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Libertarianism, the view that human beings possess L-freedom, is considered untenable by many philosophers. This chapter shows that libertarianism is virtually entailed by the appropriate kind of indeterminacy and argues that indeterminacy increases or procures the appropriate nonrandomness. In making this argument, it assumes that some form of mind-brain materialism is true and that all causation is ordinary event causation. The chapter demonstrates that the question of whether libertarianism is true reduces to a straightforward empirical question about the causal histories of the neural events which are our torn decisions. Finally, it shows why TDW-indeterminism increases or procures authorship and control.

The various neural networks of the infant brain do not all become functional at the same rate. Investigating the relationships between emerging cognitive competences and maturational neural events can therefore be most instructive. In some respects, this approach to the neural basis of behaviour, although it involves some methodological difficulties, is similar to the neuropsychological approach to adult patients with brain lesions. The double dissociations between emerging behaviours and between neural maturational events correspond to the double dissociations that are being studied in adult patients. Neural events of other kinds, which may be very similar or even identical to those underlying adult learning processes, are probably involved in the mechanisms of cognitive development. Discovering how learning mechanisms and neural maturation co-operate and are correlated with age-related behavioural changes is the main goal of the developmental approach.

This chapter is primarily concerned with the cutaneous system, and three major classes of experiments are distinguished. In the first experiments to be discussed, two temporally dispersed stimuli occupy noticeably different spatial positions. These studies emphasize the role of central neural events in temporal interactions, since the stimuli activate different subsets of receptors and peripheral axons. The second class comprises experiments in which two successive stimuli occur at the same locus, thereby bringing into play peripheral as well as central factors. The third class considers n-stimulus generalizations of the preceding two classes of experiments. It is also shown here that psychophysical and electrophysiological studies of responses to successive stimuli bring out certain parallels between behavioral and physiological processes.

This book proposes a novel view of free will and links the problem of free will and determinism to a straightforward (and wide-open) empirical question about the causal histories of certain neural events. In this chapter, the problem of free will is formulated and a few brief remarks about libertarianism are provided, along with a discussion of compatibilism. The chapter then provides an outline of the book, which explores why the compatibilism and conceptual-analysis issues are metaphysically irrelevant, why the libertarian question reduces to the issue of indeterminacy, and why there are no good arguments for or against determinism (or any other thesis that would support or reject libertarianism).

This chapter outlines selected recent developments in psychophysics that may be relevant to problems of sensory organization. It is assumed in this discussion that psychophysics is concerned primarily with “terminal” activities, in that specified sensory inputs are related to specified behavioral outputs, without direct observation of the complexity of intermediate neural events. Psychophysical data are thus necessary, but not sufficient, for a complete model of sensory organization. From this point of view, psychophysics is examined to suggest crude alternative models or broad strategies of action for approaches to the sensory organization of the human observer. All references to the nervous system in this chapter refer to a conceptual nervous system that serves between the terminal activities of stimulus and response.

This chapter is concerned with the neurogenic factors that influence the evoked potentials of the mammalian cortex. The aim here is to survey some of the neurogenic factors that influence the electrical responses evoked in the neocortical gray matter by a brief volley of afferent impulses. Because of the importance and immediacy of the question, special emphasis has been given to heterosynaptic convergences of specific sensory and unspecific reticular impulses at the thalamic and cortical levels. Like the mono- and polysynaptic reflex responses of spinal moto-neurons to single electrical stimuli, the evoked potentials of the cerebral cortex are obviously the artificial product of experiments devised for analytical purposes. Yet the study of the factors of variation of these integrated cortical responses throws light on the physiological properties of the neuronal networks of the brain. By doing so, it represents an approach to the knowledge of the primary neural events, which, initiating an immensely complicated chain of neurophysiological processes, underlie perceptual integration.