DR. BAIN ON FREE WILL

Bain on neural networks.

In his book Mind and body (1873), Bain set out an account in which he related the processes of associative memory to the distribution of activity in neural groupings--or neural networks as they are now termed. In the course of this account, Bain anticipated certain aspects of connectionist ideas that are normally attributed to 20th-century authors--most notably Hebb (1949). In this paper we rep...

The Scope of Man's Free Will

Folk Intuitions on Free Will*

This paper relies on experimental methods to explore the psychological underpinnings of folk intuitions about free will and responsibility. In different conditions, people give conflicting responses about agency and responsibility. In some contexts, people treat agency as indeterminist; in other contexts, they treat agency as determinist. Furthermore, in some contexts people treat responsibilit...

Free will

Much of the best biological work in decision-making has been carried out in bacteria and insects because the genetics of these organisms is better understood and they provide the most physically accessible nervous systems. With the advent of modern imaging and neurophysiological techniques, however, decision-making by human and non-human primates has become a bustling area in the early stages o...

Free Will

A criterion for the existence of human free will is specified: a human action is asserted to be a manifestations of human free-will if this action is a specific physical action that is experienced as being consciously chosen and willed to occur by a human agent, and is not determined within physical theory either in terms of the physically described aspects of nature or by any non-human agency....