Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Free will — free will and volition, as philosophy and as science — compatibilism and its rivals, manipulation and responsibility, and the neuroscience of voluntary action such as the readiness potential (group: philosophy; ADR-025).
24 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-029 v5 | A higher-order attitude cannot make a motive the agent’s own by its order alone: any attitude specified without presupposing the agent’s participation can itself be disowned, and any specified to include it presupposes what it was meant to explain | Velleman (1992), LIT-295: every candidate for the agent’s standpoint in a hierarchical account (second-order desire, Watsonian value, decisive commitment) is either disownable or question-begging. Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) state the regress as their own argument; McKenna & Coates (LIT-291) and Dryden (LIT-297) credit it to Watson 1975, which the record has not read. Frankfurt’s own 2004 lectures (LIT-293) never address it. The dilemma is argued by examples, not proved, and it does not show that higher-order structure is irrelevant to agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-040 v5 | A condition on free agency stated only in present psychological structure is met by a manipulated agent, so the account must count that agent free or add a historical condition, and no historical condition in the record’s readings is shown to escape | McKenna & Coates, LIT-291: every “mesh” compatibilism can be installed by a manipulator, and Frankfurt is quoted (2002, second-hand) accepting that a manipulated character leaves a person responsible. Dryden (LIT-297) and Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) make the same point against hierarchical autonomy. Historical supplements are reported to face “loading-in” and a circularity worry; neither is argued in full in the record. The claim says what the account must choose between, not which choice is wrong. | Proposed |
| THEORY-059 | The readiness potential does not show that a neural decision to act precedes awareness of the urge to act | Libet read the readiness potential, which begins half a second or more before a spontaneous movement and before the reported urge, as the brain deciding first. Two independent arguments in the record remove that inference. Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (LIT-605) show that a leaky accumulator driven by noise and fitted to waiting times alone reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96), because movement-locked averaging recovers the fluctuations that crossed threshold; a prediction of theirs held in 13 people. Dennett & Kinsbourne (LIT-431) argue that the clock report times a represented content, not an event in the brain. Proposed: the authors say their model shows the potential could be fluctuation, not that it is. It says nothing about whether the urge causes the act. | Proposed |
| THEORY-065 | The unity that makes a movement an agent’s action is achieved by conformity to the constitutive norms of agency, not given by the causal unity of a mind, so collective agents are agents in the same sense as individual ones | Korsgaard (2014), LIT-587: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and ordinary attribution implies that the agent was active and that the action expresses who she is. Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action the form of self-determined efficacy; the content of the maxims chosen under that form constitutes practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes breaks the unity an animal is given, and reason is the work of rebuilding it, so unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, and people can act together “in the most literal sense”. The Tanner Lectures (LIT-564) supply the reflective structure the chapter assumes. Argued, with the Kantian premise assumed and the collective mechanism stated in a paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-067 | Self-control over time needs no faculty of will: interests that dominate at different delays bargain, and resolve is the recursive staking of expected future choices on the present one | Ainslie’s précis (LIT-586): hyperbolic discounting makes a smaller, sooner reward temporarily preferred, so successive “interests” conflict as in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Treating a choice as a precedent bundles the series, and summed hyperbolic curves favour the larger, later rewards; a lapse costs credibility. Will is that recursion, not an organ. Schelling (LIT-602) describes the same divided chooser from the side of tactics: we manage our later selves as we manage other people. The mathematics of bundling is sound; that willpower works this way is argued, and the précis concedes it is hard to test directly. It is a claim about how control is achieved, not about whose control is self-governance. | Proposed |
