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Neurocognitive free will
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Hills, Thomas Trenholm (2019) Neurocognitive free will. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286 (1908). 286. doi:10.1098/rspb.2019.0510 ISSN 0962-8452.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0510
Abstract
Free will is an apparent paradox because it requires a historical identity to escape its history in a self-guided fashion. Philosophers have itemized design features necessary for this escape, scaling from action to agency and vice versa. These can be organized into a coherent framework that neurocognitive capacities provide and that form a basis for neurocognitive free will. These capacities include (1) adaptive access to unpredictability, (2) tuning of this unpredictability in the service of hierarchical goal structures, (3) goal-directed deliberation via search over internal cognitive representations, and (4) a role for conscious construction of the self in the generation and choice of alternatives. This frames free will as a process of generative self-construction, by which an iterative search process samples from experience in an adaptively exploratory fashion, allowing the agent to explore itself in the construction of alternative futures. This provides an explanation of how effortful conscious control modulates adaptive access to unpredictability and resolves one of free will's key conceptual problems: how randomness is used in the service of the will. The implications provide a contemporary neurocognitive grounding to compatibilist and libertarian positions on free will, and demonstrate how neurocognitive understanding can contribute to this debate by presenting free will as an interaction between our freedom and our will.
Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology | |||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | |||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Free will and determinism, Metacognition | |||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | |||||||||
Publisher: | The Royal Society Publishing | |||||||||
ISSN: | 0962-8452 | |||||||||
Official Date: | August 2019 | |||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 286 | |||||||||
Number: | 1908 | |||||||||
Article Number: | 286 | |||||||||
DOI: | 10.1098/rspb.2019.0510 | |||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | |||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | |||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 19 July 2019 | |||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 19 July 2019 | |||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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