books — The Brains Blog

The Mental Lives of Zombies

Declan Smithies September 9, 2019 September 4, 2019 Consciousness / Declan Smithies: The Epistemic Role of Consciousness

This week, I’m blogging about my new book, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, September 2019). Thanks to John Schwenkler for hosting me. Today, I’ll start by situating the project of the book within a broader landscape in the philosophy of mind. What is the role of phenomenal …

3. The Naturalistic Case for Free Will: Indeterminism as an Emergent Phenomenon

How could we have alternative possibilities if the world was physically deterministic? I argue that physical determinism does not rule out indeterminism at the level of agency. The distinction between determinism and indeterminism is level-specific.

2. The Naturalistic Case for Free Will: An Indispensability Argument

Christian List August 14, 2019 August 13, 2019 books / Christian List: Why Free Will Is Real / Free will / mental causation

Realism about free will is warranted, because the picture of humans as choice-making agents is explanatorily indispensable in the human and social sciences.

1. The Naturalistic Case for Free Will: The Challenge

Christian List August 12, 2019 June 4, 2020 books / Christian List: Why Free Will Is Real / Free will / mental causation

This series of posts discusses some key ideas from Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019) by Christian List.

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John Schwenkler August 12, 2019 August 20, 2019 books

We are pleased to have Christian List blogging this week on Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019). To see all of Christian’s posts on a single page, please click here.

5. Diachronic Constitution and Extended Consciousness

Julian Kiverstein and Michael Kirchhoff June 20, 2019 September 8, 2022 Michael Kirchhoff and Julian Kiverstein: Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing

Based on our third-wave framing of predictive processing, we argued in our previous post (4) that generative models cannot be unplugged from the world, given that action couples the agent to the environment. It is only via action in the world that the agent is able to tune and maintain …

4. Is Perceptual Experience Controlled Hallucination?

Julian Kiverstein and Michael Kirchhoff June 19, 2019 June 19, 2019 Michael Kirchhoff and Julian Kiverstein: Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing

Predictive processing is standardly combined with views of perceptual experience as the outcome of psychological processes of unconscious inference. Perceptual experience is taken to be the product of guesswork about what is out there in the external world. The brain forms its guess by a process that approximates probabilistic reasoning, …