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April 2018 Q & A

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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The Effects of Consciousness on Autonomy

I don't think that Libet's experiments demonstrate conclusively that there's no such thing as free will, even though there are action potentials that indicate that there is brain activity signaling even the onset of a voluntary choice early. So phenomenologically it seems clear that we have free choice and it isn't obvious to me why we have consciousness if free choice isn't real. And I think consciousness is also the faculty, so to speak, or a manifestation of the faculty that enables us to pre-program deterministic actions. The degree to which you might regard that as free exactly is unclear as are the temporal limitations.

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