In a recent podcast, originally aired at Humanize Today, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor defends the reality of free will. All the guests are editors and authors involved in Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023). The podcast, hosted by Wesley J. Smith, is available here at Mind Matters News too and an excerpt from the transcript below focuses on Egnor’s comments:

Wesley J. Smith: Well, let’s talk about free will. There are people who deny free will. And I think Michael’s chapter discussed this where they had an experiment where it said if they tell you to push the button, the brain fires before the finger pushes the button… And that to these physicalists proves that actually what we think is free will, our choices are actually dictated in a sense by the brain through some kind of unconscious means. Is that correct, Michael?

Michael Egnor: Yes. There’s a researcher named Benjamin Libet [1916–2007] who worked in the mid-20th century who did some fascinating work on this. He asked people to sit at a desk, these otherwise normal people, and just push a button, whenever the thought came into their mind to push the button. And he had a special clock that they could record within like 20 or 30 milliseconds, the moment they had the thought to push the button and he could record the time the button was pushed. They had electrodes on their scalps. So he was constantly monitoring the brainwaves.

And he found, as other people have also found — it’s a very well-established phenomenon — that about a half a second before the person would have the conscious decision to push the button, there was a spike in the brain that often seemed to correlate with that decision. But it happened before the person was aware of the decision. And that was originally interpreted as meaning that we don’t have free will. The brain is driving the whole process unconsciously, and what we think is free, we’re really being forced to do by our brains.

Free won’t?

But Libet was a brilliant researcher, and what he did is, he asked these people to occasionally veto their decision. So they would start to push the button and then stop. And what he found was that there was no brainwave activity that was new that was associated with a veto. That is that the original decision had its brainwave activity, but the veto was silent in the brain. And he said, what people really have is free won’t, that is they can veto what their brain tells them to do unconsciously, but the veto itself is not from the brain. The veto is a decision we make that’s not in the brain, or the acceptance is also not from the brain.

So he said he really hadn’t proven free will, but he proved “free won’t,” That is, we do have the ability to stop ourselves, and stopping ourselves isn’t from the brain.

Wilder Penfield [1891–1976] also did some excellent research on this. He would ask his awake brain surgery patients to raise their arms during the surgery at any time they felt like. And he would stimulate their brains to make their arms raise anytime he felt like it and the patient couldn’t tell what he was doing. And he would ask them when their arm would rise, “Did you choose to do that or did I choose to do that?” The person always knew the difference. He did tens of thousands of repetitions of this, and people never lost the sense of free will. That is he could stimulate the person’s brain in a way that they couldn’t feel, they didn’t know it was being stimulated, and they would do something, but they would know that they didn’t choose it. It was done to them.

Free will vs. totalitarianism

Wesley J. Smith: But … free will isn’t about pushing buttons. It seems to me free will is about making moral decisions or being creative. It’s not mechanistic. And the people who are arguing, and I’ve read various bioethics journal articles and so forth, denying free will, seem to have a very reductionist view of the human person.

Michael Egnor: Well, if I may, I’ve rather strong feelings about this because I think the denial of free will, first of all, has terrible social implications.

Wesley J. Smith: It means that Hitler’s not responsible for the Holocaust.

Michael Egnor: So the denial of free will is a perfect setup for a totalitarian society. I think there are several reasons. First of all, every society, and as far as I know, practically every person that has ever lived implicitly believes in free will. That is, the denial of free will is way outside way of human experience. Everybody in one way or another accepts choices to some degree as being free. Logically, it doesn’t make any sense to deny free will because if you say that your electrochemistry in your brain is driving your decisions and driving what you do, then the very claim that free will doesn’t exist is driven by electrochemistry and not by logic. So then your claim…

Wesley J. Smith: It’s self-refuting.

Michael Egnor: Yeah, it’s self-refuting. What you’re basically saying is, “I’m a meat robot, so take seriously what I’m saying.” Which is nonsense. If you really don’t have free will, you’re just a bag of chemicals and I don’t take opinions from bags of chemicals.

Almost all free will deniers are determinists who believe that the way the universe is at one moment determines exactly what will happen the next moment. And that’s just bad physics. A couple of years ago, a bunch of Nobel prizes were awarded to physicists who showed that determinism is not true. So that’s just wrong.

Neuroscience points to free will. And I like philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889–1951]. One of the perspectives that he suggested on questions like this is, when a person says, “I don’t believe free will is real,” you have to look at what they do, not just what they say. And even free will deniers, if you deliberately dent their car, they will blame you.

I’ve made this joke online that if you really want to find out if someone believes in free will, walk up to them and pour your coffee on their laptop. And then if they say, “Why did you do that? What a horrible thing.” Say, “Hey, I had no choice.”

Wesley J. Smith: That’s right, “My brain made me do it.”

Michael Egnor: “I had no choice at all. You can’t blame me.” A free will denier must believe that if his car is dented in a parking lot, that the car that did the denting is every bit as much responsible for that as the person driving the car, because they’re both just machines.

Note: Michael Egnor’s forthcoming book, The Immortal Mind: (Worthy, June 3, 2025), co-authored with me, has a chapter on free will.

You may also wish to read: The Nature of Mind, Free Will, and Human Uniqueness: A Deep Dive. The book Minding the Brain sparks some interesting discussions about what is really unique about the human mind. Many philosophers have concluded both from experience and careful consideration that mental phenomena cannot be reduced to neural mechanisms.