Language-of-thought hypothesis: Wrong, but sometimes useful?

Quilty-Dunn et al. maintain that language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) is the best game in town. We counter that LoTH is merely one source of models - always wrong, sometimes useful. Their reasons for liking LoTH are compatible with the view that LoTH provides a sometimes pragmatically useful level of abstraction over processes and mechanisms that fail to fully live up to LoT requirements.

What is the intention to move and when does it occur?

In 1983 Benjamin Libet and colleagues published a paper apparently challenging the view that the conscious intention to move precedes the brain's preparation for movement. The experiment initiated debates about the nature of intention, the neurophysiology of movement, and philosophical and legal understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Here we review the concept of "conscious intention" and attempts to measure its timing. Scalp electroencephalographic activity prior to movement, the Bereitschaftspotential, clearly begins prior to the reported onset of conscious intent. However, the interpretation of this finding remains controversial. Numerous studies show that the Libet method for determining intent, W time, is not accurate and may be misleading. We conclude that intention has many different aspects, and although we now understand much more about how the brain makes movements, identifying the time of conscious intention is still elusive.

Can the law do without retributivism? Comments on Erin Kelly's The Limits of Blame.

Erin Kelly's The Limits of Blame presents a critique of our current overly punitive legal system and champions a system of criminal justice that does not traffic in moral blame and is free of retributivist elements. This commentary questions the viability of such a system, and ultimately suggests that there is not much distance between a more perfect retributivist system and the kind of more nuanced and humane system of criminal justice that Kelly envisions.

What Is the Readiness Potential?

The readiness potential (RP), a slow buildup of electrical potential recorded at the scalp using electroencephalography, has been associated with neural activity involved in movement preparation. It became famous thanks to Benjamin Libet (Brain 1983;106:623-642), who used the time difference between the RP and self-reported time of conscious intention to move to argue that we lack free will. The RP's informativeness about self-generated action and derivatively about free will has prompted continued research on this neural phenomenon. Here, we argue that recent advances in our understanding of the RP, including computational modeling of the phenomenon, call for a reassessment of its relevance for understanding volition and the philosophical problem of free will.

Neuroethics in the Shadow of a Pandemic.

Neuroethics under the BRAIN Initiative has been focused upon both the neuroethical implications of basic advances in neuroscience, as well as the ethics attending the development of ever more powerful tools to both understand the brain and treat dysfunction. It has focused on health and disease in the context of the pre-pandemic status quo, essentially divorced from issues like infectious disease and large-scale disruption of social and economic structures. The questions animating the neuroethics of the BRAIN Initiative, on first glance, seemingly fail to intersect with the primary concerns of a post-Covid world, but careful consideration shows that they of course do. After all, the brain's job is to model and respond to the pressures of our environment, and the environment of virtually all of humanity has changed in a dramatic way, unprecedented since the rise of modern neuroscience. Here we consider ways in which neuroethics work aligned with the BRAIN Initiative can inform our response to the Covid crisis, as well as ways in which the pandemic may shape future work in neuroethics. In particular we focus on neuroethics work on agency.

Rationalization and the status of folk psychology.

Cushman's theory has implications for the philosophical debate about the nature of folk psychological states, for it entails realism about propositional attitudes. I point out a tension within his view and suggest a different view upon which rationalization emerges as a consequence of the adaptiveness of mentalizing. This alternative avoids the strong metaphysical implications of Cushman's theory.

New NIH Regulations Say Most Basic Human Brain Research Is a Clinical Trial.

New NIH definitions classify virtually all human brain and behavioral research as clinical trials. The new definitions will change regulatory, reporting, and funding schemes for noninvasive studies such as neuroimaging. Resulting burdens threaten the viability of basic biobehavioral science research.

Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes.

An increase in brain activity known as the "readiness potential" (RP) can be seen over central scalp locations in the seconds leading up to a volitionally timed movement. This activity precedes awareness of the ensuing movement by as much as two seconds and has been hypothesized to reflect preconscious planning and/or preparation of the movement. Using a novel experimental design, we teased apart the relative contribution of motor-related and non-motor-related processes to the RP. The results of our experiment reveal that robust RPs occured in the absence of movement and that motor-related processes did not significantly modulate the RP. This suggests that the RP measured here is unlikely to reflect preconscious motor planning or preparation of an ensuing movement, and instead may reflect decision-related or anticipatory processes that are non-motoric in nature.

Agency and intervention.

Novel ways to intervene on brain function raise questions about agency and responsibility. Here, I discuss whether direct brain interventions, and in particular, deep brain stimulation, pose a threat to agency in individual cases, or to our general conceptualization of what it is to be a responsible agent. While I do not currently see evidence that these interventions constitute a global challenge to our concept of agency, they do have the potential to diminish agency in individuals. I consider whether the lack of evidence for a global challenge ratifies our folk conceptions, or is a necessary consequence of them. In closing, I propose that our theoretical understanding of agency and our therapeutic approaches could be improved with a more nuanced, multidimensional view of agency.

Neuroimages in court: less biasing than feared.

Neuroscience is increasingly poised to play a role in legal proceedings. One persistent concern, however, is the intuition that brain images may bias, mislead, or confuse jurors. Initially, empirical research seemed to support this intuition. New findings contradict those expectations, prompting a rethinking of the 'threat' of neuroscience in the courtroom.

How does the neuroscience of decision making bear on our understanding of moral responsibility and free will?

This review considers recent work in neuroscience that has been thought to challenge views of free will. I argue that these experiments do little to directly undermine the belief that we have free will. However, evidence for mechanism and automatic behaviors may cause us to rethink some commonsensical notions of what is required for acting freely.

The neurobiology of decision-making and responsibility: reconciling mechanism and mindedness.

This essay reviews recent developments in neurobiology which are beginning to expose the mechanisms that underlie some elements of decision-making that bear on attributions of responsibility. These "elements" have been mainly studied in simple perceptual decision tasks, which are performed similarly by humans and non-human primates. Here we consider the role of neural noise, and suggest that thinking about the role of noise can shift the focus of discussions of randomness in decision-making away from its role in enabling alternate possibilities and toward a potential grounding role for responsibility.

How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition?

Although there is no clear concept of volition or the will, we do have intuitive ideas that characterize the will, agency, and voluntary behavior. Here I review results from a number of strands of neuroscientific research that bear upon our intuitive notions of the will. These neuroscientific results provide some insight into the neural circuits mediating behaviors that we identify as related to will and volition. Although some researchers contend that neuroscience will undermine our views about free will, to date no results have succeeded in fundamentally disrupting our common sense beliefs. Still, the picture emerging from neuroscience does raise new questions, and ultimately may put pressure on some intuitive notions about what is necessary for free will.