a wrist whenever they felt like it while watching a fast-moving clock, and reported the moment they became aware of their intention to move. Electroencephalography showed a buildup of electrical activity, the so-called readiness potential, beginning roughly half a second before that reported awareness. Conclusion drawn by many researchers since: the unconscious brain decided first, and consciousness found out later.

Hossenfelder points to the weak link immediately: the measurement depended on people self-reporting an inner event with millisecond precision. In her words, "Bob, please tell us exactly when your consciousness happened is perhaps not neuroscience's finest measuring instrument." The findings themselves were solid and repeatedly confirmed. The interpretation layered on top of them is where the new papers push back.

What the London Team Did Differently

The first new paper, from a team in London, redesigned the experiment to remove the awkward self-timing. As covered by SciTechDaily, the researchers recruited 51 participants to type words from given categories, such as animals, while their brain activity was recorded. Between words, participants paused, and at random moments the researchers interrupted to ask a single question: do you already know what your next word will be?

The result inverted the Libet story. When participants had already made up their minds, the brain signal preceding the action was stronger, and the conscious sense of intending was part of the picture from the start. The team's own conclusion, quoted in the video: "These results are difficult to reconcile with the view that experiences of conscious intention are merely a retrospective confabulation."

That phrasing is aimed directly at the strongest version of the anti-free-will argument, the one promoted by researchers like the late Daniel Wegner, which holds that the feeling of willing an action is a story the brain tells itself after the real decision has already happened unconsciously. The London data suggest the feeling shows up while the decision is still forming, not after it.

The Argument that Decisions Take Time

The second paper, from cognitive neuroscientist Thomas James, attacks the assumption underneath the original experiment rather than the data. As reported by ScienceAlert, James challenges the standard model neuroscientists have used for decades, which describes behavior as a clean sequence: perception, then decision, then action.

His alternative, as quoted in Hossenfelder's video: "There's no sudden decision moment. Rather, what we call a decision is the process in which sensory input and motor processes develop to result in an action or not."

Under that reading, the readiness potential Libet measured was an early phase of an unfolding process, and the conscious intention was part of that same process rather than a late notification. On this view, the famous experiment never demonstrated an unconscious decision at all. It demonstrated that deciding takes measurable time, which is a much less dramatic finding and a much more defensible one.

Here is where neutrality requires honesty about the terrain. The Libet results themselves were never in dispute, and they have been replicated many times, including with more invasive brain recordings that pushed the prediction window even earlier. The new interpretation has to explain all of that data too, and whether a "process" account can absorb decades of findings is an open question the papers alone can't close. Defenders of the original interpretation will also point out that reframing neural buildup as mere preparation risks making "decision" unfalsifiable: if the decision is smeared across the whole process, what experiment could ever catch it happening or not happening?

What Disbelief Actually Does to People

The third paper moves from the lab bench to the moral consequences, and it's the one with the strangest history. For years, studies have reported that people primed to disbelieve in free will, typically by reading passages stating that behavior is predetermined by brain inputs, become more likely to cheat or endorse morally questionable actions. The takeaway seemed obvious: free will is a useful illusion, and puncturing it makes people worse.

An Australian team re-ran the question with different framing. Instead of asking primed participants about moral failings, they asked them to recall a time they had hurt someone, or a time someone had hurt them. Participants who then read arguments that free will is an illusion reported more self-forgiveness and more forgiveness toward others. The same disbelief that allegedly licensed cheating also, under a different prompt, loosened guilt.

Hossenfelder's diagnosis of the whole literature is blunt: the prompts meant to induce disbelief in free will actually induce disbelief in responsibility, and those are different things. Her test case is practical rather than metaphysical. If Bob sneezes, could a warning have stopped him? Probably not, so we don't hold him responsible. If Bob eats Eva's donut, could a threat of consequences have stopped him? Likely, so we do. "Nothing about this requires mentioning free will," she concludes. Whether that compatibilist move satisfies philosophers who want a deeper account of agency is a fair question, but it does show the psychology experiments were measuring their own framing as much as anything else.

The Definition Problem Nobody Solved

Hossenfelder rates both neuroscience papers eight out of ten on her review meter, and docks the missing points for a reason that cuts across the entire field: nobody has settled on a definition of the thing being measured. What, physically, counts as a conscious decision? If the answer is circular, if a conscious decision is whatever a person reports being conscious of deciding, then every experiment built on self-report inherits the same soft spot Libet had in 1983.

That problem matters beyond academic scorekeeping. As the video's summary notes, the field is expected to see heavy activity in the coming decade, driven by better brain imaging and by artificial intelligence, which will serve as a test case for what it means to think, decide, and be aware of something. An AI system can produce output that looks like deliberation with no reported inner experience at all, which makes the definitional question impossible to dodge much longer.

For now, the honest reading of the new evidence is narrower than either triumphalism or panic. The 1983 results stand. The conclusion that consciousness is a spectator has lost its cleanest support, and the process view of decision-making has gained two data points. Whether conscious intention is causally effective, an epiphenomenon, or a category we've defined badly enough that the question can't yet be asked properly remains open.

The Libet experiments were supposed to have closed this book. Forty years later, the most interesting development is that researchers finally checked what the book actually said.

Nadia Marchetti covers unexplained phenomena and the questions mainstream coverage skips, with methodological rigor and respect for the evidence.