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  1. Psychological Epiphenomenalism.Darryl Mathieson - 2024 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 31 (3-4):120-143.
    Researchers in the psychological sciences have put forward the thesis that various sources of psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific evidence demonstrate that being conscious of our mental states does not make any difference to our behaviour. In this paper, I argue that the evidence marshalled in support of this view — which I call psychological epiphenomenalism — is subject to major objections, relies on a superficial reading of the relevant literature, and fails to engage with the more precise ways in which (...)
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  • The Libet paradigm and a dilemma for epiphenomenalism.Bradford Stockdale - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Epiphenomenalism is the thesis that though physical events may cause mental events, those mental events never cause physical events. In this paper, I will be concerned with the claim that our thoughts, intentions, and awareness play no causal role in producing actions. Though epiphenomenalism has been defended with a priori philosophical arguments, the majority of the support that it has gained in recent years has come from advances in neuroscience. At the center of these experiments is the Libet paradigm that (...)
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  • Hard-Incompatibilist Existentialism: Neuroscience, Punishment, and Meaning in Life.Derk Pereboom & Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - In Gregg D. Caruso & Owen J. Flanagan (eds.), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.
    As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some (...)
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  • Willusionism, epiphenomenalism, and the feeling of conscious will.Sven Walter - 2014 - Synthese 191 (10):2215-2238.
    While epiphenomenalism—i.e., the claim that the mental is a causally otiose byproduct of physical processes that does not itself cause anything—is hardly ever mentioned in philosophical discussions of free will, it has recently come to play a crucial role in the scientific attack on free will led by neuroscientists and psychologists. This paper is concerned with the connection between epiphenomenalism and the claim that free will is an illusion, in particular with the connection between epiphenomenalism and willusionism, i.e., with the (...)
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  • Consciousness and Moral Responsibility: Skeptical Challenges and Theological Reflections.Aku Olavi Visala - 2021 - Zygon 56 (3):641-665.
    Some philosophers and scientists have argued that we humans cannot be held morally responsible for anything. Invoking results of the neurosciences and the cognitive sciences, they argue that humans lack the kind of conscious control and awareness required for moral responsibility. For theological ethics and Christian theology as a whole, moral responsibility is indispensable. I will begin by outlining some empirical results that are invoked in support of moral responsibility skepticism. I will, then, examine the subsequent discussion and the question (...)
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  • Compatibilism evolves?: On some varieties of Dennett worth wanting.Manuel Vargas - 2005 - Metaphilosophy 36 (4):460-475.
    I examine the extent to which Dennett’s account in Freedom Evolves might be construed as revisionist about free will or should instead be understood as a more traditional kind of compatibilism. I also consider Dennett’s views about philosophical work on free agency and its relationship to scientific inquiry, and I argue that extant philosophical work is more relevant to scientific inquiry than Dennett’s remarks may suggest.
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  • Rational Action and Moral Ownership.Vishnu Sridharan - 2013 - Neuroethics 7 (2):195-203.
    In exploring the impact of cognitive science findings on compatibilist theories of moral responsibility such as Fischer and Ravizza’s, most attention has focused on whether agents are, in fact, responsive to reasons. In doing so, however, we have largely ignored our improved understanding of agents’ epistemic access to their reasons for acting. The “ownership” component of Fischer and Ravizza’s theory depends on agents being able to see the causal efficacy of their conscious deliberation. Cognitive science studies make clear that a (...)
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  • Intentional systems theory, mental causation and empathic resonance.Marc V. P. Slors - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (2):321-336.
    In the first section of this paper I argue that the main reason why Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Systems Theory (IST) has been perceived as behaviourist or antirealist is its inability to account for the causal efficacy of the mental. The rest of the paper is devoted to the claim that by emending the theory with a phenomenon called ‘empathic resonance’ (ER), it can account for the various explananda in the mental causation debate. Thus, IST + ER is a much more (...)
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  • Scientific Challenges to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Joshua Shepherd - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (3):197-207.
