Free Will
Balaguer, Mark (2010). Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem. MIT Press. Mark Balaguer's Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem is a must-read...
The main views can be summarized as follows:
(1) "the metaphysical issue inherent in the problem of free will and determinism comes down to … the which-kinds-of-freedom-do-we-have question" (165-6).
(2) "the which-kinds-of-freedom-do-we-have question reduces largely (though not entirely … ) to … the question of whether humans are L-free" (166), where L-freedom is a kind of libertarian freedom (incompatible with determinism).
(3) "the question of whether humans are L-free comes down to the purely empirical question … of whether TDW-indeterminism is true" (166), where TDW-indeterminism is the thesis that "Some of our torn decisions are wholly undetermined at the moment of choice" (78).
(4) "we currently have no good reason to accept or reject TDW-indeterminism" (166). From these, various other claims appear to follow...
(A) There is no compelling reason to deny that humans have free will.
(B) "the metaphysically interesting issue in the problem of free will and determinism boils down to a straightforward (and wide open) empirical question about the causal histories of certain neural events" (1).
(From Joseph Keim Campbell Notre Dame Philosophy Review)
Bayne, T. In press. Libet and the Case for Free Will Scepticism. In R. Swinburne (ed.) Free Will and Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (available at http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/philosophy_panel/timothy_bayne).
Bayne argues that “Libet's finding have not found [a basis for free will skepticism]. However, Libet's experiments do raise a number of important questions for accounts of free will. In particular, Libert's experiments raise challenging questions about the analysis of the concept of free will. In order to determine whether brain science supports free will skepticism we need not only to understand the relevant brain science, we also need to understand just what the common-sense or folk notion of free will commits us to.”
Churchland, Patricia S. (2002). Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. MIT Press.
The “big questions” Churchland is after include the nature of the self, the relation between free will and determinism, consciousness, and the justification of knowledge...[for Churchland] Free will and determinism are compatible because there is a real [empirical] distinction between control and out of control, even though actions in both categories are caused and determined. The main line on her views on these big questions are familiar from thinkers who predate the neuroscientific claims she discusses. She elucidates empirical claims made by some of the great philosophers in the
Libet, Benjamin W. (1999). Do we have free will? Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:47-57.
I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are pre- ceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the ‘readiness potential’, RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act
but it could control performance of the act. The findings also affect views of guilt and responsibility. But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro- deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, non-determined by natural laws and ‘truly free’? I shall present an experimentalist view about these
fundamental philosophical opposites. days before philosophy and psychology were distinct. (From Ned Block in SCIENCE VOL 201)
Mele, Alfred R. (2009). Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. Oxford University Press.
Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions. In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this. Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book.
Nahmias, E., Coates, D. J. and Kvaran, T. (2007), Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Mechanism: Experiments on Folk Intuitions. Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 31:214–242. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.2007.00158.x.
It seems that people—from philosophers to scientists to journalists to the ordinary “folk” we have surveyed—share the intuition that “if our brain makes us do it, then we aren't morally responsible.” We think that this intuition runs deep and that it is driven by people's tendency to view a reductive, mechanistic explanation of behavior—for instance, in the neuroscientific language of neural processes and chemical reactions—as inconsistent with a mentalistic (or intentional) explanation—in the psychological language of thoughts, desires, and plans. Because people also tend to ascribe free will (FW) and moral responsibility (MR) only to agents whose actions can be understood in terms of their mental states, people tend to see reductive mechanism as incompatible with FW and MR. That is, we think that most ordinary folk have intuitions about freedom and responsibility that accord with a position we will call Mechanism Incompatibilism (MI): FW and MR are incompatible with reductive mechanism....One way to examine the relevance of determinism and mechanism to people's judgments about FW and MR is to present them with agents in a range of scenarios, varied according to whether determinism and/or mechanism holds in the scenario, and examine their judgments about the agents' freedom and responsibility. The experiments we describe in this paper were developed to test folk intuitions about FW and MR in this way. But before we describe the experiments and results, we will briefly explain why we think such information about folk intuitions about FW and MR is relevant to the philosophical debates about these issues.
Pockett, Susan (2004). Does consciousness cause behaviour? Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2):23-40.
