nucleation

LIT-1963: Attention as the Source of a Free Will

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1508), from the manuscript of 2026-10-29 the owner supplied; worth reading as a worked attempt to make attention the mechanism of a will without a homunculus, and for its one original move, a boundary between an emergent phenomenon and its context as what keeps contextual emergence from collapsing into supervenience. Read it knowing that its neural evidence (phase-amplitude coupling, ephaptic coupling) is consistent with the weakly emergent models it rejects, and that its step from a non-reducible subject to free will is asserted.
Tagsfree-will, agency, neuroscience, metaphysics
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-539 — Jennings's attention as the source of a free will has Frankfurt's two-level architecture with its upper level changed from an attitude to a process: the whole collection of an agent's interests, prioritizing, settles which first-order interest becomes effective, as a second-order volition does for Frankfurt, but by metacontrol and not by endorsement; so it inherits unchanged the objection that a manipulated organization can meet the condition, and what it adds to Frankfurt is that the process forms new interests and is a contextually emergent cause
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1508 — Jennings — Attention as the Source of a Free Will
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1314 — Contextual emergence, on which an emergent phenomenon's parts are necessary but not sufficient, needs a functional boundary between the phenomenon and its context, without which the context could be folded into the base and the account collapse into weak emergence or global supervenience; and the subject of attention is contextually emergent in this sense, its boundary being the skull, meninges and brain stem, so that its macro-level patterns constrain micro-level activity with a power that is not reducible to the parts and needs neither downward nor circular causation, 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

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Jennings, C. D. (2026). Attention as the source of a free will. Synthese, forthcoming. Manuscript of 29 October 2026, 52 pp. PhilArchive JENAAT-12.

Read in full on 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1508).

Key takeaways

  • Attention is defined as prioritization by a subject, and the subject as a collection of interests. That avoids a homunculus by making the subject distributed, and it separates attention from filtering by whether the selection answers to the whole collection (pp. 21–32).
  • Attention resolves conflicts between equally weighted interests and turns a fluid interest into a formed one. On this account that is where a will is formed (pp. 25–26).
  • Contextual emergence is given a condition the paper says other accounts lack: a boundary between the emergent phenomenon and its context (pp. 18–20).
  • Freedom comes from constraint: “constraint, in a noisy environment, is what gives us power over ourselves” (p. 33).

Standing in the record

The owner uploaded it to the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” and asked whether it is “Frankfurt with a hat on” (U14); that is CLAIM-539. It bears on the will line, where it is a candidate realizer of CLAIM-027’s precedence relations, and on CLAIM-334, whose supervenience premise it denies. The paper does not cite Frankfurt.

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