    Here, I review work from three lines of research in cognitive science often taken to threaten free will and moral responsibility. This work concerns conscious deciding, the experience of acting, and the role of largely unnoticed situational influences on behavior. Whether this work in fact threatens free will and moral responsibility depends on how we ought to interpret it, and depends as well on the nature of free and responsible behavior. I discuss different ways this work has been interpreted and (...)
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  • Conscious Action/Zombie Action.Joshua Shepherd - 2016 - Noûs 50 (2):419-444.
    I argue that the neural realizers of experiences of trying are not distinct from the neural realizers of actual trying . I then ask how experiences of trying might relate to the perceptual experiences one has while acting. First, I assess recent zombie action arguments regarding conscious visual experience, and I argue that contrary to what some have claimed, conscious visual experience plays a causal role for action control in some circumstances. Second, I propose a multimodal account of the experience (...)
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  • Causally efficacious intentions and the sense of agency: In defense of real mental causation.Markus E. Schlosser - 2012 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 32 (3):135-160.
    Empirical evidence, it has often been argued, undermines our commonsense assumptions concerning the efficacy of conscious intentions. One of the most influential advocates of this challenge has been Daniel Wegner, who has presented an impressive amount of evidence in support of a model of "apparent mental causation". According to Wegner, this model provides the best explanation of numerous curious and pathological cases of behavior. Further, it seems that Benjamin Libet's classic experiment on the initiation of action and the empirical evidence (...)
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  • Mental imagery and the illusion of conscious will.Paulius Rimkevičius - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4581-4600.
    I discuss the suggestion that conscious will is an illusion. I take it to mean that there are no conscious decisions. I understand ‘conscious’ as accessible directly and ‘decision’ as the acquisition of an intention. I take the alternative of direct access to be access by interpreting behaviour. I start with a survey of the evidence in support of this suggestion. I argue that the evidence indicates that we are misled by external behaviour into making false positive and false negative (...)
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  • Mental states, processes, and conscious intent in Libet's experiments.Michael M. Pitman - 2013 - South African Journal of Philosophy 32 (1):71-89.
    The meaning and significance of Benjamin Libet’s studies on the timing of conscious will have been widely discussed, especially by those wishing to draw sceptical conclusions about conscious agency and free will. However, certain important correctives for thinking about mental states and processes undermine the apparent simplicity and logic of Libet’s data. The appropriateness, relevance and ecological validity of Libet’s methods are further undermined by considerations of how we ought to characterise intentional actions, conscious intention, and what it means to (...)
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  • The Five Marks of the Mental.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8.
    The mental realm seems different to the physical realm; the mental is thought to be dependent on, yet distinct from the physical. But how, exactly, are the two realms supposed to be different, and what, exactly, creates the seemingly insurmountable juxtaposition between the mental and the physical? This review identifies and discusses five marks of the mental, features that set characteristically mental phenomena apart from the characteristically physical phenomena. These five marks (intentionality, consciousness, free will, teleology, and normativity) are not (...)
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  • Can Conscious Agency Be Saved?Elisabeth Pacherie - 2014 - Topoi 33 (1):33-45.
    This paper is concerned with the role of conscious agency in human action. On a folk-psychological view of the structure of agency, intentions, conceived as conscious mental states, are the causes of actions. In the last decades, the development of new psychological and neuroscientific methods has made conscious agency an object of empirical investigation and yielded results that challenge the received wisdom. Most famously, the results of Libet’s studies on the ‘readiness potential’ have been interpreted by many as evidence in (...)
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  • Why 'Willusionism' Leads to 'Bad Results': Comments on Baumeister, Crescioni, and Alquist.Eddy Nahmias - 2009 - Neuroethics 4 (1):17-24.
    Drawing on results discussed in the target article by Baumeister et al. (1), I argue that the claim that the modern mind sciences are discovering that free will is an illusion ( willusionism ) is ambiguous and depends on how ordinary people understand free will. When interpreted in ways that the evidence does not justify, the willusionist claim can lead to ‘bad results.’ That is, telling people that free will is an illusion leads people to cheat more, help less, and (...)
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  • Scientific Challenges to Free Will.Eddy Nahmias - 2010 - In C. Sandis & T. O'Connor (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 345-356.
