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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Susan Pockett

Susan Pockett is a neurophysiologist from New Zealand who developed an electromagnetic field theory explanation of consciousness in a 2012 article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and in her 2012 book, The Nature of Consciousness: A Hypothesis.

She says:

The essence of the present hypothesis can be stated in one sentence. It is that consciousness is identical with certain spatiotemporal patterns in the electromagnetic field.

Now if this hypothesis is true, it may not be overstating the case to say that it solves the mind-body problem at a stroke. If the hypothesis is true, then consciousness is not material in the usually accepted sense, but neither is it some kind of non-physical spook (which, being non-physical, is therefore not accessible to scientific investigation). Consciousness (or at least normal human consciousness) is a local, brain-generated, configuration of, or pattern in, the electromagnetic field. A brain-sized spatial pattern in the electromagnetic field is not matter as such, so the hypothesis escapes the main objection to materialism. However, the electromagnetic field does have the easily observed property of affecting matter, so the hypothesis also side-steps the main objection to dualism. Philosophically speaking, this looks like a winner.

Pockett examined the implications for the problem of free will versus determinism (which she doubts can be proved to exist) and of recent studies in neuroscience that challenge freedom of the will (especially the Libet experiments).
Has neuroscience killed free will? The answer depends entirely on one’s definition of free will—and in this case it does not matter whether we are talking about the compatibilist, incompatibilist or libertarian variety. If any of these definitions of free will requires the conscious initiation of one action rather than another, then the answer is yes, neuroscience has killed that kind of free will. There is now an abundance of evidence that voluntary actions are not initiated consciously.

The pioneer in the matter of bringing the idea of conscious free will into the arena of experimental science was Benjamin Libet. His original experiments (Libet et al. 1982, 1983) are now well known: they show that the event-related potential coupled to a spontaneous action (the readiness potential or RP) starts off the order of 350 ms before the subject reports having consciously willed the action. For many years this highly repeatable and methodologically robust result was taken to mean that voluntary acts are initiated pre-consciously. More recently, Pockett and Purdy (2010) showed that when the same action is made not spontaneously but as the result of a specific decision, the RP preceding the action becomes so much shorter that it starts at about the same time as the reported conscious decision to make the action. This is probably explained by the fact that the earlier-onset parts of the RP relate more to expectation or readiness than to the initiation of a specific act: in the decision condition, the subject is so occupied with actually making the required (fairly complicated) decision that they have no processing capacity to spare for getting ready to move. On the face of it, this result restores the possibility that consciousness does directly cause actions.

Backward time referral is still taken literally by neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff. Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR "backward time referral of quantum information can provide real-time conscious causal control of voluntary actions."
A special issue of Consciousness and Cognition in June 2002 was devoted to Libet's interpretation of the long delay between cortical stimulation and conscious awareness of the stimulus. Especially controversial was Libet's interpretation of the delay as the "backward referral in time" of the felt stimulus. In her contribution to the issue, Pockett claimed that "it takes only 80ms (rather than 500ms) for stimuli to come to consciousness and that "subjective back-referral of sensations in time" to the time of the stimulus does not occur (contrary to Libet's original interpretation of his results)."

In 2004, Pockett wrote an article in Consciousness and Cognition on "the death of 'subjective backwards referral'." She cited Daniel Pollen's research in the 1970's to show that Benjamin Libet's idea of a long delay between direct cortical stimulation and the moment of conscious awareness was a consequence of suppression of neuronal activity. Libet's interpretation of the delay as "subjective backward time referral" was discounted by several contributors to the issue. Pockett said that Pollen's "evidence so seriously undermines the data interpretation underlying the notion of subjective backwards referral that it may well have finally buried it."

In the same issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Pollen commented on those who agreed with his analysis of Libet's 1964 paper,

Thus, I believe that our results are consistent with the insights of those who have long suspected a prolonged integrative mechanism and a delayed neuronal activation following threshold direct cortical stimulation Churchland (1981a, 1981b), Glynn (1990, 1991), Gomes (1998, 2002), and especially Pockett (2002), who correctly surmised the existence of a dynamic intratrain facilatory process that we have confirmed at the single cell level. The relationship between intratrain facilitation and a prolonged latency at liminal currents is straightforward. As long as such facilitation is present, it will always be possible to excite a neuron at a lower current than would be required to elicit an action potential with the very first stimulus but only after a sufficient delay for the threshold to be reached.

