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Neuroscientists often consider free will to be an illusion. Contrary to this hypothesis, the contributions to this volume show that recent developments in neuroscience can also support the existence of free will. Firstly, the possibility of intentional consciousness is studied. Secondly, Libet’s experiments are discussed from this new perspective. Thirdly, the relationship between free will, causality and language is analyzed. This approach suggests that language grants the human brain a possibility to articulate a meaningful personal life. Therefore, human beings can escape strict biological determinism. Contributing author Sofia Bonicalzi has received funding from the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 754388 (LMUResearchFellows) and from LMUexcellent, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Free State of Bavaria under the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal Government and the Länder.
Self-organization constitutes one of the most important theoretical debates in contemporary life sciences. The present book explores the relevance of the concept of self-organization and its impact on such scientific fields as: immunology, neurosciences, ecology and theories of evolution. Historical aspects of the issue are also broached. Intuitions relative to self-organization can be found in the works of such key western philosophical figures as Aristotle, Leibniz and Kant. Interacting with more recent authors and cybernetics, self-organization represents a notion in keeping with the modern world's discovery of radical complexity. The themes of teleology and emergence are analyzed by philosophers of sciences with regards to the issues of modelization and scientific explanation. The implications of self-organization for life sciences are here approached from an interdisciplinary angle, revealing the notion as already rewarding and full of promise for the future.
This book offers an intellectually fierce defence of Libertarian Free Will seen from a neuroscientific and biological perspective. Tse argues that causation in living systems is dominated by non-linear goal-seeking automatic feedback loops and a continual criterial reparameterization of what will count as an adequate solution to goal fulfilment. For this reason, outcomes are neither determined nor random. That is, for each cycle, outcomes could have turned out differently than they actually did. Humans, he argues, have two kinds of libertarian free will. One type concerns the ability to choose freely and is shared with other highly developed animals. Second-order free will, in contrast, is u...
Contemporary classics on the the major approaches to emergence found in contemporary philosophy and science, with chapters by such prominent scholars as John Searle, Stephen Weinberg, William Wimsatt, Thomas Schelling, Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Dennett, Herbert Simon, Stephen Wolfram, Jerry Fodor, Philip Anderson, David Chalmers, and others. Emergence, largely ignored just thirty years ago, has become one of the liveliest areas of research in both philosophy and science. Fueled by advances in complexity theory, artificial life, physics, psychology, sociology, and biology and by the parallel development of new conceptual tools in philosophy, the idea of emergence offers a way to understand a wide v...
Free Imagination argues that the brain's capacity to imagine is the fundamental basis of human Free Will. Laws of physics need not apply in our internal simulations, so virtually anything is possible there. And since some of our actions can follow from that which we imagine, especially from processes of deliberation that involve imagining possible scenarios and outcomes, our actions inherit the freedom of our imaginings. The creative power of the human imagination may have evolved as a consequence of the demodularization of neural circuitry associated with volitional attentional operations over operands downloadable into a mental workspace where, virtually, anything could be combined with an...
Free will is a perennial theological and philosophical topic. As a central dogmatic locus, it is implicated in discussions around core Christian doctrines such as grace, salvation, sin, providence, evil, and predestination. This book offers a state-of-the-art look at recent debates about free will in analytic and philosophical theology. The chapters revolve around three central themes: the debate between theological compatibilists and libertarians, the communal nature of Christian freedom, and the role of free will in Christology. With contributions by leading scholars, the volume provides a valuable overview of current arguments as well as novel openings and ideas for further discussion.
The relatively new movement of Experimental Philosophy applies different systematic experimental methods to further illuminate classical philosophical issues. This book brings together experts from the field to give the reader a compact yet extensive overview, offering a ready at hand introduction to the state of the art.
The recording and analysis of electrical brain activity associated with eye movements has a history of several decades. While the early attempts were primarily focused on uncovering the brain mechanisms of eye movements, more recent approaches use eye movements as markers of the ongoing brain activity to investigate perceptual and cognitive processes. This recent approach of segmenting brain activity based on eye movement behavior has several important advantages. First, the eye movement system is closely related to cognitive functions such as perception, attention and memory. This is not surprising since eye movements provide the easiest and the most accurate way to extract information from...
This book contains the proceedings of an International Eibsee Meeting held in Garmisch Partinkirchen in 1993. It should be of interest to ophthalmologists, neurologists and otolaryngologists.
This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.