{"id":21045,"date":"2026-04-13T10:08:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T10:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/13\/uri-maoz-does-free-will-exist\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T10:08:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T10:08:14","slug":"uri-maoz-does-free-will-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/13\/uri-maoz-does-free-will-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"You have no choice in reading this article\u2014maybe"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his boss was going to tell him exactly what to do, or at least throw some PowerPoint slides his way. But no. Maoz had free rein to teach anything, as long as it was relevant to the students. \u201cI could have gone to human brain augmentation,\u201d he says. \u201cCyborgs or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet that admittedly fun and borderline sci-fi topic wasn\u2019t what popped, unbidden, into his mind. His idea, he recalls with excitement: \u201cWhat neuroscience has to say about the question of free will!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

How\u2014or whether\u2014humans make decisions (like, say, about what to discuss in an undergrad lecture) had been on his mind since he\u2019d read an article in his early twenties suggesting that \u2026 maybe they didn\u2019t. This question might naturally beget others: Had he even had a choice about whether to read that article in the first place? How would he ever know if he was responsible for making decisions in his life or if he just had the illusion of control?<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter that, there was no turning back,\u201d says Maoz, now a professor at Chapman University, in California. He finished his PhD work in human movement, but afterward he scooted further up the neural chain to find out how desires and beliefs turn into actions\u2014from raising an arm to choosing someone to ask out to dinner on a Friday night.<\/p>\n

Today, Maoz is a central figure in the attempt to (sort of, maybe) answer how that neural chain functions. His research has since overturned and reinter\u00adpreted canonical neuroscience studies and united the straight-scientific and philosophical sides of the free-will question. More than anything, though, he\u2019s succeeded in uncovering new wrinkles in the debate.<\/p>\n

Machines and magic tricks<\/h3>\n

The concept of free will seems straightforward, but it doesn\u2019t have a universally accepted definition. One intuitive notion is that it\u2019s the ability to make our own decisions and take our own actions on purpose\u2014that we control our lives. But physicists might ask if the universe is deterministic, following a preordained path, and if human choices can still happen in such a universe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a question for them, Maoz says. What neuroscientists can do is figure out what\u2019s going on in the brain when people make decisions. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do: to understand how our wishes, desires, beliefs, turn into actions,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

By the time Maoz had finished his PhD, in 2008, neuroscientific research into the question had been going on for decades. One foundational study from the 1960s showed that a hand movement\u2014something a person seemingly decides to do\u2014was preceded by the appearance in the brain of an electrical signal called the \u201creadiness potential.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Building on that result, in the 1980s a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet did the experiment that had first piqued Maoz\u2019s interest in the topic\u2014one that many, until recently, interpreted as a death knell for the concept of free will.<\/p>\n

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An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cHe just had people sit there, and whenever they feel like it, they would go like this<\/em>,\u201d says Maoz, wiggling his wrist. Libet would then ask where a rotating dot was on a screen when they first had the urge to flick. He found that the readiness potential appeared not only before they moved their hand but before they reported having the urge to move\u2014or, in Libet\u2019s interpretation, before they knew they were going to move.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Studies since have confirmed the observation and shown that the readiness potential appears a second or two\u2014and maybe, fMRI implies, up to 10 seconds\u2014before participants report making a conscious decision. \u201cIt suggests we are essentially passengers in a self-driving car,\u201d says Maoz. \u201cThe unconscious biological machine does all the steering, but our conscious mind sits in the driver\u2019s seat and takes the credit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maoz initially approached his own research with variations on Libet\u2019s experiments. He worked with epilepsy patients who already had electrodes in their brains, for clinical purposes, and was able to predict which hand they would raise before they raised it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, some of the Libet-inspired studies people were doing nagged at him. \u201cAll these results were about completely arbitrary decisions. Raise your hand whenever you feel like it,\u201d he says. \u201cWhy? No reason.\u201d A decision like that is quite different from, say, choosing to break up with your partner. Try telling someone they weren\u2019t in the driver\u2019s seat for that<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The field wasn\u2019t looking at meaningful decisions, he says\u2014the ones that actually set the course of lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maoz began pulling in philosophers to help guide his approach. They would challenge him to confront the semantic differences between things like intention, desire, and urge. Neuroscientists have tended to lump those concepts together, but philosophers tease them apart: Desire is a want that doesn\u2019t necessarily progress toward an action; urge carries implications of immediacy and compulsion; and intention involves committing to a plan. (Maoz has come to focus specifically on intention\u2014including, recently, the potential intentions of AI<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In 2017, he organized his first in a series of free-will conferences, drawing many autonomy-interested philosophers. \u201cThank you so much for coming,\u201d he recalls saying at the opening of the meeting. \u201cAs if you had a choice.\u201d One day, the crew took an excursion out on a lake. As the group munched on shrimp, someone joked that they hoped the boat didn\u2019t sink, because everybody in the field would die.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The comment didn\u2019t make Maoz feel existential dread. Instead, he figured that if the whole field was already there, why not lasso them all into writing a research grant? \u201cHe just thinks what should be the next step and just has a very good ability to just make it happen,\u201d says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University and a frequent collaborator.<\/p>\n

