The Neurophenomenology of Voluntary Action: The Libet Experiment with an Experienced Meditator

Abstract

Truths are as fragile as the people who have formulated them.-Andreas Steinhöfel, 2005 Overview Biology, chemistry, and physics are the building blocks of a materialist worldview of consciousness; conversely, consciousness is needed in order to comprehend and investigate these fields.This circularity and the apparent lack of an independent foundation of science are major challenges for consciousness research and are addressed in this chapter.Here, the need for a meaningful combination of first-person and third-person data is explained and emphasized.A fruitful example for this approach is the famous Libet experiment, which pre sents an apparent paradox about free will.This experiment was expanded by the introduction of the first-person perspective of a very experienced meditator.In a narrative approach with the research team, joint strategies on how they could act differently in the Libet task were developed and subsequently assessed by electroencephalography (EEG) (see glossary).While most other researchers try to rule out subjectivity in the Libet task, our approach was driven by the goal of making subjectivity a more reliable source of information.Our participant had the stability of attention and the mental capacity to observe and produce finegrained differences in the process of initiating a voluntary act in the Libet task.The resulting EEG data provided support for theoretical models and fi nally resulted in a new interpretation of the Libet paradox termed the slow cortical potential sampling hypothesis.In this empirical story, the circularity of organism and environment, as described in the model of Varela and Maturana, enabled a new perspective and new insights.It also demonstrates that there is no ultimate starting point or foundation in science, but just "worlds without grounds" (Varela et al., 1991, p. 254).