Adina Roskies

This article examines whether, and in what ways, neuroscience can illuminate those questions associated with neurophilosophy. It begins by discussing the relation between philosophy and neuroscience, in particular how they can each influence each other. It then considers how neuroscience can illuminate philosophical questions about mind, including metaphysical questions about the relation of mind and brain, questions about the nature of mental representation and content, consciousness, and even moral theory. It also looks at some of the most prevalent techniques employed by neuroscience for investigating brain structure and function; how neuroscience provides potential counterexamples to philosophical claims, by showing how brains work and suggests new interpretations of data; and the influence of neuroscience on philosophy in the area of normativity. The article concludes by examining attempts to use neuroscience to inform philosophical argument about free will.

What happens at the end of a clinical trial for an investigational neural implant? It may be surprising to learn how difficult it is to answer this question. While new trials are initiated with increasing regularity, relatively little consensus exists on how best to conduct them, and even less on how to ethically end them. The landscape of recent neural implant trials demonstrates wide variability of what happens to research participants after an neural implant trial ends. Some former research participants continue to receive support for their devices (e.g., battery and component replacements, software updates, etc.). Others, when safe, have their neural implants removed through surgical explantation. Still others continue to live with a deactivated neural implant embedded in their body. In the United States, there are no uniform requirements to provide services, of any kind, after an neural implant study ends, and other nations are similarly facing this challenge. The existence of a post-trial gap in an expanding neural implant research ecosystem invites obvious questions: What is owed to neural implant research participants post-trial, and why has providing it been so difficult to accomplish in practice? To take a step forward on this difficult issue, we assembled one group of stakeholders – researchers funded for neuroethics grants by the National Institutes of Health – to explore possible starting points on one topic: ethical guidance for post-trial care of research participants in neural implant trials. Based on shared concerns discussed in the expert workshop the current paper is a call to action. It reports the key areas of convergence from the meeting and highlights important next steps towards developing much needed guidance.

In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of motivation itself, and use that discussion to sketch four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: caricature versions of familiar instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories about morally worthy motivation. To test these theories, we turn to a wealth of scientific, particularly neuroscientific, evidence. Our conclusions are that (1) although the scientific evidence does not at present mandate a unique philosophical conclusion, it does present formidable obstacles to a number of popular philosophical approaches, and (2) theories of morally worthy motivation that best fit the current scientific picture are ones that owe much more to Hume or Aristotle than to Kant.

This paper explores whether brain images may be admitted as evidence in criminal trials under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, which weighs probative value against the danger of being prejudicial, confusing, or misleading to fact finders. The paper summarizes and evaluates recent empirical research relevant to these issues. We argue that currently the probative value of neuroimages for criminal responsibility is minimal, and there is some evidence of their potential to be prejudicial or misleading. We also propose experiments that will directly assess how jurors are influenced by brain images

The readiness potential (RP) is one of the most controversial topics in neuroscience and philosophy due to its perceived relevance to the role of conscious willing in action. Libet and colleagues reported that RP onset precedes both volitional movement and conscious awareness of willing that movement, suggesting that the experience of conscious will may not cause volitional movement (Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983). Rather, they suggested that the RP indexes unconscious processes that may actually cause both volitional movement and the accompanying conscious feeling of will (Libet et al., 1983; pg. 640). Here, we demonstrate that volitional movement can occur without an accompanying feeling of will. We additionally show that the neural processes indexed by RPs are insufficient to cause the experience of conscious willing. Specifically, RPs still occur when subjects make self-timed, endogenously-initiated movements due to a post-hypnotic suggestion, without a conscious feeling of having willed those movements.

Marcelo Fischborn discusses the significance of neuroscience for debates about free will. Although he concedes that, to date, Libet-style experiments have failed to threaten “libertarian free will”, he argues that, in principle, neuroscience and psychology could do so by supporting local determinism. We argue that, in principle, Libet-style experiments cannot succeed in disproving or even establishing serious doubt about libertarian free will. First, we contend that “local determination”, as Fischborn outlines it, is not a coherent concept. Moreover, determinism is unlikely to be established by neuroscience in any form that should trouble compatibilists or libertarians—that is, anyone who thinks we might have free will. We conclude that, in principle, neuroscience will not be able undermine libertarian free will and explain why these conclusions support a coherent compatibilist notion of causal sourcehood.

Thought experiments have played a central role in philosophical methodology, largely as a means of elucidating the nature of our concepts and the implications of our theories.1 Particular attention is given to widely shared “folk” intuitions – the basic untutored intuitions that the layperson has about philosophical questions.2 The folk intuition is meant to underlie our core metaphysical concepts, and philosophical analysis is meant to explicate or sometimes refine these naïve concepts. Consistency with the deliverances of folk intuitions is a sign that the philosopher is making contact with his object of interest. In order to explore folk concepts, people are often asked to provide their intuitions about a state of affairs in some alternate universe or possible world, one that differs in particular, precise ways from the way things are in the actual world. Here we provide evidence that people’s intuitions about moral responsibility sometimes diverge across worlds even when the facts about these worlds are the same. Which world one considers actual affects at least some philosophical judgments, suggesting that it is not just possible worlds to which our intuitions are tied. We will present several possible explanations for the asymmetry we have identified, and we’ll consider some implications for philosophical intuition.

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.

© The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Clark is usually among the first in philosophy to ride a new and important wave on the frontiers of cognitive science research. His Microcognition and Associative Engines chronicled connectionism, Being There explored embodied cognition, Natural Born Cyborgs deals with BCIs and environmental and technological scaffolding, and Supersizing the Mind is an extended argument for extended minds. Clark's latest, showcases his new enthusiasm about predictive coding, a computational framework for understanding cognition that is generating more excitement and controversy across diverse areas of cognitive science than an offshore wind at Maverick’s does among the boarding elite....Clark is a master at taking complex ideas in cognitive science and conveying them in less technical fashion to a wide audience, doing so with panache and wit....

Van Orden and Paap argue that subtractive functional neuroimaging is fundamentally flawed, unfalsifiable, and cannot bear upon the nature of mind. In this they are mistaken, although their criticisms interestingly illuminate the scientific problems we confront in investigating the material basis of mind. Here, I consider the criticisms of Van Orden and Paap and discuss where they are mistaken and where justified. I then consider the picture of imaging science that Van Orden and Paap seem to espouse and sketch an alternative picture that is more realistic, more interesting, and consistent with the deliverances and the weaknesses of neuroimaging techniques. Finally, I identify three assumptions that I do think neuroimaging is wedded to and briefly discuss their implications