The Neural Basis of Free Will

Continuing this post, his book The Neural Basis of Free Will is available here and virus free. Some excerpts:

“I argue that consciousness plays a key role in mental causation by providing a common format for endogenous attentional and other executive operations that permit the assessment of possible behaviors and thoughts against highest-level criteria for successful attainment of goals and fulfillment of desires” (237).

“It is the deliberative and volitional manipulation of contents of working memory via endogenous attentional operations that offers the primary causal role of consciousness and the primary domain of free will, regardless of whether or not such operations are associated with conscious feelings of willing or agency. Free will is not limited to the kinds of decisions that are reached by tracking or playing things out endogenously in working memory. Free will also includes the creative ability to imagine, regardless of whether any physical act follows from that which has been imagined” (238).

“It is important to understand that even seemingly high-level, executive processes, such as those involved in shifting attention, must involve unconscious and preconscious processes. […] There is a hierarchy of types of attention. From the most primitive to the most complex these are: (i) retinotopically location-based salience specification, (ii) object-based salience specification (also at this level would be feature-based attention), (iii) exogenous or automatic and stimulus-driven object tracking, and (iv) endogenous or volitional object tracking” (200 – 01).

"Jiang et al. (2006)have provided evidence that (i) computations of salience occur at locations unconsciously, and that these in turn influence the conscious placement of attention. In addition, others have recently shown (Chou &Yeh, 2012 ) that attention in the sense of (ii) appears to be allocated to objects even in the absence of any awareness of the objects that have been attended. Data collected in my lab suggest that (iii) unconscious attentional allocation to an object does not trigger automatic, unconscious tracking of that object. Finally, (iv) endogenous attentional selection, tracking, and inhibition of nontracked items over seconds is quintessentially a conscious set of operations that cannot take place unconsciously, probably because unconscious operators lack full access to working memory. Volitional attentional allocation entails the specification of voluntary criteria to be met by what will be attended. These criteria are maintained in working memory. An executive system can set the criterion that the color of a stimulus will be attended, rather than the form, and then switch criteria and attend to the form. This process is not driven by the stimulus, because the stimulus can remain constant while first its color and then its form is attended. This flexible remapping of criteria for subsequent endogenous attentional allocation appears to be a conscious process, because only conscious processes have access to the contents of working memory. In short, unconscious processing, including unconscious attentional processing, appears to be limited to automatic and rather ballistic processes that are driven by the stimulus, whereas conscious processing affords the possibility of flexible remapping of the criteria that will determine immediately future responses, such as where endogenous attention will next be allocated” (202 – 03).