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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1. The problem of perceptual self-location We perceive things in the external world as spatially located both with respect to each other and to ourselves, such that they are in principle accessible from where we seem to be. I hear the door bang behind me; I feel the pen on the desk over to my right; and I see you walking beneath the line of pictures, from left to right in front of me. By displa...

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organism...

We propose a new business cycle theory. Firms need to randomize over firing or keeping workers who have performed poorly in the past, in order to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Firms have an incentive to coordinate the outcome of their randomizations, as coordination allows them to load the firing probability on states of the world in which it is costlier for workers to become ...

The present paper introduces a principal-agent model in which the principal pays wages that exceed agents’ resevations values, and agents voluntarily comply with his directives even though no formal mechanisms exist to enforce these directives. We view the agency relationship as a reciprocal exchange where the principal pays rents to reduce the probability of a collective challenge. These rents...

Time is the grand stage where human activities take place (rational or otherwise). And the view of a branching temporal universe, or tree of possible events, with our actual history linearly advancing through it, is a widely shared cultural idea, not confined to Academia (cf. Borges brilliant 1941 essay El Jard́ın de senderos que se bifurcan). Even though logic is often considered a study of tim...

A self or person does not appear to be identifiable with his or her organic body, nor with any part of it, such as the brain; and yet selves seem to be agents, capable of bringing about physical events (such as bodily movements) as causal consequences of certain of their conscious mental states. How is this possible in a universe in which, it appears, every physical event has a sufficient cause...

In this paper we present new empirical evidence on the agency based asset pricing model of Brennan (1993). We find strong evidence that in the recent period stocks whose returns covary more with the idiosyncratic component of the S&P500 return have significantly lower returns, holding constant either the market beta or the loadings on the Fama-French factors. The effect is confined mainly to la...

1 The CMOD4 model 1.1: The scatterometer................................................................1 1.2: The CMOD4 model..............................................................4 2 The tropical cyclone.................................................................19 3 Experiments 3.1: Premise............................................................................23 3.2: Theoret...