free-will.
24 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-264 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Read |
| NOTE-269 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities | PAP (“a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise”) has no decisive positive argument: it is not self-evident, and the moral arguments from fairness, OIC and the W-defense cover blame at most. Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are the strongest attack, because the factor that makes the act inevitable plays no role in producing it. The entry lays out three defences of PAP: - general-ability readings (PAP-general); - “flickers of freedom”, which Fischer answers with the robustness requirement; - the Kane/Widerker/Ginet dilemma, answered by Fischer’s causal-irrelevance reply on the first horn and by Pereboom’s buffer case, Hunt’s blockage and Mele & Robb 1998 on the second. Robb reports “not much consensus” (§5). He treats the fall of PAP as re-energising compatibilism, with Frankfurt’s 1971 identification view and Fischer & Ravizza’s guidance control as the two replacement accounts. | Read |
| NOTE-270 | Compatibilism | The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Read |
| NOTE-367 | Dennett & Kinsbourne — Time and the Observer | The Cartesian Theater is the tacit assumption that some place or moment in the brain makes contents conscious, so that arrival order there fixes experienced order. The Multiple Drafts model replaces it: discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel; temporal order is represented by content, not by the timing of vehicles. Four timing “anomalies” then need no backward projection. At sub-second scales the difference between pre- and post-experiential revision is said to be only verbal. It is a conceptual argument over published data; no experiment is run. | Read |
| NOTE-441 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | SDT’s autonomy is “regulation by the self”: acting with reflective endorsement, graded along the internalization continuum, compatible with external influence, dependence and a single option. Ryan and Deci align it with phenomenological and hierarchical (Frankfurt, Dworkin) accounts and use that definition to answer behaviourist, social-cognitive, reductionist, nonconscious-priming, choice-overload and cultural critiques. Autonomy lies not in being an uncaused cause but in the capacity to “reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). | Read |
| NOTE-462 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | A three-parameter leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, fitted to Libet-task waiting times (k = 0.5, I = 0.11, threshold at the 80th percentile of output), reproduces the readiness potential (r² = 0.96) and the linear mean–SD relation of waiting times (r = 0.9). In a variant with random clicks, fast responders showed a slow negativity before the click (P < 0.005), and fast and slow clicks were spread equally through the trial (P = 0.64). The neural decision to move is placed at the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement. | Read |
| NOTE-545 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Persons differ from other creatures in the structure of the will: they have second-order volitions, desires that a given desire be the one that moves them to act, and wantons do not. Forming one is identifying with a desire. Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, and a decisive identification ends the series of higher orders “without cutting it off arbitrarily” (p. 16). Responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts of his own free will. The view is neutral on determinism, and on how the will came to be (n. 10). | Read |
| NOTE-546 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt argues that PAP is false because circumstances can make an action unavoidable without bringing it about: Black stands ready to make Jones4 act and never needs to, so Jones4 is as responsible, for blame or praise, as he would be without Black (§IV). A fact that explains nothing about the action cannot excuse it (§V). The replacement principle excuses only an agent who acted “only because he could not have done otherwise”, and Frankfurt says it is compatible with determinism. | Read |
| NOTE-547 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer’s own sketch of his framework (guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with determinism; the Frankfurt cases’ moral is the actual sequence), followed by the paper’s thesis: acting freely is artistic self-expression that gives a life narrative value, a product judged mainly morally and prudentially, so the activity’s aesthetic nature does not fix how the life is evaluated. | Read |
| NOTE-548 | Moral Responsibility | A survey of moral responsibility. Its most exact reports, for this record: Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control as an owned, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism, with page references (§2.3); Wolf’s critique of Real Self views and the requirement that an agent be able to form her values on the basis of the True and the Good (§3.1.1); and the moral competence condition, through JoJo (§3.2). Wolf’s praise/blame asymmetry is noted in one sentence. | Read |
| NOTE-565 | Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise | A lecture arguing that deep responsibility extends beyond the moral, to prudential and aesthetic traits and to art, and that the self-disclosure view explains this. Watson’s two-level view, attributability with accountability stacked on top, is rejected: the two are independent, and accountability may need nothing metaphysically robust. What makes a self a fit target of reactive attitudes is offered as a hunch: an intelligent self that perceives, understands and appreciates the world as we do. | Read |
| NOTE-569 | The Conversable, Responsible Corporation | A syllogism. Corporations are conversable agents: through authorised spokespersons they avow attitudes and make commitments, and because mechanical aggregation can be inconsistent they must form minds of their own. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible, having a significant choice, the capacity for normative judgment, and control over acting on it. So corporations are fit to be held responsible. | Read |
| NOTE-575 | Précis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | The authors’ own summary of Responsibility and Control. Moral responsibility requires guidance control, the agent’s ownership of the mechanism that actually issues in action plus that mechanism’s moderate reasons-responsiveness. Ownership comes from taking responsibility, a historical matter of dispositional self-beliefs acquired in appropriate ways. The result is compatible with causal determinism. | Read |