| THEORY-118 | Praiseworthiness is compatible with being psychologically determined by good reasons, but blameworthiness requires that the agent could have done otherwise, that is, could have acted on the right reasons | Susan Wolf’s asymmetry thesis, reported second-hand: the primary texts are unread. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3), citing “Asymmetrical Freedom” and Freedom Within Reason pp. 79–81, report that for Wolf praiseworthy conduct does not require the freedom to do otherwise and blameworthy conduct does. An agent determined to act in accord with the True and the Good loses nothing by lacking the ability to act irrationally; an agent who acts against it and cannot act in accord with it cannot reasonably be blamed. In Fischer’s terms, only blame needs regulative control. Wolf holds that the ability needs only the falsity of psychological, not physical, determinism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-119 v2 | An agent can be morally responsible for what she did although she could not have done otherwise, when what made the action unavoidable played no part in bringing it about, so the principle of alternate possibilities is false | Frankfurt (1969, LIT-694, read): Black stands ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needs to, so Jones4 could not have done otherwise and is as responsible, for blame or praise, as without Black. A fact that plays no part in bringing an action about cannot excuse it. The 1971 willing addict (LIT-692, read) is a second route. Robb’s SEP entry (LIT-294) gives the standard objections: the dilemma defence from the prior sign, flickers of freedom, general abilities, and the case’s oddity. None is settled, and the record has read the replies only in survey. | Proposed |
| THEORY-120 | A motive is the agent’s own, and she acts of her own free will, when she identifies with it, and that is all the freedom moral responsibility requires: identification is the conformity of the effective desire to a decisive higher-order volition (1971), and later wholehearted acceptance with no conflict at any higher order | Frankfurt’s hierarchical, or endorsement, account, from his own texts: the 1971 paper (LIT-692, read) and the 2004 Tanner Lectures (LIT-293, read). A person’s will is the desire that moves him to act; he identifies with a desire by wanting it to be his will, decisively, and he acts of his own free will when the will that moves him is the will he wants. In 2004 the condition is “volitional unanimity” with no conflict “at any higher order”, and identification is “willing acceptance”, which may be resigned. Acting of one’s own free will is what responsibility requires, and alternatives and history are irrelevant. The 1987 and 1992 revisions are held only by report. | Proposed |
| THEORY-121 v4 | Moral responsibility requires guidance control, moderate reasons-responsiveness of the agent’s own actual-sequence mechanism, and not regulative control over alternative possibilities, so responsibility is compatible with causal determinism | Fischer and Ravizza, in their own précis (LIT-728, read): moral responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control over alternatives. Guidance control is acting from a mechanism one has made one’s own by taking responsibility for it, which is moderately reasons-responsive: regularly receptive to reasons, some moral, and at least weakly reactive. Fischer’s 1987 paper (LIT-687, read) is the weak-responsiveness origin. The view is compatible with causal determinism. | Active |
| THEORY-122 | Moral responsibility requires the normative competence to recognise and act on the True and the Good, which identification with one’s own motives does not supply | Susan Wolf’s Reason View, reported second-hand: the primary texts are unread. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3) report that for Wolf free will is the ability to act in accord with the True and the Good, an anchor outside the agent’s psychology. Talbert (LIT-691, §§3.1.1, 3.2) reports her case against deep-self or Real Self views and the JoJo case: JoJo identifies wholly with the cruel values his father raised him in, yet is not responsible, because he cannot appreciate that they are wrong. The claim is a necessary condition. It does not by itself say whether the ability must include being able to do otherwise; that is THEORY-118. | Proposed |
| THEORY-139 v4 | A corporation that forms its judgments through authorised avowal and corrects the inconsistency any mechanical aggregation of its members’ views produces has a mind of its own, and as a conversable agent it meets the conditions for being fit to be held responsible: a significant choice, the capacity to judge its options normatively, and control over acting on that judgment | Pettit (2017), LIT-718, restating Responsibility Incorporated (2007). Corporations are conversable agents: spokespersons avow and commit in their name, and because majority aggregation can be inconsistent they must form their own minds. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible under three conditions, which corporations meet. Proposed: it is an argument, and its empirical premise about corporate procedure is asserted rather than shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-147 | Deep responsibility is not limited to the moral, and attributability and accountability are independent kinds of it rather than two levels: accountability needs only that the agent acted as she ought not to, was in a position to know it, and that acting so was up to her, while what makes a self a fit target of the reactive attitudes is plausibly that it can perceive, understand and appreciate the world as we do | Wolf (2015), LIT-747, the 2013 Routledge Lecture. We are deeply, not merely causally, responsible for nonmoral traits and art, by the self-disclosure view. Watson’s two-level view, accountability as attributability plus control, is rejected: a stipulated psychopath may be accountable for acts whose source is not attributable to him. Fitness for reactive attitudes is, on Wolf’s hunch, being an intelligent self. Proposed: the positive view is her hunch. | Proposed |
