The Metaphysics Of Freedom

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Dretske
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Intentional Behavior

I offer Jimmy a dollar to wiggle his ears. He wiggles them because he wants the dollar and, as a result of my offer, thinks he will earn it by wiggling his ears. So I cause him to believe something that explains, or helps to explain, why he wiggles his ears. If I push a button, and a bell, wired to the button, rings because the button is depressed, I cause the bell to ring. I make it ring. Indeed, I ring it. So why don’t I, by offering him a dollar, make Jimmy wiggle his ears? Why, indeed, don’t I wiggle them? If I ring a bell by pushing a button, why don’t I wiggle Jimmy’s ears by offering him a dollar?That is a question that has always vexed a compatibilist’s vision of human freedom. If an intentional act–say, wiggling one’s ears in order to earn a dollar–is caused by one’s beliefs and desires (the reasons one has for wiggling one’s ears), then, by the transitivity of the causal relation, it appears to follow that it is (also) caused by whatever causes one to have those beliefs and desires. But the causes of belief and desire are often (in fact, if we trace the causal chain far enough backward, always) factors over which one has no control. So intentional behavior is often (or always) something one is made (caused) to do by factors over which one has no control. This, however, robs intentional behaviorand, presumably, also voluntary action–of its autonomy. Deliberate acts–Jimmy wiggling his ears to earn a dollar–have the same causal structure as does a bell that rings because a button is pushed. The only difference is the switch.

scholarly journals Communication in Action: Planning and Interpreting Communicative Demonstrations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark K Ho ◽  
Fiery Andrews Cushman ◽  
Michael L. Littman ◽  
Joseph L. Austerweil
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Action Planning ◽  
Formal Models ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Intentional Behavior ◽  
The World ◽  
Communication Culture

Theory of mind enables an observer to interpret others' behavior in terms of unobservable beliefs, desires, intentions, feelings, and expectations about the world. This also empowers the person whose behavior is being observed: By intelligently modifying her actions, she can influence the mental representations that an observer ascribes to her, and by extension, what the observer comes to believe about the world. That is, she can engage in intentionally communicative demonstrations. Here, we develop a computational account of generating and interpreting communicative demonstrations by explicitly distinguishing between two interacting types of planning. Typically, instrumental planning aims to control states of the physical environment, whereas belief-directed planning aims to influence an observer's mental representations. Our framework (1) extends existing formal models of pragmatics and pedagogy to the setting of value-guided decision-making, (2) captures how people modify their intentional behavior to show what they know about the reward or causal structure of an environment, and (3) helps explain data on infant and child imitation in terms of literal versus pragmatic interpretation of adult demonstrators' actions. Additionally, our analysis of belief-directed intentionality and mentalizing sheds light on the socio-cognitive mechanisms that underlie distinctly human forms of communication, culture, and sociality.

Omniscience, Foreknowledge and Human Freedom

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-488
Author(s):  
Osmond G. Ramberan
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Actual Performance ◽  
Divine Foreknowledge

One argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom runs as follows:(a) God is infallible.(b) God knows the outcome of human actions prior to their performance.(c) Therefore, no human action is free.In other words it is argued that if an essentially omniscient being (God) believes prior to the actual performance of a certain action that that action will be performed at a particular time the action in question cannot be a voluntary action. The crucial premise in the argument, it seems to me, is (b) the assumption that an essentially omniscient being can know the outcome of human actions in advance of their performance, or more simply put, that essential omniscience implies knowledge of future free acts. My purpose here is to argue that this assumption is self-contradictory.

scholarly journals Suppress me if you can: neurofeedback of the readiness potential

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Schultze-Kraft ◽  
Vincent Jonany ◽  
Thomas Samuel Binns ◽  
Joram Soch ◽  
Benjamin Blankertz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Causal Chain ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Readiness Potential ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
Voluntary Movements ◽  
Immediate Feedback ◽  
Spontaneous Movements ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Conscious Control

AbstractVoluntary movements are usually preceded by a slow, negative-going brain signal over motor areas, the so-called readiness potential (RP). To date, the exact nature and causal role of the RP in movement preparation have remained heavily debated. One important open question is whether people can exert conscious control over their RP, for example by learning to suppress it. If people were able to initiate spontaneous movements without eliciting an RP, this would challenge the idea that the RP is a necessary stage of the causal chain leading up to a voluntary movement. We tested the ability of participants to control the magnitude of their RP in a neurofeedback experiment. Participants performed self-initiated movements and after every movement they were provided with immediate feedback about the magnitude of their RP. They were asked to find a mental strategy to perform voluntary movements such that the RPs were as small as possible. We found no evidence that participants were able to to willfully modulate or suppress their RPs while still eliciting voluntary movements. This suggests that the RP might be an involuntary component of voluntary action over which people cannot exert conscious control.

