Do we have free will? The answer has big implications.

On 25 October 2023, Robert Card, a US Army reservist walked into a restaurant and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, and shot dead 18 people. According to Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Centre, “While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioural changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms." But Libet’s experiment proves that much before an individual thinks consciously of taking an action, another part of the brain has already willed that action. A 1989 paper, ‘The Nervous System in the Context of Information Theory’ by Manfred Zimmermann of Heidelberg University concluded that of the 11 million bits of the human brain’s processing capacity, only 77 bits are available for use at a conscious level. This knowledge is converging on a new theory of human behaviour that replaces existing theories based on human decisions arising from our conscious free will.