Aaron Schurger: Neuroscience Does Not Threaten Free Will
episodePreviously titled “Aaron Schurger: "No. Neuroscience Does NOT Threaten Free Will."” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the readiness potential and why does it matter for free will?
What this explanation offers is an answer. Suddenly it just hit me like a ton of bricks, and I was like, Whoa, this is different.
For decades, neuroscientists have claimed your brain decides before you do. The Libit experiment seemed to kill free will. You're a puppet of your unconscious. Done. Simple. Right? Well, professor of neuroscience Aaron Surger, on the other hand, was not convinced. He thinks something fundamental about the most famous experiment in neuroscience is wrong. I'm Kurt Jimungel, and on this channel I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Surger says the readiness potential reflects stochastic drift towards a threshold and not commitment. Even more radically, the professor is testing his framework by examining whether consciousness has a higher, steeper threshold.
We explore what would genuinely threaten free will, why the Professor believes free will has not been killed, despite all of the headlines to the contrary, and we also explore new avenues neuroscience has to explain consciousness. Today's episode is a huge treat and I'm super excited for you to hear it. Professor, it would be great for you to outline the prevailing view on readiness potentials and its relationship to free will among your neuroscientific colleagues and then where you diverge.
Great. So so for for the the viewers who who may not know what the readiness potential is, it's this slow buildup of neural activity that you see over motor errors before a spontaneous self-initiated action. And slow on neural timescales, it can stretch back in time up to a s a whole second or more before the movement. before the movement is initiated. So the the prevailing view has been that that buildup of neural activity beginning quite early on before the movement is is a di reflects a decision that happened in the brain, reflects a commitment to initiate a movement and The brain is now getting ready to execute that movement. That's been the prevailing view of of the readiness potential. Um and the reason it's been controversial was you know because of Libbet, who asked his subjects to report when they felt the urge to move.
while the readiness potential was being recorded and showed that it it it it looks as if the urge to move manifests very close to the time of movement, maybe maybe 200 milliseconds before two tenths of a second before the movement. Whereas the readiness potential, which is taken to be the sign of the brain actually deciding to get the movement going, started well before that. So that's that's the prevailing view, right? Is that that that From a conscious point of view, your conscious decision or your conscious urge to move is is sort of an afterthought with regard to your brain actually preparing to initiate that movement.
Okay, and what do you think?
So I I thought a lot about that result early in my career when I was a PhD student and even afterward. And e even I wasn't really studying movement initiation at the time. I was studying perception and and working on perception, attention, and consciousness research. But I that result always struck me at a at a gut level, I just always felt that there was something something in s something seemed off about it and and but I I couldn't pin it down. Um and then one day it sort of dawned on me, I don't know how or why, that, well, wait a minute. You know, we all we're all taught, even in high school, that correlation doesn't imply causation. And this is clearly a a correlational relationship. Between the readiness potential and movement.
So what if it's not the cause of the movement? What if, right? Is it? Did anybody ever bother to ask? Um and uh that's when I started to think in more depth about it and like, well, how how could it if if if if it weren't the cause of movement, why would it be there? How would it be there? And then th that's when this idea started to develop that maybe the readiness potential reflects the leading up to the decision rather than the outcome of the decision.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the readiness potential and why does it matter for free will?
0:00–8:53
2
How does Aaron Schurger reinterpret Libet’s results about the readiness potential?
8:53–25:03
3
What is autocorrelated neural noise and how does it relate to spontaneous movement?
25:03–34:45
4
How does the brain’s noise compare to a conscious imperative in initiating actions?
34:45–49:54
5
What is the “point of no return” in voluntary movement decisions?
49:54–55:43
6
How does Attention Schema Theory explain consciousness and the “what it’s like” experience?
55:43–1:29:02
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
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