Do You Have Free Will, or Is Everything Determined?
Schopenhauer called the Upanishads 'the consolation of my life.' Then he wrote about will.
Benjamin Libet's 1983 lab finds that the brain decides before the conscious 'I' catches up. The Svetasvatara Upanishad, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer all reach a stranger answer. Freedom is not a lever the ego pulls. It is a place the witness stands.
The Lab at Midday
Sometime in 1983, in a fluorescent-lit room at the University of California, San Francisco, a neurophysiologist named Benjamin Libet is fitting a volunteer with scalp electrodes. The protocol is simple. The volunteer will flex her wrist whenever she feels like it, any time in the next half minute. As she does it, she will watch a rotating dot on a clock face on the wall and, afterwards, tell Libet exactly where the dot was at the moment she first felt the urge to move.
The volunteer flexes. The dot sweeps. Libet writes down the number. He does this hundreds of times, with dozens of volunteers. When he finishes his analysis, the result is strange enough that it will be argued about for the next forty years. There is a telltale brain signal, the readiness potential, that begins roughly 350 milliseconds before the volunteer becomes conscious of wanting to flex. The brain has already started. The 'you' who experiences deciding is catching up.
The experiment is cited, rightly or wrongly, as one of the great modern embarrassments for the idea of free will. If the brain is going first and the conscious 'I' is going second, where exactly is the freedom of the person supposed to live? The legal system assumes you are free. Physicists tell you the universe since the Big Bang has been running on equations that do not leave a gap for anything extra. And now the neuroscience lab, too, has a stopwatch that does not leave one either.
The Upanishad that will answer Libet's question is nearly twenty-five hundred years older than his clock face. It was composed around 400 BCE by a rishi called Śvetāśvatara, in the generation after the Buddha. Its answer is not the one most Western readers expect from an ancient religious text. It does not say 'of course you are free, God gave you a will.' It says something closer to this: yes, you are on a wheel you did not start and cannot stop, and the freedom you are looking for is real, but it is located somewhere you have not been looking. What follows is where.