Neuroscience: Capturing free will

The concept of free will: philosophy, neuroscience and the law.

Various philosophical definitions of free will are first considered. The compatibilist definition, which says simply that acts are freely willed if they are not subject to constraints, is identified as much used in the legal system and essentially impervious to scientific investigation. A middle-ground "incompatibilist" definition, which requires that freely willed acts be consciously initiated...

NEUROSCIENCE, INTENTIONALITY AND FREE WILL Reply to Habermas

I agree with much of Habermas’s article ‘The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will,’ but concentrate on disagreements. (i) He is wrong to think the language game of neuroscience is somehow at odds with the language game of rational intentionality. I argue that they give different levels of description of the same system. He also has too narrow a conception of contempo...

Computational Neuroscience: Capturing the Essence

C.G. Galizia, P.-M. Lledo (eds.), Neurosciences From Molecule to Behavior: A University Textbook, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-10769-6_30, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 The nervous system faces a most challenging task – to receive information from the outside world, process it, to change adaptively, and to generate an output – the appropriate behavior of the organism in a complex world. The...

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...