What are the types of action at issue in the free will and moral responsibility debate? Are the neuroscientists who make claims about free will and moral responsibility studying those types of action? If not, can the existing paradigm in the field be modified to study those types of action? This paper outlines some claims made by neuroscientists about the inefficacy of conscious intentions and the implications of this inefficacy for the existence of free will. It argues that, typically, the (...) types of actions at issue in the philosophical literature require proximal or distal conscious decisions and have the right kind of connection to reasons. It points out that neuroscientists are not studying this class of actions, as their studies focus on simple commanded actions (e.g., finger flex) and simple Buridan choices (e.g., push the left or right button). Finally, it argues that neuroscience already has the resources to study the types of action relevant for free will and moral responsibility and outlines two experiments which focus on skilled actions and moral choices that could be run using the available technology. (shrink)

Psychopathy refers to a range of complex behaviors and personality traits, including callousness and antisocial behavior, typically studied in criminal populations. Recent studies have used self-reports to examine psychopathic traits among noncriminal samples. The goal of the current study was to examine the underlying factor structure of the Self-Report of Psychopathy Scale–Short Form (SRP-SF) across complementary samples and examine the impact of gender on factor structure. We examined the structure of the SRP-SF among 2,554 young adults from three undergraduate samples (...) and a high-risk young adult sample. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a four-correlated factor model and a four-bifactor model showed good fit to the data. Evidence of weak invariance was found for both models across gender. These findings highlight that the SRP-SF is a useful measure of low-level psychopathic traits in noncriminal samples, although the underlying factor structure may not fully translate across men and women. (shrink)

Many philosophical theories of causation are egalitarian, rejecting a distinction between causes and mere causal conditions. We sought to determine the extent to which people's causal judgments discriminate, selecting as causes counternormal events—those that violate norms of some kind—while rejecting non-violators. We found significant selectivity of this sort. Moreover, priming that encouraged more egalitarian judgments had little effect on subjects. We also found that omissions are as likely as actions to be judged as causes, and that counternormative selectivity appears to (...) apply equally to actions and omissions. (shrink)

The use of brain scanning now dominates the cognitive sciences, but important questions remain to be answered about what, exactly, scanning can tell us. One corner of cognitive science that has been transformed by the use of neuroimaging, and that a scanning enthusiast might point to as proof of scanning's importance, is the study of face perception. Against this view, we argue that the use of scanning has, in fact, told us rather little about the information processing underlying face perception (...) and that it is not likely to tell us much more. (shrink)

A. Newell and H. A. Simon were two of the most influential scientists in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the late 1950s through to the early 1990s. This paper reviews their crucial contribution to this field, namely to symbolic AI. This contribution was constituted mostly by their quest for the implementation of general intelligence and (commonsense) knowledge in artificial thinking or reasoning artifacts, a project they shared with many other scientists but that in their case was (...) theoretically based on the idiosyncratic notions of symbol systems and the representational abilities they give rise to, in particular with respect to knowledge. While focusing on the period 1956-1982, this review cites both earlier and later literature and it attempts to make visible their potential relevance to today's greatest unifying AI challenge, to wit, the design of wholly autonomous artificial agents (a.k.a. robots) that are not only rational and ethical, but also self-conscious. (shrink)

The biomedical literature makes extensive use of the concept of a genetic program. So far, however, the nature of genetic programs has received no satisfactory elucidation from the standpoint of computer science. This unsettling omission has led to doubts about the very existence of genetic programs, on the grounds that gene regulatory networks lack a predetermined schedule of execution, which may seem to contradict the very idea of a program. I show, however, that we can make perfect sense of genetic (...) programs, if only we abandon the preconception that all computers have a von Neumann architecture. Instead, genetic programs instantiate the computational architecture of Post–Newell Production Systems. That is, genetic programs are unordered sets of conditional instructions, instructions that fire independently when their conditions are matched. For illustration I present a paradigm Production System that regulates the functioning of the well-known lac operon of E. coli. On close reflection it turns out that not only genes, but also proteins encode instructions. I propose, therefore, to rename genetic programs to biomolecular programs. Biomolecular and/or genetic programs, and the cellular computers than run them, are to be understood not as von Neumann computers, but as Post–Newell production systems. (shrink)

In Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind, Ben R. Newell & David R. Shanks (henceforth, N&S) challenge the popular claim that much of human judgment and decision-making is explained by unconscious processes...