That ability is special among scientists, says Chapman colleague Aaron Schurger, with whom Maoz co-directs the Laboratory for Understanding Consciousness, Intentions, and Decision-Making (LUCID, appropriately). \u201cI really think that Uri is kind of at the nexus of this field right now because he\u2019s really, really good at bringing people together around these big ideas,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Donations and interruptions<\/h3>\n

Maoz has recently been making progress on one of the big ideas that have consistently occupied his working hours: how trivial and significant decisions play out differently in the brain. In collaborations with Mudrik, he\u2019s parsed the neural difference between picking and choosing\u2014their terms for arbitrary decisions and those that change your life and tug on your emotions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Readiness potential? Their measurements didn\u2019t clock it ahead of choices. In 2019, Maoz and a crew published a paper measuring the electrical activity in people\u2019s brains as they pressed a key to choose one of two nonprofits to donate $1,000 to\u2014for real, with actual dollars. Then the researchers compared that activity with what they saw when the same group pressed a key at random to donate $500 each to two nonprofits. The team saw the readiness potential in the arbitrary decision, but not for the $1,000 question.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Libet\u2019s result, they concluded, doesn\u2019t apply to the important stuff, which means readiness potential might not actually be a sign that your brain is making a choice before you\u2019re aware of it. \u201cIf Libet would have chosen to focus on deliberate decisions, then maybe the entire debate about neuroscience proving free will to be an illusion would have been spared from us,\u201d Mudrik says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maoz\u2019s research has spurred others to reinterpret Libet\u2019s work. It\u2019s \u201cenriched my thought process a great deal,\u201d says Bianca Ivanof, a psychologist whose dissertation scrutinized Libet\u2019s methods. They turn out to identify readiness potential at different times depending on how the rotating-dot setup is designed, complicating the ability to compare and interpret results.<\/p>\n

Maoz has also continued to gather data on the subject. Last year, for example, he used an EEG<\/a> to measure electrical signals in people\u2019s brains as they got ready to press a keyboard space bar. At random moments, he interrupted their preparations with an audible tone and asked them about their intentions. He saw no connection between the readiness potential and whether or not they were planning to tap the key\u2014evidence that the potential doesn\u2019t represent the buildup of either conscious or unconscious plans. The team did see a signal, though, in a different part of the brain when people said they were preparing to move.<\/p>\n

So \u2026 that\u2019s free will? Sadly, Maoz would be compelled to say Well, not exactly<\/em>. An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates. And maybe the confusing data from neurons is actually the point. \u201cI don\u2019t think it is a yes-or-no question,\u201d Maoz says. Maybe our less meaningful choices aren\u2019t <\/em>mindfully made but big ones are; maybe we have the conscious power to change an intended action, but only if our brains are in a particular state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neuroscientists likely can\u2019t figure out, on their own, if free will exists. But they can, Maoz says, parse how semantically distinct decision-making forces\u2014desires, urges, intentions, wishes, beliefs\u2014manifest in our brains and become actions. \u201cThat is something that we are making progress on,\u201d he says, \u201cand I think that that\u2019s going to help us understand what we do control.\u201d And perhaps also help us make peace with what we do not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist and author based in southern Colorado.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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