Can Neuroscience Resolve Issues about Free Will? ” Adina Roskies knits together traditional and modern philosophical ideas with emerging concepts arising from the neuroscience of decision making. It is an elegant and nuanced synthesis. Roskies feels the neurobiology of decision making offers insight into the machine behind the mind while arguing that mechanism does not undermine mindedness or t...

Do voluntary and task-driven shifts of attention have the same time course? In order to measure the time needed to voluntarily shift attention, we devised several novel visual search tasks that elicited multiple sequential attentional shifts. Participants could only respond correctly if they attended to the right place at the right time. In control conditions, search tasks were similar but part...

Everyone sober believes in freedom of the will. Whatever we precisely mean by it, it is something we have. The world, which includes us, may be deterministic. This generates a contradiction. Or the world may be indeterministic, but it seems common ground that this does not improve the dialectical situation; the freely willed cannot occur at random. There is no escape; we are dealing here with a...

Free will is one of the fundamental aspects of human cognition. In the context of cognitive neuroscience, various experiments on time perception, sensorimotor coordination, and agency suggest the possibility that it is a robust illusion (a feeling independent of actual causal relationship with actions) constructed by neural mechanisms. Humans are known to suffer from various cognitive biases an...

Belief in free will is widespread. The present research considered one reason why people may believe that actions are freely chosen rather than determined: they attribute randomness in behavior to free will. Experiment 1 found that participants who were prompted to perform a random sequence of actions experienced their behavior as more freely chosen than those who were prompted to perform a det...

Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably important in terms of inner process, subjective perception, and social consequences. Psychology can study the difference between freer and less free actions without making dubious metaphysical commitments. Human evolution seems to have created a relatively new, more complex form of action control that corresponds to popular noti...

The article focuses on the issue of brain determinism, by examining two recent neuroscientific experiments (Libet’s and Haynes’ experiments about conscious acts). Such experiments aim to show a cerebral determination of the agent’s free choices. The author argues that even if their conclusions were true, that would not eliminate the common use of the concept of free will and the attribution of ...