    This chapter contains sections titled: References.
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  • Agency, authorship, and illusion.Eddy Nahmias - 2005 - Consciousness and Cognition 14 (4):771-785.
    Daniel Wegner argues that conscious will is an illusion. I examine the adequacy of his theory of apparent mental causation and whether, if accurate, it suggests that our experience of agency and authorship should be considered illusory. I examine various interpretations of this claim and raise problems for each interpretation. I also distinguish between the experiences of agency and authorship.
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  • From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free Will.Andrew E. Monroe & Bertram F. Malle - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):211-224.
    People’s concept of free will is often assumed to be incompatible with the deterministic, scientific model of the universe. Indeed, many scholars treat the folk concept of free will as assuming a special form of nondeterministic causation, possibly the notion of uncaused causes. However, little work to date has directly probed individuals’ beliefs about what it means to have free will. The present studies sought to reconstruct this folk concept of free will by asking people to define the concept (Study (...)
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  • An issue for Wegner’s theory about the conscious will: the Readiness Potential does not conclusively represent preparation for an action.Beatriz Sorrentino Marques - 2018 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 63 (3):1029-1045.
    The role of consciousness in the production of actions has received much attention from philosophy and neuroscience. Wegner claims that what he calls the conscious will plays no role in the causal production of human actions, and that it is just an illusion. I will argue that Wegner’s claim is mistaken, because his defense of the alleged illusion rests on how he conceives of what the Readiness Potential represents in a key experiment—Libet’s experiment—and this conception is mistaken. Therefore, Wegner has (...)
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  • An issue for Wegner’s theory about the conscious will: the Readiness Potential does not conclusively represent preparation for an action.Beatriz Sorrentino Marques - 2017 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 62 (3):860.
    O papel da vontade consciente na produção de ações tem recebido bastante atenção tanto da filosofia como da neurociência. Wegner afirma que o que ele chama de vontade consciente não desempenha nenhum papel na produção causal das ações humanas, e que a mesma é apenas uma ilusão. Será argumentado no presente artigo que a afirmação de Wegner está equivocada, porque a sua defesa da suposta ilusão está fundamentada em como ele concebe o que o Potencial de Prontidão representa em um (...)
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  • Neuroethics: Ethics and the sciences of the mind.Neil Levy - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (1):69-81.
    Neuroethics is a rapidly growing subfield, straddling applied ethics, moral psychology and philosophy of mind. It has clear affinities to bioethics, inasmuch as both are responses to new developments in science and technology, but its scope is far broader and more ambitious because neuroethics is as much concerned with how the sciences of the mind illuminate traditional philosophical questions as it is with questions concerning the permissibility of using technologies stemming from these sciences. In this article, I sketch the two (...)
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  • Indirect compatibilism.Andrew J. Latham - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):141-162.
    In this paper I will introduce a new compatibilist account of free action: indirect conscious control compatibilism, or just indirect compatibilism for short. On this account, actions are free either when they are caused by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes, or else by sub‐personal level processes influenced in particular ways by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes. This view is motivated by a problem faced by a certain family of compatibilist views, which I call conscious control views. These views hold that we act (...)
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  • Questions for a Science of Moral Responsibility.Marcelo Fischborn - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2):381-394.
    In the last few decades, the literature on moral responsibility has been increasingly populated by scientific studies. Studies in neuroscience and psychology, in particular, have been claimed to be relevant for discussions about moral responsibility in a number of ways. And at the same time, there is not yet a systematic understanding of the sort of questions a science of moral responsibility is supposed to answer. This paper is an attempt to move toward such an understanding. I discuss three models (...)
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  • The illusionist and the folk: On the role of conscious planning in intentionality judgments.Silvia Felletti & Fabio Paglieri - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (6):871-888.
    Illusionism is a prominent hypothesis about action control, according to which acts that we consider voluntary are nevertheless caused by unconscious brain events, and thus our subjective experience of consciously willing them is ultimately illusory. Illusionism can be understood as either an ontological thesis or a phenomenological claim, but both versions are vulnerable to a line of attack based on the role of long-term planning in action control. According to this objection, the evidence upon which illusionism rests is confined to (...)
