The problem with Libet’s experiment, and others like it, is that they involve the performing of completely trivial actions, with no moral or personal consequences.
A similar study (the name of which I can’t recall at the moment, but will try to find later) asked subjects to press one of two buttons. The study found that over 60% of the subjects chose the button indicated by their neural activity prior to their being consciously aware of that decision.
The problem with this study, again, is that the action being performed is totally inconsequential, and thus it is not only understandable but incredibly likely that people are going to follow their “impulses” in making this decision. This study in no way accounts for the undeniable fact that we are aware of what we are about to do before we do it and can use our reason and conscience to avert ourselves from performing dangerous, immoral or otherwise undesirable acts. That is the “use of consciousness.”
Going back to Libet, though, his work has been subject to some pretty devastating criticism from numerous philosophers, including Daniel Dennett. Here are a few excerpts from Wikipedia’s entry on Benjamin Libet:
“A more general criticism from a dualist-interactionist perspective has been raised by Alexander Batthyany, who points out that Libet asked his subjects to merely “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”. According to Batthyany, neither reductionist nor non-reductionist agency theories claim that urges which appear on their own are suitable examples of (allegedly) consciously caused events because one cannot passively wait for an urge to occur while at the same time being the one who is consciously bringing it about. Libet’s results thus cannot be interpreted to provide empirical evidence in favour of agency reductionism, since non-reductionist theories, even including dualist interactionism, would predict the very same experimental results.”
*"Daniel Dennett argues that no clear conclusion about volition can be derived from Libet’s experiment because of ambiguities in the timings of the different events involved. Libet tells when the readiness potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur:
‘Suppose Libet knows that your readiness potential peaked at second 6,810 of the experimental trial, and the clock dot was straight down (which is what you reported you saw) at millisecond 7,005. How many milliseconds should he have to add to this number to get the time you were conscious of it? The light gets from your clock face to your eyeball almost instantaneously, but the path of the signals from retina through lateral geniculate nucleus to striate cortex takes 5 to 10 milliseconds — a paltry fraction of the 300 milliseconds offset, but how much longer does it take them to get to you. (Or are you located in the striate cortex?) The visual signals have to be processed before they arrive at wherever they need to arrive for you to make a conscious decision of simultaneity. Libet’s method presupposes, in short, that we can locate the intersection of two trajectories: • the rising-to-consciousness of signals representing the decision to flick • the rising to consciousness of signals representing successive clock-face orientations so that these events occur side-by-side as it were in place where their simultaneity can be noted.’"*
So, in sum, I personally think your question is moot.
