In Part 3 of this series, I argued that organisms really do think about what to do, really do come to their reasons by reasoning, and really do make decisions, in ways that cannot be pre-determined.   If the neural computations are causally sensitive to semantic content, rather than detailed syntax, and those semantics relate to organism-level...

In his book Determined, Robert Sapolsky argues that our intentions arise in a completely deterministic fashion from the combined effects of all the prior causes that have acted on us, right up to the moment of action. He contends (i) that our intentions determine what we do, and (ii) that we have no control over their formation – they just appear...

In Part 1 of this series, I explored the different philosophical premises that Robert Sapolsky and I bring to the question of free will, in our respective books, Determined and Free Agents. Here, I will examine the scientific evidence that Sapolsky marshals to make his argument that all our decisions are fully determined. ...

Free will is in the air. Among neuroscientists at least, the question of whether we are in control of our actions has been attracting renewed attention of late, driven in large part by the successes of the field in laying bare the neural machinery of behaviour. It’s thus not a total coincidence that two books by neuroscientists on this topic – Determined,...

Well, now! The consciousness field is all atwitter! A letter has been published, with 124 signatories, claiming that one prominent “theory of consciousness” – the Integrated Information Theory proposed and developed by Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch and colleagues over several years – is “pseudoscience”. That’s a serious charge to level in print,...

Did you ever get the feeling, when you’re working on some problem (scientific or otherwise), that there are some basic principles at play that elude you, but that must have been worked out already by somebody? That’s certainly been my experience in my career in biology, whether it was in developmental biology, human genetics, neuroscience or other...