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  • From Freedom From to Freedom To: New Perspectives on Intentional Action.Sofia Bonicalzi & Patrick Haggard - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:459073.
    There are few concepts as relevant as that of intentional action in shaping our sense of self and the interaction with the environment. At the same time, few concepts are so elusive. Indeed, both conceptual and neuroscientific accounts of intentional agency have proven to be problematic. On the one hand, most conceptual views struggle in defining how agents can adequately exert control over their actions. On the other hand, neuroscience settles for definitions by exclusion whereby key features of human intentional (...)
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  • Rethinking the evolution of consciousness.Thomas Polger - 2007 - In Susan Schneider & Max Velmans (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Blackwell. pp. 72--87.
    Suppose that consciousness is a natural feature of biological organisms, and that it is a capacity or property or process that resides in a single organ. In that case there is a straightforward question about the consciousness organ, namely: How did the consciousness organ come to be formed and why is its presence maintained in those organisms that have it? Of course answering this question might be rather difficult, particularly if the consciousness organ is made of soft tissue that leaves (...)
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  • Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018):1-81.
    Skepticism about moral responsibility, or what is more commonly referred to as moral responsibility skepticism, refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings are never morally responsible for their actions in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is defined in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise. Some moral responsibility skeptics (...)
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  • Explaining the evolution of consciousness: The other hard problem.Thomas W. Polger & Owen J. Flanagan - 1996
    Recently some philosophers interested in consciousness have begun to turn their attention to the question of what evolutionary advantages, if any, being conscious might confer on an organism. The issue has been pressed in recent dicussions involving David Chalmers, Todd Moody, Owen Flanagan and Thomas Polger, Daniel Dennett, and others. The purpose of this essay is to consider some of the problems that face anyone who wants to give an evolutionary explanation of consciousness. We begin by framing the problem in (...)
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  • Indirect Compatibilism.Andrew James Latham - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Sydney
    In this thesis, I will defend a new kind of compatibilist account of free action, indirect conscious control compatibilism (or indirect compatibilism for short), and argue that some of our actions are free according to it. My argument has three components, and involves the development of a brand new tool for experimental philosophy, and the use of cognitive neuroscience. The first component of the argument shows that compatibilism (of some kind) is a conceptual truth. Contrary to the current orthodoxy in (...)
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  • Consciousness, Free Will, Moral Responsibility.Caruso Gregg - 2018 - In Rocco Gennaro (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. New York: Routledge. pp. 89-91.
    In recent decades, with advances in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences, the idea that patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our conscious control has increasingly gained traction and renewed interest in the age-old problem of free will. To properly assess what, if anything, these empirical advances can tell us about free will and moral responsibility, we first need to get clear on the following questions: Is consciousness necessary for free will? If so, what role or (...)
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  • The Unplanned Obsolescence of Psychological Science and an Argument for its Revival.Stan Klein - 2016 - Pyshcology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 3:357-379.
    I examine some of the key scientific pre-commitments of modern psychology, and argue that their adoption has the unintended consequence of rendering a purely psychological analysis of mind indistinguishable from a purely biological treatment. And, since these pre-commitments sanction an “authority of the biological”, explanation of phenomena traditionally considered the purview of psychological analysis is fully subsumed under the biological. I next evaluate the epistemic warrant of these pre-commitments and suggest there are good reasons to question their applicability to psychological (...)
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  • Precis of.D. M. Wegner - 2004 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27.
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  • Neurofilosofía y libre albedrío.José Manuel Muñoz Ortega - 2013 - Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 59:57-70.
    Presento la trascendencia de la neurociencia para el estudio de la relación entre determinismo y libre albedrío. Diversos trabajos vinculan la actividad de ciertas áreas nerviosas con el desempeño de las funciones volitivas, el trabajo de Benjamin Libet y de Daniel Wegner otorga gran importancia al inconsciente en nuestros actos, y hay pruebas de influencia causal del entorno sociocultural sobre el cerebro del individuo. Todo esto sugiere una concepción determinista de nuestra voluntad, pero sostengo que ni esta ni la indeterminista (...)
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