Topic: intention

Suppose you are on your favorite touchscreen device consciously and deliberately deciding emails to read or delete. In other words, you are consciously and intentionally looking, tapping, and swiping. Now suppose that you are doing this while neuroscientists are recording your brain activity. Eventually, the neuroscientists are familiar enough with your brain activity and behavior that they run an experiment with subliminal cues which reveals that your looking, tapping, and swiping seem to be determined by a random switch in your brain. You are not aware of it, or its impact on your decisions

The COINTOB (conditional intention and integration to bound) model provides a heuristic framework of processes in Libet-style experiments. The model is based on three assumptions. First, brain activation preceding conscious intentions in Libet-style experiments does not reflect an unconscious decision but rather the unfolding of a decision process. Second, the time of conscious decision (W) reflects the moment in time when the decision boundary is crossed. This interpretation of W is consistent with our apparent intuition that we decide in the moment we experience the conscious intention to ac

The question of free will has been topical for millennia, especially considering its links to moral responsibility and the ownership of that responsibility. Free will, or volition, is an incredibly complex phenomenon - and cannot easily be reduced to a single empirical paradigm. Roskies (2010) proposes that there are five cognitive aspects to be considered when developing a more complete understanding of volition. These are: intention, initiation, feeling, executive control and decision-making. Decision-making will be the focus of this talk, which steps through aspects of the philosophy of fre