| THEORY-310 | On a forward-looking justification of blame, a counterfactual capacity condition calibrated to what makes blaming effective is redundant: fixing its parameters presupposes that blaming such agents is good policy, so freedom is ascribed because of blameworthiness rather than grounding it | Harland (2020), LIT-991, §3, read in NOTE-847. Argued, not shown, against Vargas’s agency cultivation model, whose free-will test sets its similarity and proportion parameters by what is co-optimal for cultivating moral agency. The argument is about that model only, and works class by class. It does not show that freedom is irrelevant to responsibility in general, and Vargas is read here only through Harland’s quotations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-316 v2 | Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions on moral responsibility but leave standing the incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history, which is the more fundamental one | Pereboom (2001), LIT-1006, Chapter 1 pp. 1–6 and the Introduction (pp. xv), read in NOTE-823, Skimmed. Fischer concedes that a Frankfurt-style case does not refute a requirement that the action not be deterministically produced by factors beyond the agent’s control, and Pereboom builds causal-history incompatibilism on that concession. It does not say that determinism rules out responsibility; that is argued in Chapter 4, which was not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-328 | An agent manipulated so that he meets every leading compatibilist condition is not morally responsible in the basic-desert sense, no responsibility-relevant difference separates him from an ordinarily determined agent, and so causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why neither is responsible | Pereboom’s four-case argument, as two surveys report it: Caruso’s SEP entry (LIT-1047, NOTE-862), which quotes Case 2, and De Marco and Cyr (LIT-1045, NOTE-856), which quote Case 1 and state the best-explanation conclusion. Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006) is a source for the thesis it states in its Introduction and Chapter 1, not for the cases, which are in the unread Chapter 4. It does not say that determinism is true, or that manipulation itself is what defeats responsibility. The argument says it is the determination by outside factors, and that the manipulator is irrelevant. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1118 | McKenna and Coates argue, with Dryden and with Buss and Westlund, that a condition on free agency stated only in the agent’s present psychological structure is met by an agent whose structure a manipulator installed, so a mesh account must count that agent free or add a historical condition; Frankfurt, read first-hand, takes the first option | The manipulation argument as its sources make it, split from THEORY-040 by the tenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern, so that a claim needing only the argument’s first half can stand on it. All five sources were read in full (NOTE-270, NOTE-266, NOTE-267, NOTE-545, NOTE-264). Whether any historical condition escapes the argument stays THEORY-040’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1298 | When mental control returns after mind-wandering, the self-model represents the return as the person’s own act whether or not the person’s control system caused it, because it must bridge to earlier control to keep the autobiographical self-model continuous | Metzinger (2015), LIT-1941, pp. 289–292, read in NOTE-1497; first in 2013 (LIT-1942, pp. 4, 11) and widened in 2017 (LIT-1945, pp. 20–21) to the sense of origination in agency generally. It rests on Schooler et al. (2011) and Wegner (2002), neither read, and on the argument that a self-model which must represent itself as always having had the ability cannot represent its return as caused from outside. A hypothesis: no episode is reported in which the cause of a return and the report of it were recorded apart. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1302 | Sánchez-Cañizares reinterprets Irruption Theory for binary decisions (IAT*): irruption is the onset of a landscape with one attractor per option and absorption the passage to a single attractor, both correlated in mind and brain, reversing the sign of Froese’s variance hypothesis; the mind’s causal role is to set the landscape’s control parameters by “selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining”, not to push the state, so on this account the mind controls which outcomes exist and not which one the state reaches | Sánchez-Cañizares (2026), LIT-1992, read in full in NOTE-1506. The interpretation is the paper’s (pp. 6–7, 18–20); the last clause is this reading’s description of the control architecture it implies, from the model and simulation of pp. 8–12, in which the choice between wells is settled by initial condition and noise. Proposed: the paper says IAT* “cannot be tested with empirical results without further assumptions” (p. 7). Bears on CLAIM-533 and QUESTION-071. