free will

Question 1

What is Free Will?

Answer 1

The ability to consciously choose without being constrained between different possible courses of action

Question 2

Free Will: Hard Determinism

Answer 2

• FW is not possible in hard determinism
• all effects have a cause
• “there is at any instance exactly one physically possible future”
• FW is an illusion
• effect -> effect

Question 3

Free Will: Libertarianism

Answer 3

• FW is possible because the universe is not (always) deterministic
• effect without a cause: impossible, a miracle (Dennett, 2007)
• agent -> effect
• “one wants to be what tradition has it that Eve was when she bit the apple. Perfectly free to do otherwise. So perfectly free, in fact, that even God couldn’t tell which way she’d jump” (Fodor, 2003)

Question 4

Free Will: Compatibilism

Answer 4

• what kind of FW is compatible with determinism? not the libertarian kind
• determinism
• choices
• inevitable & evitable
• the will is “nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind” (Hume, 1739)

Question 5

The Timing of Agency:
What did Blackmore say about Libet?

Answer 5

Libet et al (1984):
* “Many philosophers and scientists have argued that free will is an illusion. Unlike all of them, Benjamin Libet found a way to test it.” – Susan Blackmore

Question 6

The Timing of Agency:
Libet et al.’s (1984)

Answer 6

0 repose
1 (-500 ms) EEG measures Readiness potential (RP)
2 (-250 ms) Person notes the position of the dotwhen decides
3 (0 ms) Act

Question 7

The Timing of Agency:
Libet et al.’s (1984) Conclusions:

Answer 7

• will does not play a causal role in action
  However:
• unconscious brain events start process
• conscious (brain?) events vetoes or releases action

Question 8

Veto Power Process

Answer 8

1.) brain signal
1.) 0.3 sec delay
2.) desire - e.g. to eat chocolate
3.) veto power for 0.2 secs
4.) movement occurs

Question 9

Soon et al (2008)

Answer 9

• prediction of decision from micropatterns of brain activity
• “felt” time of decision for left or right decision
• found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 sec before it enters awareness

Question 10

Soon et al (2008): Criticism

Answer 10

But Libet assumes there’s one finishing line when consciousness occurs (Dennett, 1990)
-cartesian material (idea that at some place (or places) in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience)

Question 11

Percentage of Behaviour under Conscious Control

Answer 11

5%

Question 12

Wilson & Nisbett (1977):
3 reasons why they claim why people do not have access to these higher order cognitive processes?

Answer 12

1.) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response,
2.) unaware of the existence of the response
3.) unaware that the stimulus
has affected the response

Question 13

What is the major claim of the Nisbett and Wilson (1977) article?

Answer 13

There is evidence that people do not have much introspective access, i.e. the ability to perceive, higher order cognitive processes

Question 14

Wilson & Nisbett (1977):
Percentage of Behaviour which is not Freely Chosen (Unconscious)

Answer 14

A 12%
B 17%
C 31%
D 40%

Question 15

What is the Adaptive Unconscious?

Answer 15

Wilson (2002):
* set of unconscious mental processes influencing judgement & decision making
* different from conscious processing: faster, effortless, more focused on the present, but less flexible

examples:
* habits
* perceptions
* learned associations
* reflexes

Question 16

Wegner’s (2002) Theory of Willed Action

Answer 16

• “the experience of will … is the way our minds portray their operations to us, … not their actual operation” (Wegner 2002)
• “the experience of willing an act arises from interpreting ones thoughts as the cause of the act” (Wegner, 1999)

Question 17

Wegner’s (2002) Theory of Willed Action:
Preconditions

Answer 17

• Thought before action (priority)
• Thought consistent with action (consistency)
• No other apparent causes (exclusivity)

Question 18

Apparent Mental Causation:
Sources of the Experience of Will(Wegner & Wheatley, 1999)

Answer 18

• the experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one’s thoughts as the cause of the act
• conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency and exclusivity of the thought about the action
• the thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action and not be accompanied by other causes
• experiment illustrating this forced people to think about an action, which once they had performed the action they attributed it to their own free will because they thought about it first

Question 19

Illusion of Will (Stetson et al., 2006)

Answer 19

• artificially injected a fixed delay between ppts’ actions (keypresses) & subsequent sensations (flashes)
• after ppts adapted to this delay, flashes at unexpectedly short delays after the keypress were often perceived as occurring before the keypress, demonstrating a recalibration of motor-sensory temporal order judgments
• when ppts experienced illusory reversals, fMRI BOLD signals increased in anterior cingulate cortex/medial frontal cortex (ACC/MFC) (a brain region previously implicated in conflict monitoring)
• this illusion-specific activation suggests that the brain maintains not only a recalibrated representation of timing, but also a less-plastic representation against which to compare it

Question 20

Delusional Thinking

Answer 20

Delusions of Alien Control in SZ:
* symptoms associated with SZ in which patients misattribute self-generated actions to an external source
* sensorimotor deficits disrupt sense of agency so that own movements are judged not produced by their own will

Alien/Anarchic Hand Syndrome:
* a phenomenon in which one hand is not under control of the mind
* involuntary & goal-directed movements of the upper limb executed without volitional control

Question 21

What Happened?

Phineas Gage

Answer 21

Macmillan (2008):
* metal rod through brain in 1848
* personality change: profane, impulsive, rude, lack of social inhibitions
* “no longer Gage” (Harlow, 1848)
* died of epileptic seizures

Question 22

Phineas Gage: Brain Damage

Answer 22

(Damasio et al., 1994):
* dorsolateral PFC (executive functions)
* ventromedial PFC (complex emotions, planning & social knowledge)

Question 23

Cause & Symptoms

What Condition did Damasio (1994) conduct Research into?

Answer 23

Frontal Dysexecutive Syndrome:
* damage to ventromedial PFC

Symptoms:
* sociopathy
* acts inappropriately in moral & social scenarios
* fails to act on knowledge
* lack of emotional response
* indifference to self & others
* no embarrassment
* risk-taking (to other’s suffering)
* however no deficit judging social norms

Question 24

Moral Implications of Adaptive Unconscious

Answer 24

Choice Architectures:
* no neutral architectures (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008)
* Libertarian paternalism nudge
* Behavioural Insights Unit
* social media
* repetition
* social norms

Question 25

What are Choice Architectures?

Answer 25

The design of different ways in which choices can be presented to decision makers, and the impact of that presentation on decision-making