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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
 
Aaron Schurger

Aaron Schurger earned his neuroscience Ph.D. from Princeton, working in Jonathan Cohen's Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Laboratory (NCC Lab). He is currently in France at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM).

Cohen and Joshua Greene (a former NCC Lab researcher and now professor of psychology at Harvard University) published an important paper challenging conscious will, with the evidence based primarily on Benjamin Libet's famous experiments.

Now Schurger and his French colleagues, Jacobo D. Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene, have produced significant evidence that the readiness potential (RP) seen before voluntary self-initiated movements is not necessarily causal and determinative of the action.

In their 2012 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say:

The premovement buildup of neuronal activity apparent in the RP and the assumption of causality invested in it have become a cornerstone in the study of volition. Notably, Benjamin Libet (9, 15) tried to measure the temporal relationship between the onset of the RP and the feeling of an “urge” to move. The results of Libet et al.’s experiments (9, 15) suggested that the objective neural events in the brain that cause movement precede the urge to move by 300 ms or more. A recent experiment, using Libet’s paradigm, confirms the same preurge buildup at the single-neuron level (16). Such demonstrations have had an unrivaled influence on the prevailing view that movement is initiated preconsciously and the feeling of intending to move is grafted on after the fact.

In fact a gradual increase in neural activity preceding spontaneous movements appears to be a very general phenomenon, common to both vertebrates (8, 16, 17) and invertebrates (18) alike. Why do both humans and crayfish (18) exhibit the same 1- to 2-s buildup of neural activity in advance of self-initiated movements? Kornhuber and Deecke’s (12) interpretation of the RP as a sign of planning and preparation for movement fails to explain what specific neural operations underlie the spontaneous self-initiation of movement and why these operations are reflected in the specific exponential shape of the RP.

Schurger et al. find that the shape of the readiness potential can be explained if the brain uses a common machinery for decision making, specifically a threshold applied to the output of a stochastic neural accumulator. they say:

Decision-making tasks are typically modeled in terms of the accumulation of evidence. What is unique to the spontaneous-movement task is that subjects are specifically instructed to not base their movement decisions on any specific evidence, sensory or otherwise. One simple solution, given these instructions, is to apply the same accumulator-plus-threshold decision mechanism, but fed solely with internal physiological noise.

The stochastic-decision model reproduces the distribution of waiting times as well as the characteristic shape and time course of the readiness potential. Schurger et al. repeated the Libet experiments, but also added a variation that they call Libetus Interruptus. In the classic Libet experiment, the subject observes a rotating clock dial and notices the clock's position when the subject, without preplanning, flicks a wrist at a random time. The Libetus interruptus task is identical to the classic Libet task except for the addition of random interruptions: an audible “click” that cues the subject to make the movement as quickly as possible after the click.

Recall that philosopher Alfred Mele is a powerful critic of interpretations of the Libet experiments which claim our decisions are made in our brain long before our conscious awareness of the decisions. Mele criticizes the interpretation of the Libet results on two grounds.

First, the mere appearance of the RP a half-second or more before the action in no way makes the RP the cause of the action. It may simply mark the beginning of forming an intention to act. In the two-stage model, the rise of the RP might simply reflect the considering of possible options.

Secondly, Libet himself argued that there is enough time after the W moment (a window of opportunity) to veto the action, but Mele's second criticism points out that such examples of "free won't" would not be captured in the classic Libet experiments, because the recording device is triggered by the action (typically flicking the wrist) itself.

Thus, although all Libet experiments ended with the wrist flicking, we are not justified in assuming that the rise of the RP (well before the moment of conscious will) is a cause of the wrist flicking. Libet knew that there were very likely other times when the RP rose, but which did not lead to a flick of the wrist, so his experiment could not detect them.

Schurger et al. note this backward selection bias, that only epochs ending with an actual movement are subject to analysis (ibid, p.6). Their Libetus interruptus is exploring those time intervals when the RP might rise, their accumulator model might get to, or even surpass?, the threshold, and yet there might be no wrist flick.

They offer a new model for what the RP represents, beyond the vague phrases of the past four decades of research, that it reflects "planning and preparation for movement." Their model for the RP is divided into two nonlinear components: an early precommitment phase (or stage in our terminology) dominated by stochastic fluctuations (with an evolving spatial distribution) and a late postcommitment motor execution phase (the last 150 ms).

Schurger et al. challenge the notion that the early buildup of activity biases supposedly "voluntary" decisions (as argued by Soon et al., among others) They say that their model is consistent with such predecision biases, but suggests that they may reflect stochastic fluctuations rather than an intentional (preconscious) decision process:

It is widely assumed that the neural decision to move coincides with the onset of the RP (which, given its slow nonlinear character, is difficult to pinpoint) (11). Our model challenges that assumption by suggesting that the “neural decision to move now” might come very late in the time course of the RP. Prior research shows an involvement of motor areas, including primary motor cortex, in motor imagery, in the absence of overt movement (40). Thus, movement-specific activity in motor cortex, even primary motor cortex, although it might vary with the probability that a movement will occur, does not necessarily signal the final commitment to produce a movement now...Thus, according to our model, uncued movements in a task like Libet’s tend to be preceded by a gradual increase in neural activity [measured at the scalp (8, 9) or the single-neuron level (16)] whose causal role is incidental—not directed (consciously or otherwise) at producing a movement.

"Finally," say Schurger et al., although their "model is silent with respect to the urge to move and its temporal relation to motor decisions, it helps dissolve another puzzling question that seemed to arise from Libet’s paradigm. Libet himself found that subjects were able to estimate the time of a tactile sensory decision in relation to a quickly rotating clock dial with only about 50 ms of error on average (9). Why then should there be such a long and variable gap between the time of a motor decision and the subjective estimate of the time of the motor decision, whereas no such gap exists for sensory decisions? In fact, this question arises only when we assume that the motor decision coincides in time with the onset of the RP. We have argued that this need not be the case and that the neural decision to move may come much closer in time to the movement itself (e.g., −150 ms). We propose that the neural decision to move coincides in time with average subjective estimates of the time of awareness of intention to move (9, 11) and that the brain produces a reasonably accurate estimate of the time of its movement-causing decision events." (ibid, p.7)

Thinkers (e.g., Daniel Wegner, Patrick Haggard) who claim that the Libet experiments prove that our conscious will and subsequent actions are caused by prior neural activity - this is the popular view that "my neurons made me do it" - are simply wrong.

Note that the abrupt and rapid decisions to flex a finger measured by Libet bear little resemblance to the kinds of two-stage deliberate decisions for which we can first freely generate alternative possibilities for action, then evaluate and select (in an adequately causal way) which is the best of these possibilities in the light of our reasons, motives, 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 single stream of consciousness.

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