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1321 | Froese proposes that irruptions combined with attunement, modelled on Watson et al.’s self-optimization of a Hopfield network by occasional resets to arbitrary states plus Hebbian learning, answer the libertarian’s randomness challenge, how behaviour can be effective though underdetermined; but in the model offered the resets are arbitrary, so what makes the behaviour effective is the learned attractor landscape, and nothing in it distinguishes a motivated irruption from noise | Froese (2023), LIT-1950, read in full in NOTE-1521. The first half is the paper’s proposal (§§4, 5.2.3, 6); the second half is this reading’s observation about the model it cites, from the paper’s own description of it (“reset to an arbitrary configuration”). Proposed because the proposal is stated as potential (“holds potential to provide”) and no model with motivated irruptions is given. It bears directly on CLAIM-533 and on the luck objection (THEORY-328, THEORY-040). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1328 | Kane answers the luck objection by making indeterminism a hindrance inside goal-directed effort rather than a cause on its own: in a self-forming action the agent makes two competing efforts, each meeting the indeterminacy as interference from the other, so whichever succeeds is a willed success for which the agent is responsible; indeterminism lessens the agent’s control but not its responsibility, and what responsibility needs is macro-control of processes involving many neurons, not control of each | Kane (2009), LIT-1984, pp. 39–44, read in NOTE-1518. Proposed: the reply rests on analogies whose structure differs from the self-forming case (one aim and an outside obstacle against two aims, each the other’s obstacle), and it does not meet the rollback form of the luck objection (THEORY-328 is the record’s nearest neighbour). Its concession, that indeterminism lessens control, is what CLAIM-533 turns on. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1329 | On Kane’s account, self-forming actions occur under motivational conflict, when tension moves the relevant brain regions away from thermodynamic equilibrium, “a kind of stirring up of chaos” that makes them sensitive to micro-indeterminacy at the neuronal level, so that the choice is undetermined | Kane (2009), LIT-1984, p. 39, read in NOTE-1518. Kane’s neural hypothesis, stated without evidence in this paper. Proposed: it is an empirical claim about brains for which the paper gives none, and the record holds nothing that measures it. It is the attribution CLAIM-533 makes to Kane, now checked against his text. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1332 | In Bishop’s account, chaos is a property of deterministic dynamics, so sensitive dependence is not indeterminism; under determinism it may model deliberation but is not sufficient for incompatibilist freedom, and under indeterminism the incompatibilist (Kane) must still show that agents can harness amplified indeterminism; and amplification itself may fail, since damping, the sign of the local Lyapunov exponents when a perturbation arrives, and the brain’s parallel redundancy limit it | Bishop, SEP “Chaos” (2008; revision of 2024-10-11), LIT-1961, §§4, 6.1 and 6.4, read in NOTE-1535. Active as a statement of the entry’s position, checked verbatim, and its §4 dynamics is elementary. The sharp edge: the brain-redundancy point is asserted without evidence, and the entry does not argue that harnessing is impossible, only that it has not been shown. | Active |
| THEORY-1341 | In Jennings’s hybrid account, attention is prioritization of processing by a subject that is the whole collection of an organism’s fixed, formed and fluid interests, separated from filtering by whether selection answers to that collection, marked by feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; when interests are equally weighted, attention breaks the stalemate and updates the chosen option’s value, so that a fluid interest becomes a formed one | Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, §6, read in NOTE-1508. The operational half of the paper: what attention is, how it is told from filtering, and how it forms interests. The stalemate mechanism is taken from Voigt 2022 (LIT-1976), registered unread. Proposed because the criterion is inferred, not tested, and the paper reports no data. It does not say the subject is contextually emergent (THEORY-1314) or that attention is the source of a free will. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1348 | In Froese’s Irruption Theory an agent’s motivations make a difference to behaviour only as an increase in its material underdetermination, measurable at best indirectly as neural or behavioural entropy, and such irruptions are by the theory’s own terms undirected: scaled up by chaos, 1/f noise or criticality, they loosen the current organization but “cannot force the formation of the behavior that is to come”, so the theory places behaviour’s direction in the body’s attunement and not in the irruption | Froese (2023), LIT-1950, read in full in NOTE-1521 from PubMed Central’s copy. Active as a statement of what the theory says: its three axioms, its three theses, and the commitment that irruptions are undirected, all in the text (§§5.1–5.2.3). It does not say that the theory is true, that neural entropy measures motivation, or that attunement answers the luck objection (THEORY-1321, Proposed). | Active |