This book has both a negative aim and a positive aim. The negative aim is to show that some recent influential scientific claims about free will, consciousness, and action‐production are not warranted by the data. These claims (by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and others) include the following: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100‐millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all you can freely do in that window is veto conscious intentions that you were about to execute; intentions and their physical correlates play no role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. The positive aim is to show that there is powerful empirical support for the thesis that there are effective conscious decisions and intentions to act.
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