Perpetuity, Eternity, and Time in Proclus' Cosmos

Phronesis ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-169
Author(s):  
Helen Lang
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
The Self ◽  
Precise Sense ◽  
The World ◽  
Effect Relation

AbstractProclus composed 18 arguments for the eternity of the world and they survive only because Philoponus, intending to refute Proclus' arguments one by one, quotes each; one copy of Philoponus' work – and so Proclus' arguments too – survives. Because of their odd history, these arguments have received little attention either in themselves or in relation to Proclus' other works, even though they are intrinsically interesting and reflect his larger philosophical enterprise. I first examine Argument XVIII, in which Proclus calls on "perpetuity", "eternity", and "time" to argue that the cosmos must be eternal. This argument leaves unanswered two important questions. The cosmos is caused by god and is itself a god; how can a cause and its effect both be gods? Proclus concludes that the cosmos is "a copy of the perpetuity of the eternal"; but what does this phrase – and the conclusion that it expresses – mean? To answer these questions, I turn to The Elements of Theology, a systematic progression of 211 propositions disclosing the causal structure of all reality. "Eternity" and "time", along with "being perpetual", also appear here, particularly in propositions 40-55, to which I turn in the second part of this paper. They are conjoined with what Proclus calls "the Self-Constituted". I argue that by understanding the relation of the Self-Constituted as a cause to its effect, what depends upon another, we can also understand the causal relation between god and the cosmos. The cosmos can be called divine because, via the cause/effect relation between them, god and the cosmos are both eternal; the cosmos is "a copy of the perpetuity of the eternal" because via its relation to god, the cosmos becomes what its cause is, and in this precise sense an effect "imitates" its cause.

scholarly journals The causal order on the ambient boundary

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (20) ◽  
pp. 1650122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignatios Antoniadis ◽  
Spiros Cotsakis ◽  
Kyriakos Papadopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Conformal Geometry ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Poincaré Metric ◽  
Global Topology

We analyze the causal structure of the ambient boundary, the conformal infinity of the ambient (Poincaré) metric. Using topological tools, we show that the only causal relation compatible with the global topology of the boundary spacetime is the horismos order. This has important consequences for the notion of time in the conformal geometry of the ambient boundary.

scholarly journals Causal Discovery in Radiographic Markers of Knee Osteoarthritis and Prediction for Knee Osteoarthritis Severity With Attention–Long Short-Term Memory

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanfei Wang ◽  
Lei You ◽  
Jacqueline Chyr ◽  
Lan Lan ◽  
Weiling Zhao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Knee Osteoarthritis ◽  
Joint Space Narrowing ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Joint Space ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Long Short Term Memory

The goal of this study is to build a prognostic model to predict the severity of radiographic knee osteoarthritis (KOA) and to identify long-term disease progression risk factors for early intervention and treatment. We designed a long short-term memory (LSTM) model with an attention mechanism to predict Kellgren/Lawrence (KL) grade for knee osteoarthritis patients. The attention scores reveal a time-associated impact of different variables on KL grades. We also employed a fast causal inference (FCI) algorithm to estimate the causal relation of key variables, which will aid in clinical interpretability. Based on the clinical information of current visits, we accurately predicted the KL grade of the patient's next visits with 90% accuracy. We found that joint space narrowing was a major contributor to KOA progression. Furthermore, our causal structure model indicated that knee alignments may lead to joint space narrowing, while symptoms (swelling, grinding, catching, and limited mobility) have little impact on KOA progression. This study evaluated a broad spectrum of potential risk factors from clinical data, questionnaires, and radiographic markers that are rarely considered in previous studies. Using our statistical model, providers are able to predict the risk of the future progression of KOA, which will provide a basis for selecting proper interventions, such as proceeding to joint arthroplasty for patients. Our causal model suggests that knee alignment should be considered in the primary treatment and KOA progression was independent of clinical symptoms.

Special, radical, failure of reduction in psychiatry

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Ross
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Network Models ◽  
Gambling Addiction ◽  
Brain Disorder ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Special Radical ◽  
Intentional Relationships

AbstractUse of network models to identify causal structure typically blocks reduction across the sciences. Entanglement of mental processes with environmental and intentional relationships, as Borsboom et al. argue, makes reduction of psychology to neuroscience particularly implausible. However, in psychiatry, a mental disorder can involve no brain disorder at all, even when the former crucially depends on aspects of brain structure. Gambling addiction constitutes an example.

Moving beyond the “LDL hypothesis”

VASA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 333-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Werner ◽  
Ulrich Laufs
Keyword(s):  
Ldl Cholesterol ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Low Density Lipoprotein ◽  
Density Lipoprotein ◽  
Clinical Trial Data ◽  
Randomised Clinical Trial ◽  
Trial Data ◽  
Low Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol ◽  
Genetic Studies ◽  
Statin Drug

Abstract. Summary: The term “LDL hypothesis” is frequently used to describe the association of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-cholesterol, LDL-C) and cardiovascular (CV) events. Recent data from genetic studies prove a causal relation between serum LDL-C and CV events. These data are in agreement with mechanistic molecular studies and epidemiology. New randomised clinical trial data show that LDL-C lowering with statins and a non-statin drug, ezetimibe, reduces CV events. We therefore believe that the “LDL-hypothesis” has been proven; the term appears to be outdated and should be replaced by “LDL causality”.

Blocking Is Sensitive to Causal Structure in 4-Year-Old and 8-Year-Old Children

2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 264-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Beckers ◽  
Uschi Van den Broeck ◽  
Marij Renne ◽  
Stefaan Vandorpe ◽  
Jan De Houwer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Associative Learning ◽  
Learning Theory ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Contingency Learning

Abstract. In a contingency learning task, 4-year-old and 8-year-old children had to predict the outcome displayed on the back of a card on the basis of cues presented on the front. The task was embedded in either a causal or a merely predictive scenario. Within this task, either a forward blocking or a backward blocking procedure was implemented. Blocking occurred in the causal but not in the predictive scenario. Moreover, blocking was affected by the scenario to the same extent in both age groups. The pattern of results was similar for forward and backward blocking. These results suggest that even young children are sensitive to the causal structure of a contingency learning task and that the occurrence of blocking in such a task defies an explanation in terms of associative learning theory.

Who is the dynamic duo? How infants learn about the identity of objects in a causal chain.

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Rakison ◽  
Gabriel Tobin Smith ◽  
Areej Ali
Keyword(s):  
Causal Chain
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