You’ve probably heard the argument. Brain scans show your neurons fire before you’re consciously aware of “deciding” to act. Therefore, your sense of choosing is an illusion. Free will is a fiction. The Stoics were wrong.

It’s a compelling story. It also appears to be scientifically outdated, at least as a knockdown argument against the kind of free will the Stoics actually cared about.

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology makes a careful case that the famous Libet experiments, the neuroscience experiments that launched a thousand “free will is dead” op-eds, don’t show what their popularizers claim. Worse, the study argues the actual neural evidence points toward something that looks a lot like the Stoic model of self-regulation. The brain data doesn’t refute Stoic free will. It provides a substrate for it.

The Quick Version

The Libet experiments showed brain activity preceding conscious awareness of a decision—often interpreted as proof that “you” don’t really choose anything. But a new analysis argues this misreads both the experiments and what free will actually requires. The researchers reframe free will as a spectrum from impulsivity to mindful self-regulation, map it onto Stoic practices like prosoche and askesis, and point to specific neural structures that support the Stoic idea of overriding first-order impulses through deliberate second-order willing.

What the Libet Experiments Actually Showed

In the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet ran a series of experiments asking participants to flex their wrists whenever they felt like it and report the clock position when they first noticed the urge to move. He simultaneously recorded their brain activity.

The finding: a “readiness potential” (a measurable neural buildup) began about 550 milliseconds before the movement. But participants didn’t report conscious awareness of the urge until about 200 milliseconds before the movement. The brain, apparently, had been preparing the action before the person “decided” to act.

This got interpreted as proof that conscious will is an illusion. Your brain initiates the action; consciousness just narrates it afterward, pretending to be in charge.

The pop-science version of this story is extremely clean. The actual scientific version is much messier.

The Frontiers in Psychology study walks through several problems with the “free will is dead” interpretation. The readiness potential may not be a decision signal at all. It might be a preparatory fluctuation in background neural noise that precedes spontaneous movements generally, not a specific intention to act. The timing of “when did you notice the urge” is also notoriously unreliable: asking people to simultaneously perform an action and monitor a clock and report their internal states is an odd experimental setup that may introduce its own distortions.

But the deeper problem is a conceptual one. The Libet interpretation assumes that free will means a conscious, deliberate decision initiates every action from scratch. If anything happens in the brain before that conscious moment, free will is disproven.

That’s not what free will has historically meant. Including, crucially, for the Stoics.

What Stoic Free Will Actually Claims

When Epictetus talks about what is “up to us” (eph’ hēmin), he’s not claiming that consciousness originates all neural activity from some immaterial ghost in the machine. He’s making a more specific claim: that we have the capacity to withhold assent to our initial impulses, to examine them, and to respond based on that examination rather than simply acting on the first urge.

This is a claim about a type of self-regulation, not about the metaphysics of causation.

The Frontiers in Psychology study frames free will as a spectrum. At one end: pure impulsivity, acting on first-order desires without reflection or delay. At the other end: mindful self-regulation, the capacity to observe your impulses, evaluate them, and choose whether to follow them. Most human behavior sits somewhere on this spectrum, and the relevant question isn’t “does free will exist or not” but “where on this spectrum are you operating right now.”

This maps almost perfectly onto Stoic practice.

Prosoche (the sustained attention to one’s own mental states that Marcus Aurelius practiced in his Meditations and that Epictetus made central to his teaching) is precisely the practice of cultivating the capacity for mindful self-regulation. It’s a skill, not a talent. You build it through repeated practice of catching your impressions before you’ve automatically acted on them.

Askesis, the Stoic tradition of voluntary hardship and self-discipline, trains the capacity to override first-order desires. Cold baths. Fasting. Deliberately choosing discomfort. These aren’t asceticism for its own sake. They’re exercises in building the neural circuitry that allows you to act from second-order choice rather than first-order craving.

Second-Order Desires: The Framework the Study Introduces

The most useful conceptual tool in the study is the distinction between first-order and second-order desires. It’s a framework drawn from philosopher Harry Frankfurt that the researchers apply to neuroscience and Stoic philosophy simultaneously.

A first-order desire is just a want. I want another coffee. I want to check my phone. I want to snap at this person who is annoying me.

A second-order desire is a desire about your desires. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t need constant caffeine. I want to not be someone whose attention is controlled by notifications. I want to respond to this person with patience rather than irritation.

Free will, on this account, isn’t about whether your neurons fired before you were conscious of an urge. It’s about whether your actions align with your second-order desires (your reflective judgments about how you want to live) or whether they’re entirely driven by first-order impulses.

This is why the Libet experiments miss the point. Even if some neural process precedes conscious awareness of the urge to flex your wrist, what the Stoics cared about was the capacity to not flex the wrist: to catch the impression and withhold assent. The interesting case isn’t the spontaneous wrist flex. It’s the moment when you notice the impulse to say something cutting and choose not to.

That capacity (the veto, as Libet himself later called it) is both neuroscientifically real and Stoically central.

