Consciousness, Agency, and the Will

Interdisciplinary Conference

University of Edinburgh, 28th/29th June 2008

Background and Rationale:

Our understanding of ourselves as conscious rational, responsible agents is questioned by recent work in the cognitive sciences. This conference will bring together leading scientists and philosophers to explore the close but puzzling relationship between the concepts of self-consciousness, agency and will. We will address such important questions as:

How do the different kinds of control humans exercise over their behaviour show up in our conscious lives?
What is the relation between these various control processes and the narratives we employ to make sense of our behaviour?
Do we need to feel that a behaviour is ours in order to know that it is ours?
Is the social character of cognition incompatible with the kind of reason-responsiveness we ordinarily take to be definitive of willed behaviour?

Programme

	Saturday 28th June	Sunday 29th June
9.00-10.40	Lars Hall (Lund) Speaking of Agency: Real-Time Speech Manipulation as a New Instrument for the Investigation of Verbal Intentions and Self-Monitoring	Tony Marcel (Herts, Cambridge) Restraint and Rationality
10.40-10.50	Coffee	Coffee
10.50-12.30	Richard Holton (MIT) Determinism, Self-Efficacy and Phenomenology of Free Will	Tim Bayne (Oxford) Agency as a marker of consciousness
12.30-13.45	Lunch	Lunch
13.45-15.25	Peter Gollwitzer (NYU) Transitions between conscious and nonconscious action control	Nico Frijda (Amsterdam) Emotion Regulation and Free Will
15.25-15.35	Coffee	Coffee
15.35-17.15	Joelle Proust (Institut Jean-Nicod) Mental agency and metacognition	Al Mele (Florida State) Vetoing and Awareness
17.15-17.25	Coffee	Coffee
17.25-19.05	Till Vierkant (Edinburgh) Is conscious action control agentive?	Ezequiel Morsella (SFSU/UCSF) Why Skeletal Muscles are "Voluntary" Muscles and the Primary Function of Consciousness
19.05-20.00	Poster Session and Wine reception

Information on submitting posters and registration for the conference is available here. For any other information contact the organiser: Till Vierkant (T.Vierkant (at) ed.ac.uk).

Back to the CONTACT Edinburgh Summer 2008 Conferences

This conference is organised by CONTACT Edinburgh and forms a part of the EUROCORES programme “Consciousness in a Natural and Cultural Context".