Leading scholars continue the debate over whether consciousness causes behaviour or plays no functional role in it, discussing the question in terms of neuroscience, philosophy, law, and public policy. Our intuition tells us that we, our conscious selves, cause our own voluntary acts. Yet, scientists have long questioned this; Thomas Huxley, for example, in 1874 compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of a locomotive. New experimental evidence (most notably, work by Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner) has brought the causal status of our behaviour to the forefront of intellectual discussion again. This multidisciplinary collection continues and advances the debate by approaching the question from a variety of perspectives. The contributors begin by examining recent research in neuroscience that suggests that consciousness does not cause behaviour, offering first the outline of an empirically based model that shows how the brain causes behaviour and where consciousness might fit in. Other writers address the philosophical presuppositions that may have informed the empirical studies, raising questions about what can be legitimately concluded about the existence of free will from Libet's and Wegner's experimental results.
Roskies, Adina L (2010). How Does Neuroscience Affect Our Conception of Volition? Annual Review of Neuroscience 33:109-130.
Although there is no clear concept of volition or the will, we do have intuitive ideas that characterize the will, agency, and voluntary behavior. Here I review results from a number of strands of neuroscientific research that bear upon our intuitive notions of the will. These neuroscientific results provide some insight into the neural circuits mediating behaviors that we identify as related to will and volition. Although some researchers contend that neuroscience will undermine our views about free will, to date no results have succeeded in fundamentally disrupting our commonsensical beliefs. Still, the picture emerging from neuroscience does raise new questions, and ultimately may put pressure on some intuitive notions about what is necessary for free will.
Synofzik, M. ; Vosgerau, G. & Newen, A. (2008). Beyond the comparator model: A multi-factorial two-step account of agency. Consciousness and Cognition 17 (1):219-239.
There is an increasing amount of empirical work investigating the sense of agency, i.e. the registration that we are the initiators of our own actions. Many studies try to relate the sense of agency to an internal feed-forward mechanism, called the ‘‘comparator model’’. In this paper, we draw a sharp distinction between a non-conceptual level of feeling of agency and a conceptual level of judgement of agency. By analyzing recent empirical studies, we show that the comparator model is not able to explain either. Rather, we argue for a two-step account: a multifactorial weighting process of different agency indicators accounts for the feeling of agency, which is, in a second step, further processed by conceptual modules to form an attribution judgement. This new framework is then applied to disruptions of agency in schizophrenia, for which the comparator model also fails. Two further extensions are discussed: We show that the comparator model can neither be extended to account for the sense of ownership (which also has to be differentiated into a feeling and a judgement of ownership) nor for the sense of agency for thoughts. Our framework, however, is able to provide a unified account for the sense of agency for both actions and thoughts.
Wegner, Daniel M. (2003). The mind’s best trick: how we experience conscious will. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 65-69.
We often consciously will our own actions. This experience is so profound that it tempts us to believe that our actions are caused by consciousness. It could also be a trick, however - the mind's way of estimating its own apparent authorship by drawing causal inferences about relationships between thoughts and actions. Cognitive, social, and neuropsychological studies of apparent mental causation suggest that experiences of conscious will frequently depart from actual causal processes and so might not reflect direct perceptions of conscious thought causing action.
Zhu, Jing (2004). Locating volition. Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2):302-322.
In this paper, it is examined how neuroscience can help to understand the nature of volition by addressing the question whether volitions can be localized in the brain. Volitions, as acts of the will, are special mental events or activities by which an agent consciously and actively exercises her agency to voluntarily direct her thoughts and actions. If we can pinpoint when and where volitional events or activities occur in the brain and find out their neural underpinnings, this can substantively aid to demystify the concept of volition. After first discussing some methodological issues regarding whether it is possible to locate volition in the brain, various approaches by which neuroscientists and psychologists explore the neural correlates and substrates of volition are examined. Although different psychological conceptualizations of volition shape different perspectives toward understanding the functions of volition, the explorations of the neural basis of volition converge on certain common brain areas and structures. A unifying conception of volition that helps to make better sense of recent empirical findings is then suggested.