The Dorsal Fronto-Median Cortex and Voluntary Inhibition

Here’s where the neuroscience gets interesting in a way that the “free will is dead” camp rarely discusses.

The study points to the dorsal fronto-median cortex (dmPFC) as a key neural structure in voluntary inhibition: the brain’s capacity to override automatic responses. This region handles the higher-order regulation of behavior. Not just reacting, but monitoring your own reactions and selectively suppressing the ones that don’t align with your goals.

When you catch an impulse and choose not to follow it, dmPFC activity is part of what makes that possible.

This is the neuroscientific substrate for what Epictetus meant by the discipline of assent. The pause between impression and response isn’t just a philosophical construct. There’s a brain region that instantiates it, and that region can be trained.

The research on Stoic practices and emotional regulation points in the same direction: Stoic-style cognitive reappraisal engages prefrontal systems that mindfulness practice without evaluation often doesn’t fully activate. When you don’t just observe an impulse but actively evaluate whether to follow it, you’re recruiting a different and more sophisticated neural circuit than simple non-judgmental awareness.

This connects to a finding I wrote about recently: brief mindfulness meditation increased risk-taking behavior in a Scientific Reports study, likely because it reduced the emotional signals (including useful anxiety) without providing an evaluative framework for what to do with the resulting calm. The Stoic model adds what pure mindfulness often leaves out: the second-order question of whether your impulse deserves your assent.

The Spectrum Model in Practice

If free will is a spectrum from impulsivity to mindful self-regulation, then the Stoic practices aren’t about achieving some perfect philosophical freedom from causation. They’re about moving along the spectrum.

This reframe matters because it makes the whole question practical rather than metaphysical.

You don’t have to resolve the hard problem of consciousness to benefit from prosoche. You don’t need to prove that some non-physical “you” exists outside the causal chain. You just need to notice that you have more or less capacity for self-regulation depending on your training, your state, and your circumstances. And that the capacity can be developed.

Epictetus never claimed he was outside causation. He claimed that rational beings have the capacity for a specific kind of self-determination that’s worth cultivating. The Frontiers in Psychology study essentially says: yes, and here’s what that looks like in the brain.

A few practices that target this capacity directly:

The pause drill. When you notice an impulse to respond, to reach for your phone, to eat something you said you wouldn’t, give it five seconds before acting. You don’t have to decide not to follow it. Just wait. That waiting is the dmPFC doing its work. The more you practice the pause, the more reliably the evaluation capacity shows up.

Second-order journaling. In your evening review, instead of asking only “what did I do today,” ask: “Where did I act from my first-order impulses? Where did I act from my considered values?” The daily journaling practice doesn’t have to frame itself in philosophical terms to work. The question is just: did my actions match what I actually want to be doing, or did they just happen?

Askesis as training, not punishment. If you want to build voluntary inhibition, you have to practice voluntary inhibition. That’s what the cold shower is actually about. Not masochism, not performance. It’s practicing the pause drill under mild discomfort, building the neural pathway that says: I noticed an impulse to avoid discomfort, I evaluated it, and I chose otherwise.

What This Doesn’t Settle

The study doesn’t prove that free will exists in some philosophically airtight metaphysical sense. Philosophers have been arguing about determinism, compatibilism, and libertarian free will for two thousand years, and a Frontiers in Psychology paper isn’t going to close that debate.

What it does is reframe the neuroscience in a way that stops treating the Libet experiments as a knockdown argument. The readiness potential doesn’t show what its interpreters claimed it showed. And the neural evidence for voluntary inhibition is real, not theoretical.

For practical purposes, for the question of how to live that the Stoics actually cared about, the spectrum model offers something more useful than either “free will is real” or “free will is an illusion.” It offers: you have more or less capacity for self-regulation, that capacity matters, and it can be trained.

Epictetus was a formerly enslaved person who had no control over his legal status, his physical safety, or his circumstances. He still became one of the most influential philosophers in history on the topic of self-determination. His answer to the free will question was always practical: it doesn’t matter whether the metaphysics resolves neatly. What matters is whether you’re cultivating the capacity to act from your considered values rather than your first impulses.

The neuroscience, it turns out, has something to say about that. And what it says is closer to Epictetus than to the pop-science version of Benjamin Libet.

Going Deeper

If this kind of intersection between ancient philosophy and contemporary research interests you, the neuroscience of Stoic practices post covers the broader research base, and the prosoche practice guide gets into the practical mechanics of attention training.

Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life remains the best treatment of askesis and the ancient understanding of philosophical practice as exercise rather than doctrine. For the second-order desires framework, Harry Frankfurt’s The Importance of What We Care About is the source: short essays, clear arguments, worth the time.

The Libet experiment itself is covered fairly in Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, which argues (before this study, but along similar lines) that the “free will is an illusion” interpretation overreaches what the data can actually support.

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Philosophy doesn’t resolve every question. But it can sometimes point at the right question—and “are you acting from considered values or unchecked impulses” turns out to be one that neuroscience and ancient wisdom both take seriously. Take what’s useful.