Adina Roskies

Dissecting the Readiness Potential: An Investigation of the Relationship between Readiness Potentials, Conscious Willing, and Action The readiness potential (RP) has proven to be one of the most controversial topics in neuroscience and philosophy due to its perceived relevance in elucidating the role of conscious will for action. The controversy stemmed largely from Libet et al.’s (1983) report that the RP that precedes a volitional movement also precedes any conscious awareness of that movement. This chapter presents five experiments showing that (1) the RP does not reflect uniquely motor-related processing, while the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) likely does, and (2) that neither the RP nor the LRP index neural processes are causal of conscious willing. Both potentials seem unrelated to conscious intentions to move. The LRP seems to be associated with an actual neural signal to move. Although the exact nature of the neural processes remains unclear, they seem not to be specific to any particular action domain.

The brain sciences are providing new means of investigating brain processes involved in decision making. However, understanding decision making at the computational level requires methods unsuitable for use in humans. This chapter argues that monkeys are attractive models of human decision making and that neurophysiological recordings in monkeys can provide insight into human decision processes. The chapter explores a number of objections to the relevance of monkey data to understanding human decision making, including the importance of language and consciousness, and argues that none undermines the applicability of the model, though some may limit it. The relevance of studies of decision in monkeys to questions of free will is discussed.

Frankfurt’s compatibilist account of free will considers an individual to be free when her first- and second-order volitions align. This structural account of the will, this chapter argues, fails to engage with the dynamics of will, resulting in two shortcomings: (1) the problem of directionality, or that Frankfurtian freedom obtains whenever first- and second-order volitions align, regardless of which desire was made to change, and (2) the potential for infinite regress of higher-order desires. The authors propose that a satisfying account of the genesis of second-order volitions can resolve these issues. To provide this they draw from George Ainslie’s mechanistic account of self-control, which relies on intertemporal bargaining wherein an individual’s self-predictions about future decisions affect the value of her current choices. They suggest that second-order volitions emerge from precisely this sort of process, and that a Frankfurt-Ainslie account of free will avoids the objections previously raised.

No neuroscientific evidence that one could feasibly obtain could settle, _by itself_, whether anyone has free will, since there are both philosophical and empirical components to this question. However, neuroscience could provide evidence for or against free will, given certain philosophical commitments. This chapter sketches some possibilities but ultimately argues that our interpretation of brain data and its relevance to a deep philosophical question are mediated by a lot of theory, both philosophical and psychological, and that our neuroscience is unlikely to uncover deep truths about metaphysical questions that don’t presuppose some controversial metaphysical views.

Folk psychology operates with commonsense conceptions of volition or the will, agency, voluntary behavior, and human freedom. Philosophy has long been concerned to clarify and illuminate the nature of these concepts, but until recently it had just analytical tools to apply to the enterprise. Now, however, enough progress has been made in understanding the neural bases of human action to begin to ask how these commonsensical concepts comport with our biological understanding. This chapter reviews results from a number of strands of neuroscientific research that provide some insight into the neural circuitry mediating behaviors we associate with will and volition, and considers the degree to which our scientific knowledge suggests alterations in these intuitive views. Although to date no results succeed in fundamentally disrupting our commonsensical beliefs, the picture emerging from neuroscience does raise new questions and may ultimately put pressure on some intuitive notions about what is necessary for free will.

The problem of induction is perennially important in epistemology and the philosophy of science. In response to Goodman's 'New Riddle of Induction', Frank Jackson made a compelling case for there being no new riddle, by arguing that there are no nonprojectible properties. Although Jackson's denial of nonprojectible properties is correct, I argue here that he is mistaken in thinking that he thereby shows that there is no new riddle of induction, and demonstrate that his solution to the grue paradox fails to rule out the possibility of equally justified contradictory inductions. More importantly, in illuminating where Jackson's argument fails, the paper casts a new light on the problem of induction, locating the problem not in the nature of the next (unexamined) x, but in the counterfactual robustness of properties of already examined x's.

(von der Malsburg, 1981), “the binding problem” has with the visual percept of it, so that both are effortlessly captured the attention of researchers across many disci- perceived as being aspects of a single event. I like to plines, including psychology, neuroscience, computa- refer to these sorts of problems as perceptual binding tional modeling, and even philosophy. Despite the is- problems, since they involve unifying aspects of per- sue’s prominence in these fields, what “binding” means cepts. In addition, there are cognitive binding problems: is rarely made explicit. In this paper, I will briefly survey they include relating a concept to a percept, such as the many notions of binding and will introduce some linking the visual representation of an apple to all the issues that will be explored more fully in the reviews semantic knowledge stored about it (it is edible, how it that follow

Functional neuroimaging is sometimes criticized as showing only where in the brain things happen, not how they happen, and thus being unable to inform us about questions of mental and neural representation. Novel analytical methods increasingly make clear that imaging can give us access to constructs of interest to psychology. In this paper I argue that neuroimaging can give us an important, if limited, window into the large-scale structure of neural representation. I describe Representational Similarity Analysis, increasingly used in neuroimaging studies, and lay out desiderata for representations in general. In that context I discuss what RSA can and cannot tell us about neural representation. I compare RSA with fMRI to a different experimental paradigm which has been embraced as being indicative of representation in psychology, and argue that it compares favorably.