Exposé d'Andrew Sims dans le cadre du séminaire associé à l'ARC "Causality and Free Will". De 14h à 16h en salle Jean Ladrière. Pour plus d'informations, contacter Anna Drozdzewska.
Résumé
One way to understand phenomena we encounter in our personal-level vocabulary (phenomena like sensation, belief, and of course will) is to define some phenomenon at the personal-level of description, and then to identify entities and processes in cognitive neuroscience which could play the role of a material realiser for that phenomenon just so defined. A differing approach is driven by the idea of “co-evolutionary research programs,” under which the personal-level concepts themselves should be transformed along with advances in the relevant sciences.
It is possible that this could be the case for our concept of will. It seems to be part of our common-sense or personal-level theory of the will, for example, that it is most freely exercised in the context of conscious deliberation over alternatives. (For example, in accepting a common-sense view of will in his studies, Libet assumes that for the action to be freely willed by the agent it must have its cause in a conscious intention.) But recent results in the science of self-control show that this view may be mistaken. The role of conscious deliberation might be much less central than assumed, because the work of George Ainslie seems to show that the exercise of the will is best understood in terms of strategy and coercion between time-slices of the same person (i.e., diachronically), rather than in terms of deliberation over alternatives at a particular point in time (i.e., synchronically).