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Evolution Explains It All for You - The New York Times
Now Dennett is advancing on free will. In ''Freedom Evolves,'' he wants to show how evolution can get us ''all the way from senseless atoms to freely chosen actions.'' And he succeeds in his aim, given what he means by freedom. But he doesn't establish the kind of absolute free will and moral responsibility that most people want to believe in and do believe in. That can't be done, and he knows it.
Right Orbitofrontal Tumor With Pedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign, March 2003, Burns and Swerdlow 60 (3): 437
The patient displayed impulsive sexual behavior with pedophilia, marked constructional apraxia, and agraphia. The behavioral symptoms and constructional deficits, including agraphia, resolved following tumor resection. Arch Neurol -- Abstract:
The Big Questions: Do we have free will?
In 2003, the Archives of Neurology carried a startling clinical report. A middle-aged Virginian man with no history of any misdemeanour began to stash child pornography and sexually molest his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Placed in the court system, his sexual behaviour became increasingly compulsive. Eventually, after repeatedly complaining of headaches and vertigo, he was sent for a brain scan. It showed a large but benign tumour in the frontal area of his brain, invading the septum and hypothalmus - regions known to regulate sexual behaviour. (18 November 2006 - New Scientist)
Patricia Churchland on free will
NewScientist often features humorous little pieces on "nominative determinism," the idea that your name can control your destiny.
It's not quite perfect. Consider Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher who isn't exactly friendly to a theistic worldview, since she espouses "eliminative materialism," the idea that the mind is matter, and that's all that matters. (decorabilia: NewScientist at 50)
The Will to Power--Is "Free Will" All in Your Head?: Scientific American
Neurosurgeons evoke an intention to act during brain surgery
Addiction, free will and self control (Podcast)
Heard the one about the psychiatrist, the Supreme Court judge and the philosopher who walked in to a radio studio...? Join Natasha Mitchell and guests in a roundtable interrogation of how the brain sciences are changing our understanding of addiction, and the powerful consequences for notions of free will, responsibility and culpability. All In The Mind - 24 October 2009 -
The speed of free will
By varying the duration of the lulls between each flash of the clock face, the researchers were able to test the top speed at which participants were able to volitionally shift their attention from one letter position to the next. It turned out the participants needed an average of about 274ms (about quarter of a second) to make these attentional shifts successfully.
Is Free Will an Illusion?
Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. | Wired Science | Wired.com
FIVE PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND By Stuart Kauffman
I have presented the mind-brain identity theory in the context of two physical theories: first one in which a multiparticle quantum-classical system is capable of decohering reversibly to classicity, or classicity for all practical purposes. This allows mind to have consequences for brain without having to act by efficient cause on brain. This appears to resolve two outstanding problems in the philosophy of mind that have plagued us since Descartes: how the mind 'acts on' matter - it does so acausally via decoherence. How does mind act on mind - via the quantum decohering-recohering dynamical behavior of the mind-brain identity system. (Edge)
Is free will an illusion?
This debate has focused on humans and 'conscious free will'. Yet when it comes to understanding how we initiate behaviour, we can learn a lot by looking at animals. Although we do not credit animals with anything like the consciousness in humans, researchers have found that animal behaviour is not as involuntary as it may appear. The idea that animals act only in response to external stimuli has long been abandoned, and it is well established that they initiate behaviour on the basis of their internal states, as we do. (Nature)
Roy Baumeister: "Free will, Consciousness, and Human Social Life"
"Roy Baumeister of Florida State University speaks about the usefulness and complexity of consciousness and human culture."
John Bargh: What Does the "Free" in "Free Will" Really Mean?
SPSP 2009 Video
Interview with Daniel Dennett. | Nirmukta
Dr. Dennett is a philosopher first although his ideas are strongly influenced by and develop on scientific ideas. His books have a way of cutting through the philosophical jargon, to present clear ways of thinking about fascinating subjects. He offers examples and analogies that help to make these areas of thought, ranging from consciousness to religion, accessible to all. I recently had the chance to ask him some questions for Nirmukta. Here is that interview:
In search of the conscious will
Studying how people form a conscious intention to move is troublesome for at least two reasons. First, as soon as you instruct a participant that now is the time for them to move freely, of their own volition, you've already undermined the idea that they're making up their own minds. Second, there's no room in materialist science for a conscious will, separate from the electro-chemical workings of brain. (BPS RESEARCH DIGEST)
Large-Scale Problems in Neuroscience > Patricia Churchland
What do neuroscientific discoveries imply for free will and responsibility?
Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet and funny--an evolutionary riddle
Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. (TED)
Sue Blackmore: Let's drop the charade
It's right we come to terms with the fact that free will, just like the sense of a higher power, is an illusion
Daniel Dennett: Is science showing that we don't have free will?
A public lecture by Daniel C. Dennett, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. In his lecture, Professor Daniel Dennett discussed some of the current work in psychology bearing on this question. He also drew on Hume, Darwin and Turing, three Enlightenment heroes.
Unconscious decisions
Benjamin Libet’s experimental finding that decisions had in effect already been made before the conscious mind became aware of making them is both famous and controversial; now new research (published in a ‘Brief Communication’ in Nature Neuroscience by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes) goes beyond it. Whereas the delay between decision and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds. (Conscious Entities)
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Whereas the delay between decision and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds.
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In the SMA the researchers found activity which predicted the decision some five seconds before the moment of conscious awareness, but it was elsewhere that the earliest signs appeared - in the frontopolar cortex and the precuneus. Here the subject’s decision could be seen as much as seven seconds ahead of time: allowing for the delay in the fMRI response, this tots up to a real figure of ten seconds.
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