Free will/External Links

Please sort and annotate in a user-friendly manner and consider archiving the URLs behind the links you provide. See also related web sources.

Links to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy :

• O'Connor, Timothy (Oct 29, 2010). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Free Will. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "A particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about."

• Hoefer, Carl (Jan 21, 2010). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Causal Determinism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "The claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws."

• Vihvelin, Kadri (Mar 1, 2011). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Arguments for Incompatibilism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). Incompatibilism is concerned with "the relevance of determinism to free will: if determinism turned out to be true, incompatibilism holds it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will." Quotation is a close paraphrase.

• McKenna, Michael (Oct 5, 2009). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Compatibilism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism."

• Clarke, Randolph (Sep 12, 2008). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "The incompatibilist theories that have been offered fall into three main groups, depending on which type of indeterminism (uncaused events, nondeterministically caused events, agent- [or substance-] caused events) they require. Further variations among accounts concern where in the processes leading to decisions or other actions they require indeterminism and what other conditions besides indeterminism they require."

• McKenna, Michael (Oct 5, 2009). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Compatibilism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism."

• Cole, David (Sep 22, 2009). Edward N. Zalta, ed:The Chinese Room Argument. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "While suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle."

• Thomason, Richmond (May 9, 2008). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Logic and Artificial Intelligence. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "Whatever causality is, causal relations should be inferrable in everyday common sense settings. Whatever belief is, it should be possible for rational agents to make plausible inferences about the beliefs of other agents....Compatibility with an acceptable account of the relevant reasoning is essential for a successful philosophical theory. But the methods in the contemporary philosophical inventory are too crude to provide anything like an adequate account of reasoning that is this complex."

• Allen, Colin (Oct 13, 2010). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Animal Consciousness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "While theories of consciousness are frequently developed without special regard to questions about animal consciousness, the plausibility of such theories has sometimes been assessed against the results of their application to animal consciousness. ...Questions about animal consciousness are just one corner of a more general set of questions about animal cognition and mind."

• Atmanspacher, Harald (May 19, 2011). Edward N. Zalta, ed:Quantum Approaches to Consciousness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). "Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness."

Other links

• Norman Bearrentine. New Millennium/New Mind: Life After the Death of Free Will. Light & Dark Inc. normbear.com. Retrieved on 2012-07-27. A thoughtful essay with a few references.
• Michael Shermer (July 26, 2012). How Free Will Collides with Unconscious Impulses: Volition as self-control exerts veto power over impulses. Scientific American. Retrieved on 2012-07-27. A claim that experiments by Marcel Brass and Patrick Haggard in 2007 demonstrate "free won't", supporting the idea humans control their decisions.
• Tim Black (Spring 2004). Lecture XIII: Mental Causation/Consciousness. Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics. California State University, Northridge. Retrieved on 2012-08-25. A lecture outlining various positions on how the mind might cause a change in a material body.
• Tiago V Maia, Axel Cleeremans (August 2005). "Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience". TRENDS in cognitive science 9 (8). DOI:10.1016/j.tics.2005.06.016. Research Blogging.

"...working memory and cognitive control involve competition between widely distributed representations. This competition is biased by top-down projections (notably from prefrontal cortex), which can selectively enhance some representations over others." Other links found here.