In The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility (2015), Bruce Waller sets out to explain why the belief in individual moral responsibility is so strong. He begins by pointing out that there is a strange disconnect between the strength of philosophical arguments in support of moral responsibility and the strength of philosophical belief in moral responsibility. While the many arguments in favor of moral responsibility are inventive, subtle, and fascinating, Waller points out that even the most ardent supporters of (...) moral responsibility acknowledge that the arguments in its favor are far from conclusive; and some of the least confident concerning the arguments for moral responsibility—such as Van Inwagen—are most confident of the truth of moral responsibility. Thus, argues Waller, whatever the verdict on the strength of philosophical arguments for moral responsibility, it is clear that belief in moral responsibility—whether among philosophers or the folk—is based on something other than philosophical reasons. -/- He goes on to argue that there are several sources for the strong belief in moral responsibility, but the following four are particularly influential: First, moral responsibility is based in a powerful “strike back” emotion that we share with other animals. Second, there is a deep-rooted “belief in a just world”—a belief that, according to Waller, most philosophers reject when they consciously consider it, but which has a deep nonconscious influence on what we regard as just treatment and which provides subtle (but mistaken) support for belief in moral responsibility. Third, there is a pervasive moral responsibility system—extending over criminal justice as well as “common sense”—that makes the truth of moral responsibility seem obvious, and makes challenges to moral responsibility seem incoherent. Finally, there is the enormous confidence we have in the power of reason, which mistakenly leads us to believe that our conscious, rational, and critically reflective selves are constantly guiding our behavior in accordance with our deep values. -/- In these comments, I would like to discuss the many points of agreement I have with Waller, providing along the way additional fuel for his skeptical fire (i.e., his moral responsibility skepticism and his skeptical analysis of the source of our strong belief in moral responsibility). I will also discuss, however, my one main point of disagreement—i.e., his desire to preserve the conception of free will. Waller believes free will can “flourish” in the absence of moral responsibility (see Ch.8), while I maintain they that the variety of free will that is of central philosophical and practical importance is the sort required for moral responsibility in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense of moral responsibility is set apart by the notion of basic desert and is purely backward-looking and non-consequentialist (see Pereboom 2001, 2014; Caruso and Morris, forthcoming). Understood this way, the sort of free will at issue in the historical debate is a kind of power or ability an agent must possess in order to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments in response to decisions or actions that the agent performed or failed to perform. (shrink)

This article addresses three main questions: What causes cognitive overload in the workplace? What analytical framework should be used to understand how agents interact with their work environments? How can environments be restructured to improve the cognitive workflow of agents? Four primary causes of overload are identified: too much tasking and interruption, and inadequate workplace infrastructure to help reduce the need for planning, monitoring, reminding, reclassifying information, etc… The first step in reducing the cognitive impact of these causes is to (...) enrich classical frameworks for understanding work environments, such as Newell and Simon’s notion of a task environment, by recognizing that our actual workplace is a superposition of many specific environments – activity spaces – which we slip between. Each has its own cost structure arising from the tools and resources available, including the cognitive strategies and interpretational frameworks of individual agents. These cognitive factors are significant, affecting how easy or difficult it is to perform an action, such as finding a specific paper in a “mess” desk. A few simple examples show how work environments can be redesigned and how restructuring can alter the cost structure of activity spaces. (shrink)

