Decision Time for Free Will

Decision Time for Free Will

In this issue of Neuron, Fried et al. report electrical recordings from single neurons in several areas of the human medial frontal lobe prior to voluntary movement. These data shed important new light on the neuronal mechanisms of human volition and on the hotly debated relation between consciousness and will.

The Scope of Man's Free Will

Free will

Much of the best biological work in decision-making has been carried out in bacteria and insects because the genetics of these organisms is better understood and they provide the most physically accessible nervous systems. With the advent of modern imaging and neurophysiological techniques, however, decision-making by human and non-human primates has become a bustling area in the early stages o...

Free Will

A criterion for the existence of human free will is specified: a human action is asserted to be a manifestations of human free-will if this action is a specific physical action that is experienced as being consciously chosen and willed to occur by a human agent, and is not determined within physical theory either in terms of the physically described aspects of nature or by any non-human agency....

Free will - even for robots

Human free will is a product of evolution and contributes to the success of the human animal. Useful robots will also require free will of a similar kind, and we will have to design it into them. Free will is not an all-or-nothing thing. Some agents have more free will, or free will of different kinds, than others, and we will try to analyze this phenomenon. Our objectives are primarily technol...