But the early appearance of the readiness potential still bothers many thinkers. Pockett was concerned that it may "kill free will." However, in her 2013 article If Free Will Did Not Exist, We Would Have To Invent It," she considers three definitions of free will that those experimenting with the readiness potential might be using:

  1. compatibilist free will, when an agent is not externally coerced,
  2. an incompatibilist free will, which could exist if causal determinism were an illusion,
  3. a libertarian free will, when an agent can originate an act with no physical antecedents.
Pockett argues strongly that the existence of causal determinism is unproven, and probably unprovable. She concludes that "causal determinism is not an established scientific fact."

Pockett quotes the SEP definition of determinism as "every event necessitated by antecedent events." There is no such determinism (really pre-determinism) There is however, a statistical or "adequate determinism."

In other more recent work, Pockett has come to accept the evidence from Daniel Wegner and others (e.g., the Libet experiments) that humans do not consciously perceive the initiation of their own actions. Consciousness is a post-hoc fabrication, a confabulated narrative to explain what was done unconsciously. In her 2012 paper, The Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness, she says that it does not directly cause voluntary behavior. So Pockett questions both determinism as the cause and consciousness as the cause of actions.

However, just as full "consciousness" is very rarely involved as causes of our actions, there is no evidence whatsoever that the early appearance of the readiness potential in the Libet experiments has already made our decision.

In her 2004 article, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?, Pockett criticizes whether the subjects in the Libet experimants were really making a "voluntary" decision.

The movements studied do comply with an everyday (i.e. relatively weak) definition of freely willed actions. However it seems to me quite likely that the subjects may have interpreted the experimental instructions as requiring them to set their brain motor systems in a threshold state and then wait for a random neural event to initiate each action, rather than actually deciding voluntarily when to make the movement. Thus the reported time of the decision to move may actually have been the time at which the subject became aware that this random neural event had happened and the action was under way. Additionally, even if this interpretation is completely wrong and each movement really was preceded by a definite decision to move, this decision could only have been concerned with the ‘when’ of the movement, not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of it. Both what the movement would be and how to make it had been decided well in advance. These experiments certainly show that sometimes (and only sometimes, even in these experiments) ‘decisions’ about when to make a particular movement are made preconsciously. But they do not address at all the question of whether larger decisions about what to do and how to do it are routinely made preconsciously.

In our information philosophy analysis, we agree with Pockett that the abrupt and rapid decisions to flex a finger measured by Libet bear little resemblance to the kinds of two-stage deliberate decisions during which we first freely generate alternative possibilities for action, then evaluate which is the best of these possibilities in the light of our reasons, motives, values, and desires - first "free," then "will."

We can correlate the beginnings of the readiness potential (350ms before Libet's conscious will time "W" appears) with the early stage of the two-stage model, when alternative possibilities are being generated, in part at random. The early stage may be delegated to the subconscious, which is capable of considering multiple alternatives (William James' "blooming, buzzing confusion") that would congest the low-data-rate single stream of consciousness.

Selected Works
  • Pockett S. (2013) If free will did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. In Exploring the illusion of free will and moral responsibility. Ed GD Caruso, Lexington Books NY. pp265-272 (View a PDF version of the article)

  • Pockett, S. (2012) The electromagnetic field theory of consciousness: a testable hypothesis about the characteristics of conscious as opposed to non-conscious fields. Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (11-12) 191-223. (View a PDF version of the article)

  • Pockett S and Purdy SC (2010) Are voluntary movements initiated preconsciously? The relationships between readiness potentials, urges and decisions. In: W Sinnott-Armstrong and L Nadel (Eds) Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet. Eds, New York; OUP. (View a PDF version of the article)

  • Pockett S (2007) The concept of free will: philosophy, neuroscience and the law. Invited Paper: Behavioral Sciences and the Law 25, 281-293. (View a PDF version of the article)

  • Banks WP and Pockett S (2007) Libet's work on the neuroscience of free will. Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Blackwell.

  • Pockett S., Banks W.P. and Gallagher S. (2006) Does consciousness cause behavior? Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. (View an online version of the article)

  • Pockett S (2006) The great subjective back-referral debate: do neural responses increase during a train of stimuli? Consciousness and Cognition 15, 551-559.

  • "Hypnosis and the death of 'subjective backwards referral'," Consciousness and Cognition 2004, 13, pp.621-625

  • "Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?"Imprint Academic, 2004, pp. 23-40

  • "On Subjective Back-Referral and How Long It Takes to Become Conscious of a Stimulus: A Reinterpretation of Libet's Data," Consciousness and Cognition 2002, 11, pp.144-161

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