“Pick a card, any card. This has to be a completely free choice.” the magician tells you. But is it really? Although we like to think that we are using our free will to make our decisions, research in psychology has shown that many of our behaviours are automatic and unconsciously influenced by external stimuli (Ariely, 2008; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), and that we are often oblivious to the cognitive mechanisms that (...) underpin our decision (Wegner, 2002, 2003). Magicians have exploited this illusory sense of agency for a long time, and have developed a wide range of techniques to influence and control spectators’ choices of such things as card, word, or number (Annemann, 1933; Banachek, 2002a; Jones, 1994; Turner, 2015). These techniques are instances of what is called forcing. -/- Many forces are extremely effective, illustrating various weaknesses in our sense of control over decisions and their outcomes. Researchers have started to investigate them in various ways (Kuhn, Pailh s, & Lan, 2020; Olson, Amlani, Raz, & Rensink, 2015; Pailhes & Kuhn, 2020b, 2020c; Shalom et al., 2013) and are beginning to obtain valuable insights into decision-making processes as well as a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that lead people to experience an illusory sense of free will and of agency. -/- Although magicians have acquired large amounts of knowledge in covertly controlling people’s choices, much of this knowledge is only discussed in the context of individual magic tricks, or in books that are not readily accessible to non-magicans. As we and others have argued elsewhere (Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, 2017; Kuhn, 2019; Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008; Kuhn, Caffaratti, Teszka, & Rensink, 2014; Macknik et al., 2008; Olson et al., 2015; Olson, Landry, Appourchaux, & Raz, 2016; Shalom et al., 2013; Thomas, Didierjean, Maquestiaux, & Gygax, 2015), a particularly effective way of making this knowledge more available is via the creation of taxonomies centered around psychological mechanisms (Rensink & Kuhn, 2015). For example, the psychologically based taxonomy of misdirection (Kuhn et al., 2014) helps draw links between misdirection and formal theories of perception and cognition. -/- Our aim here is to apply a similar process to the knowledge magicians have about forcing. The present paper develops a psychologically based taxonomy of forcing techniques with two goals in mind. Firstly, it should help uncover the various psychological mechanisms that underlie forcing techniques. Secondly, it should facilitate knowledge transfer between magicians and psychologists. Among other things, this knowledge will allow researchers to gain new insights into the mechanisms underlying decision-making, and the feeling of free will and of agency over choice. We start by defining the magician’s force and then look at some of the past classifications of forcing. (shrink)

In his famous 1982 paper, Allen Newell [22, 23] introduced the notion of knowledge level to indicate a level of analysis, and prediction, of the rational behavior of a cognitive arti cial agent. This analysis concerns the investigation about the availability of the agent knowledge, in order to pursue its own goals, and is based on the so-called Rationality Principle (an assumption according to which "an agent will use the knowledge it has of its environment to achieve its goals" (...) [22, p. 17]. By using the Newell's own words: "To treat a system at the knowledge level is to treat it as having some knowledge, some goals, and believing it will do whatever is within its power to attain its goals, in so far as its knowledge indicates" [22, p. 13]. In the last decades, the importance of the knowledge level has been historically and system- atically downsized by the research area in cognitive architectures (CAs), whose interests have been mainly focused on the analysis and the development of mechanisms and the processes governing human and (arti cial) cognition. The knowledge level in CAs, however, represents a crucial level of analysis for the development of such arti cial general systems and therefore deserves greater research attention [17]. In the following, we will discuss areas of broad agree- ment and outline the main problematic aspects that should be faced within a Common Model of Cognition [12]. Such aspects, departing from an analysis at the knowledge level, also clearly impact both lower (e.g. representational) and higher (e.g. social) levels. (shrink)

Wether the chicken or the egg came first, is not only a mind-boggling but a substantial question. Its answer depends on the biological background theory one assumes. I review recent work on the topic (by Teichmann, Sorensen, Waller and Raatzsch) and resolve some of the disputes between these authors by borrowing from Aristotle the distinction between chicken-producing eggs. I then introduce the concept of a quasi-species to make explicit the vagueness involved in species-terms and prove 13 different priority-claims within (...) a Darwinian framework. (shrink)

Free will skepticism maintains that what we do, and the way we are, is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense—the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame. In recent years, a number of contemporary philosophers have advanced and defended versions of free will skepticism, including Derk Pereboom (2001, 2014), Galen Strawson (2010), Neil Levy (2011), Bruce Waller (...) (2011, 2015), and myself (Caruso 2012, 2013, forthcoming). Critics, however, often complain that adopting such views would have dire consequences for ourselves, society, morality, meaning, and the law. They fear, for instance, that relinquishing belief in free will and basic desert moral responsibility would leave us unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior, increase anti-social conduct, and undermine meaning in life. -/- In response, free will skeptics argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe (see, e.g., Pereboom 2001, 2014; Waller 2011, 2015; Caruso 2016, forthcoming). According to optimistic skeptics, prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for instance, would not be threatened. And although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, incapacitation and rehabilitation programs would still be justified (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014; Levy 2012; Caruso 2016; Pereboom and Caruso, forthcoming). In this paper, I attempt to extend this general optimism about the practical implications of free will skepticism to the question of creativity. -/- In Section I, I spell out the question of creativity and explain why it’s relevant to the problem of free will. In Section II, I identify three different conceptions of creativity and explain the practical concerns critics have with free will skepticism. In Section III, I distinguish between three different conceptions of moral responsibility and argue that at least two of them are consistent with free will skepticism. I further contend that forward-looking accounts of moral responsibility, which are perfectly consistent with free will skepticism, can justify calling agents to account for immoral behavior as well as providing encouragement for creative activities since these are important for moral and creative formation and development. I conclude in Section IV by arguing that relinquishing belief in free will and basic desert would not mean the death of creativity or our sense of achievement since important and realistic conceptions of both remain in place. (shrink)

Thirty years ago, I elaborated on a position that could be seen as a compromise between an "extreme," symbol-based AI, and a "neurochemical reductionism" in AI. The present article recalls aspects of the espoused framework of schema theory that, it suggested, could provide a better bridge from human psychology to brain theory than that offered by the symbol systems of A. Newell and H. A. Simon.

