An overview of Tse's neural basis of free will

This link provides Tse giving an overview of his book by the above name. It's a good summary and primer for this research on downward, criterial causation. The abstract follows with Tse given more detailed description at the link.

"In my book I use recent developments in neuroscience to show how volitional mental events can be causal within a physicalist paradigm. (1) I begin by attacking the logic of Jaegwon Kim’s exclusion argument, according to which mental information cannot be causal of physical events. I argue that the exclusion argument falls apart if indeterminism is the case. If I am right, I must still build an account of how mental events are causal in the brain. To that end I take as my foundation (2) a new understanding of the neural code that emphasizes rapid synaptic resetting over the traditional emphasis on neural spiking. (3) Such a neural code is an instance of ‘criterial causation,’ which requires modifying standard interventionist conceptions of causation. A synaptic reweighting neural code provides (4) a physical mechanism that accomplishes downward informational causation, (5) a middle path between determinism and randomness, and (6) a way for mind/brain events to turn out otherwise. This ‘synaptic neural code’ allows a constrained form of randomness parameterized by information realized in and set in synaptic weights, which in turn allows physical/informational criteria to be met in multiple possible ways when combined with an account of how randomness in the synapse is amplified to the level of randomness in spike timing. This new view of the neural code also provides (7) a way out of self-causation arguments against the possibility of mental causation. It leads to (8) an emphasis on deliberation and voluntary attentional manipulation as the core of volitional mental causation rather than, say, the correlates of unconscious premotor computations seen in Libet’s readiness potentials. And this new view of the neural code leads to (9) a new theory of the neural correlates of qualia as the ‘precompiled’ informational format that can be manipulated by voluntary attention, which gives qualia a causal role within a physicalist paradigm. I elaborate each of these ideas in turn below."