Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation

About the Author
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He holds secondary appointments in Duke's Law School and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is a Partner Investigator at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Neuroethics and a Research Scientist with the Mind Research Network in New Mexico. He has served as co-chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association and co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project. He earned his bachelor's degree from Amherst College and his doctorate from Yale University. He has published widely, but his current work focuses on moral artificial intelligence, free will and moral responsibility, and various topics in moral psychology and brain science. His most recent books with Oxford University Press are Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, and Clean Hands: Philosophical Lessons from Scrupulosity. He
co-directs Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy and co-teaches a MOOC, Think Again, with over 1,000,000 registered students.
Uri Maoz is a computational neuroscientist, who researches volition, decision-making, and moral choice. He joined Chapman University in 2017 as an Assistant Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychology at Crean College and at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences, where he uses combination of empirical techniques (e.g., EEG, intracranial recordings, behavioral studies) and modeling to develop a computational account of volition, with an emphasis on the decision-making processes that lead to voluntary action and on the role of consciousness in such processes. In particular, he uses machine-learning to carry out online, real-time, closed-loop analysis of neural data, as it is being recorded. He is further interested in the legal, ethical, and philosophical implications of this work.
What is free will? Can it exist in a determined universe? How can we determine who, if anyone, possesses it? Philosophers have debated the extent of human free will for millennia. In recent decades neuroscientists have joined the fray with questions of their own. Which neural mechanisms could enable conscious control of action? What are intentional actions? Do contemporary developments in neuroscience rule out free will or, instead, illuminate how it works? Over the past few years, neuroscientists and philosophers have increasingly come to understand that both fields can make substantive contributions to the free-will debate, so working together is the best path forward to understanding whether, when, and how our choices might be free
This book contains thirty bidirectional exchanges between neuroscientists and philosophers that focus on the most critical questions in the neurophilosophy of free will. It mimics a lively, interdisciplinary conference, where experts answer questions and follow-up questions from the other field, helping each discipline to understand how the other thinks and works. Each chapter is concise and accessible to non-experts-free from disciplinary jargon and highly technical details-but also employs thorough and up-to-date research from experts in the field. The resulting collection should be useful to anyone who wants to get up to speed on the most fundamental issues in the rising field of the neurophilosophy of free will. It will interest experts from philosophy or neuroscience who want to learn about the other discipline, students in courses on a host of related topics, and lay readers who are fascinated by these profound issues.