Since the early eighties, computationalism in the study of the mind has been “under attack” by several critics of the so-called “classic” or “symbolic” approaches in AI and cognitive science. Computationalism was generically identified with such approaches. For example, it was identified with both Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis and Jerry Fodor’s theory of Language of Thought, usually without taking into account the fact ,that such approaches are very different as to their methods and aims. (...) Zenon Pylyshyn, in his influential book Computation and Cognition, claimed that both Newell and Fodor deeply influenced his ideas on cognition as computation. This probably added to the confusion, as many people still consider Pylyshyn’s book as paradigmatic of the computational approach in the study of the mind. Since then, cognitive scientists, AI researchers and also philosophers of the mind have been asked to take sides on different “paradigms” that have from time to time been proposed as opponents of (classic or symbolic) computationalism. Examples of such oppositions are: -/- computationalism vs. connectionism, computationalism vs. dynamical systems, computationalism vs. situated and embodied cognition, computationalism vs. behavioural and evolutionary robotics. -/- Our preliminary claim in section 1 is that computationalism should not be identified with what we would call the “paradigm (based on the metaphor) of the computer” (in the following, PoC). PoC is the (rather vague) statement that the mind functions “as a digital computer”. Actually, PoC is a restrictive version of computationalism, and nobody ever seriously upheld it, except in some rough versions of the computational approach and in some popular discussions about it. Usually, PoC is used as a straw man in many arguments against computationalism. In section 1 we look in some detail at PoC’s claims and argue that computationalism cannot be identified with PoC. In section 2 we point out that certain anticomputationalist arguments are based on this misleading identification. In section 3 we suggest that the view of the levels of explanation proposed by David Marr could clarify certain points of the debate on computationalism. In section 4 we touch on a controversial issue, namely the possibility of developing a notion of analog computation, similar to the notion of digital computation. A short conclusion follows in section 5. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Lee Kerckhove and Sara Waller (hereafter K & W) argue that the concept of personhood is irrelevant for the abortion debate.1 Surprisingly, this irrelevance is due merely to the fact that the predicate ‘being a person’ — hereafter ‘personhood’ — is inherently vague. This vagueness, they argue, reduces ‘personhood’ to incoherency and disqualifies the notion from being a useful moral concept. In other words, if ‘personhood’ isn’t a precise notion with well-defined boundaries, then it cannot (...) be of any use in the debate over the permissibility of abortion. This argument is mistaken. While it may be true that ‘personhood’ is irrelevant for the debate over abortion (a substantive issue not dealt with in this paper), it is not true that ‘personhood’ should be disqualified merely because it is vague. Section 2 of the paper is a quick survey in which I briefly review the importance of ‘personhood’ in some of the more recent literature concerning the moral status of abortion. Section 3 is a reconstruction of K & W’s argument against the relevancy of ‘personhood’ and a criticism showing why their argument fails. Section 4 approaches the use of a vague predicate in moral debate and explores the application of ‘personhood’ given three contemporary solutions to vagueness: degree theory, epistemicism and supervaluationism. (shrink)

The paper defends the claim that the mechanistic explanation of information processing is the fundamental kind of explanation in cognitive science. These mechanisms are complex organized systems whose functioning depends on the orchestrated interaction of their component parts and processes. A constitutive explanation of every mechanism must include both appeal to its environment and to the role it plays in it. This role has been traditionally dubbed competence. To fully explain how this role is played it is necessary to explain (...) the information processing inside the mechanism embedded in the environment. The most usual explanation on this level has a form of a computational model, for example a software program or a trained artificial neural network. However, this is not the end of the explanatory chain. What is left to be explained is how the program is realized (or what processes are responsible for information processing in the artificial neural network). By using two dramatically different examples from the history of cognitive science I show the multi-level structure of explanations in cognitive science. These examples are (1) the explanation of human process solving as proposed by A. Newell & H. Simon; (2) the explanation of cricket phonotaxis via robotic models by B. Webb. (shrink)