| NOTE-579 | Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility | Fischer’s first statement of reasons-responsiveness. Frankfurt-type cases show an agent can be responsible though he could not have done otherwise, so what must respond to reasons is the mechanism that actually issues in the action, not the agent. Weak responsiveness suffices: the actual kind of mechanism would do otherwise in some world with sufficient reason to. The result is semicompatibilism. | Read |
| NOTE-823 | Pereboom — Living without Free Will | From the Introduction and Chapter 1’s first ten pages only. Hard incompatibilism: moral responsibility in the basic-desert sense is incompatible with determinism and with the indeterminacy of standard quantum mechanics; agent-causal libertarianism may be coherent, but we have no evidence for the indeterminacy it needs, so we have no evidence that we are morally responsible. Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions but not the core incompatibilist condition, which concerns an action’s causal history. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-847 | Harland — Beyond the Moral Influence Theory? | Vargas’s agency cultivation model is said to differ from the moral influence theory by aiming at moral agency, but his notion of responsiveness to moral considerations is so capacious that it reduces to intrinsic motivation to act morally, so the model inherits the old theory’s defects. And his counterfactual test of free will is calibrated to what makes blaming effective, so it can be applied only once we know whether blaming such agents is good policy: given the model, freedom follows blameworthiness and does no work. | Read |
| NOTE-856 | De Marco and Cyr — Manipulation Cases, Part 1 | An even-handed survey of manipulation arguments. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 and describes Cases 2 to 4, gives the generic schema (No-FR, No-Diff), and notes that Pereboom’s own version concludes by best explanation. Original-design cases defeat bypassing views, and natural-force cases defeat manipulator-focused views. Hard-line replies, parallel indeterministic cases, three dilemmas against the argument, and Todd’s mitigation version are set out. | Read |
| NOTE-862 | Caruso — Skepticism About Moral Responsibility (SEP) | The SEP survey of free will skepticism. It defines basic-desert responsibility in Pereboom’s words and states hard incompatibilism: compatibilism falls to the manipulation argument, event-causal libertarianism to luck, and agent-causal libertarianism to physics. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 2, gives the four-case argument’s structure, and says why soft-line replies are fragile. It also reports Levy’s argument that historical compatibilism cannot let agents take responsibility for their constitutive luck. | Read |
| NOTE-1457 | Fischer — The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories | Fischer’s reply to the Dilemma Defense. If indeterminism holds, buffer cases remove every robust alternative; if determinism holds, a case can assume it without assuming it removes alternatives, so that determinism and Black’s device together, and neither alone, remove them. The moral is conditional: if determinism rules out responsibility, it is not by eliminating alternatives. Fischer allows that determinism may still rule it out another way, such as by removing sourcehood, and rejects Widerker’s demand that a Frankfurt case satisfy IRR. | Read |
| NOTE-1459 | Timpe — Source Incompatibilism and Its Alternatives | Against the received split between leeway and source incompatibilism. Mere alternatives cannot meet a control condition, so any acceptable incompatibilism rests on ultimacy; and ultimacy needs indeterminism, which leaves more than one open future, so it entails an alternative-possibilities condition, though perhaps only for non-robust, involuntary alternatives that do no explanatory work. The best source incompatibilism is therefore “wide”, and the taxonomy should go. Timpe counts Pereboom among those who keep an alternatives condition while making the source condition more fundamental. | Read |
| NOTE-1506 | Sánchez-Cañizares — Decision-making through irruption theory | Uses the Haken–Kelso–Bunz potential with parameters switched in time (no landscape, then two wells, then one) as a model of binary decisions, and compares the resulting rise and fall of the across-trial standard deviation of cos φ with trial-to-trial variability of event-related potentials in Sergent et al. 2021, Wolff et al. 2019 and 2021 and Hua et al. 2025, qualitatively only. It reinterprets Froese’s irruption as the onset of a two-attractor landscape and absorption as the passage to one (IAT*), reversing the sign of Froese 2024’s variance hypothesis. The mind’s role is to set the control parameters, “selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining”, which is not derived and is said to be underivable. Re-simulation confirms the trend, but under the stated noise the deviation settles near 0.40, not 0. | Read |
| NOTE-1508 | Jennings — Attention as the Source of a Free Will | A hybrid account of attention: prioritization by a subject that is a collection of fixed, formed and fluid interests, distinguished from filtering by feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The subject’s power over its interests is said to be contextually emergent, made possible by a boundary from its context, and visible in phase-amplitude coupling. Attention breaks stalemates between equally weighted interests and forms new ones, which the paper offers as the source of a free will without Kane’s indeterminism. The metaphysics is argued from an analogy with Bénard cells, and the neural evidence does not separate it from the weakly emergent models it rejects. | Read |
| NOTE-1518 | Kane — Libertarianism | Kane’s compact defence of event-causal libertarianism. Free will needs ultimate responsibility, which needs undetermined self-forming actions somewhere in a life; Frankfurt cases do not reach them. In a self-forming action the will is divided, conflict stirs up chaos that makes the brain sensitive to micro-indeterminacy, and each competing effort meets the indeterminacy as a hindrance from the other, so either outcome is a willed success. Indeterminism lessens control without lessening responsibility; what is needed is macro-control. | Read |
| NOTE-1535 | Bishop — Chaos (SEP) | The 2024 revision of Bishop’s SEP entry. Chaos is a property of deterministic models; unpredictability is not indeterminism. The sensitive-dependence argument that chaos amplifies quantum events is qualified: damping, negative local Lyapunov exponents and, in the brain, “parallel redundancy” may stop amplification. For Kane, sensitivity alone does not give incompatibilist freedom, and the incompatibilist must still show agents can “harness” indeterminism. §6.2–6.3 state Bishop’s contextual emergence as an ontological account: larger-scale stability conditions that constrain and enable smaller-scale behaviour. | Skimmed |