Debates in the philosophy of science typically take place around issues such as realism and theory change. Recently, the debate has been reformulated to bring in the role of experiments in the context of theory change. As regards realism, Ian Hacking’s contribution has been to introduce ‘intervention’ as the basis of realism. He also proposed, following Imre Lakatos, to replace the issue of truth with progress and rationality. In this context we examine the case of the vitalism — reductionism debate (...) in biology inspired by the works of Indian physicist-turned-biologist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), in the early twentieth century. Both camps had their characteristic hardcores. Vitalists led by John S. Burdon-Sanderson and Augustus D. Waller accepted religious metaphysics to support their research programme, which ultimately degenerated. Bose worked more with the ideals of science such as Occam’s razor, large-scale systematization of phenomena and novel prediction. I argue that his religious metaphysics, instead of acting as a protective shield, helped him to consolidate his position and allowed further problem shift resulting in a research programme that involved consciousness too. His research programme remains relevant even today. (shrink)

The revised and polished version of Inwood’s 2011 Carl Newell Jackson at Harvard University, Ethics after Aristotle surveys the ethical teachings of the original “neo-Aristotelians,” namely those self-identified (although not always named) members of the Peripatetic school from the time of Theophrastus (fl. 300 BCE) until that of Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 CE). An initial chapter surveys the sorts of problems in Aristotle’s ethical corpus which would generate subsequent debate amongst members of the Peripatetic school. Chapter Two examines (...) the views of “Magnus,” the name which Inwood gives to the anonymous 3rd century author of the Magna Moralia (which Inwood takes to be pseudo-Aristotle), and those of Strato of Lampsacus, Lycon, and Hieronymus, 3rd century heads of the Peripatetic school, all of whom show the influences of Epicureanism in their re-articulations of Aristotelian positions. Chapter Three, entitled “The Turning Point,” finds in the work of Critolaus—head of the Peripatetic school in the middle of the 2nd century BCE—a move away from the centrality of activity within Aristotelian ethical thought, which Critolaus instead replaces with the notion of possessing specific goods, namely those of the body, the soul, and what is external. The same chapter argues that at approximately the same historical point Cicero, in the character of Piso in De finibus, articulated an account of Peripatetic ethics that was far more faithful to 4th century Aristotelianism. The final two chapters focus on neo-Aristotelian ethical philosophizing within a new and explicitly Roman cultural setting. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed technical protocol analysis of chess masters' evaluative expertise, paying particular attention to the analysis of the structure of their memory process in evaluating foreseen possibilities in games of dynamic equilibrium. The paper has two purposes. First, to publish a results chapter from my DPhil thesis (in revised journal article form) attending to the measurement of foresight in chess masters' evaluation process, testing alternative theories of cognitive expertise in the domain of (...) chess; and second to provide a subset of the technical graphical analysis that corresponds to that measurement to preserve this protocol analysis for access in the academic domain for future studies of expert memory and foresight (e.g., Ericsson & Simon, 1993). The step-by-step protocol analysis consists of: (i) an introduction to foresight cognition as hypothesis testing, (ii) a theoretical review in the domain of chess masters' expertise according to the theoretical frameworks in that field purporting hypotheses relevant to chess masters' evaluative skill processes, and (iii) summary tables and non-parametric statistical analysis corroborating chunking theory frameworks of expert cognition (e.g., DeGroot, 1965; Newell & Simon, 1972; Gobet, 1998; Gobet et al., 2004), and refuting the alternative search-evaluation models (e.g., Holding & Reynolds, 1982). Moreover, the journal article espouses the preservation of the traditional protocol analysis method core to the field of expert cognition (DeGroot, 1969; Kotov, 1971). The full protocol analysis can be found in monograph form here on my SSRN profile in ‘The role of falsification in hypothesis testing’. It takes the form of a specialist population study (e.g., detailed case study work; Luria, 1987). Thus the outline consists of a short introduction, a theoretical methodological review discussing protocol analysis methods for specialist population studies in cognition (with particular attention to the preservation of protocol analysis methods for chess studies in cognition and expert memory/ with a fresh angle on the foresight process), and the full set of protocol analyses with corresponding problem behaviour graphs. A subset of the main results has been published elsewhere (e.g., Cowley & Byrne, 2004; Cowley 2006), receiving scientific and scientific journalistic acclaim (e.g., Nature Online News 2004). (shrink)