Research from Maoz group featured on PBS NOVA

May 2023

A research project conducted by the Maoz group at Chapman University to study the sense of agency is featured on PBS NOVA in their science TV series – Your Brain: Who’s in Control?

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Winners of the Early-Career Joint-Talk Competition (Round 2)

Sep 2022

Congratulations to Drs. Antonio Ivano Triggiani and Nick Bryd on their proposal titled “A possible role of the posterior alpha as a railroad switcher between dorsal and ventral pathways“.

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Investigating Free Will: Why Neuroscience and Philosophy Need Each Other

Jun 2022

Interdisciplinary collaboration is hard, especially for divergent fields like neuroscience and philosophy. The language is often different, what counts as important to each field is also sometimes different, as are the common methods of publication and incentive structures. In this video, we explain why it is important and worthwhile nonetheless.

The 3rd Annual Meeting of the Neurophilosophy of Free Will Consortium

Mar 2022

The 3rd annual meeting of the Neurophilosophy of Free Will Consortium was held from March 11th to 14th, 2022 in Palm Springs, CA.

A short clip showing the highlights of the meeting is available here.

Uri Maoz's talk on The Garden

Feb 2022

Do you still have free will when your unconscious mind is in charge?

Have you ever arrived at your destination with no memory of the journey that got you there? Your unconscious mind has been at work. Does that mean we don’t always have free will over our actions and decisions? And what does that tell us about the brain?

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Consciousness and Free Will:
A Joint Neuroscientific-Philosophical Investigation

Consciousness and Free Will:
A Joint Neuroscientific-Philosophical Investigation

Congrats to the winners of the 2022 worldwide competition​

Feb 2022

Marie-Christine Nizzi,  Paulius Rimkevičius, and Guillaume Pech are the award recipients of the 2022 Worldwide Postdoc/Student Competition in Neurophilosophy of Free Will.

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A piece on IAI News by Walter, Uri and Liad

Jan 2022

Are you responsible for your unconscious self?

Our choices and actions are often influenced by factors we aren’t conscious of. That has lead some philosophers to claim that we can’t possibly be held morally accountable for those actions since we didn’t freely and consciously choose them. But that would mean that people acting on damaging unconscious biases, like a doctor prescribing less medicine to black patients than to white patients, can’t be held responsible for malpractice. Instead of letting people off the hook, we should hold people responsible and train them to recognize the ways in which unconscious influences can affect their decisions, argue Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Uri Maoz, and Liad Mudrik.

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Uri Maoz talking about project on The Free Will Show

Sept 2021

Uri Maoz’s guest piece on the role of neuroscience in the free will debate and how philosophers and neuroscientists can collaborate with each other.

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Uri Maoz talking about the nature of free will on Beyond Belief

Aug 2021

Do we have control over our actions or are we just automatons made of flesh? Uri Maoz joins Beyond Belief to explore what science has to say about the nature of Free Will.

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Tim Bayne on The Free Will Show

Aug 2021

Tim Bayne’s guest piece on the Libet Experiment and free will

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Building and Enhancing Resilience Through Free Will

Mar 2021

Guest piece on Psychology Today by Uri Maoz discussing how research on the neuroscience behind free will helps us cultivate resiliency.

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Congrats to the winners of the 2021 worldwide competition​

Feb 2021

Regan Bernhard and Kristina Krasich are the award recipients of the 2021 Worldwide Postdoc/Student Competition in Neurophilosophy of Free Will.

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Using Our Free Will to Become More Resilient

Feb 2021

An interview with Alfred Mele on how free will can help us and others.

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PhD student John (Jake) Gavenas wins Science of Purpose Ideas Challenge from the John Templeton Foundation

Dec 2020

Jake proposed a project on how to use deep reinforcement learning to decode intentions and decisions.

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Uri Maoz talking about the neurophilosophy of free will with Freethink

Nov 2020

Philosophers have been making the claim that free will is an illusion for hundreds of years. What does modern neuroscience have to say about it?

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Three PIs gave a talk on THE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS | TSC 2020

Sept 2020

Uri Maoz, Aaron Schurger and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong gave a talk titled THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN DECISION MAKING during The 2020 Science of Consciousness ONLINE Conference.

View the conference program.

The 1st Annual Meeting of the Neurophilosophy of Free Will Consortium

Jul 2020

The 1st Annual Meeting of the Neurophilosophy of Free Will Consortium took place virtually from July 1st to July 3rd, 2o2o. This meeting was originally scheduled to be hosted by the Sigtuna Foundation in Sweden, and was moved online due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recordings of the invited talks given by William Newsome and Chandra Sripada during the annual meeting can be found here.

Online Seminars in Neurophilosophy of Free Will

May 2020

We recently launched a series of online, interdisciplinary seminars related to the neurophilosophy of free will. Each seminar features a talk by a neuroscientist and a philosopher followed by a moderated Q&A.

The 1st seminar, titled “Sources and reasons: internal and external factors underlying freely-willed action”, was held on April 22nd, 2020. The speakers were Patrick Haggard from UCL and Richard Holton from Cambridge. It was moderated by Elisabeth Parés.

You can watch it here.

Congrats to the winners of the 2020 worldwide competition

Apr 2020

Silvia Seghezzi and Kristina Krasich are the award recipients of the 2020 Worldwide Postdoc/Student Competition in Neurophilosophy of Free Will.

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Hans Liljenström - Peak Experiences in a Consciousness Landscape

Nov 2019

Report on The Science of Consciousness Conference in Interlaken, Switzerland, 2019

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Aaron Schurger and the project in The Atlantic

Sep 2019

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

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5 Questions about "Neuroscience and Philosophy of Free Will"

Jul 2019

During the Second International Conference on Neuroscience and Free Will, we invited some of the conference attendees for an interview, during which we asked them five questions about neuroscience and philosophy of free will.

  1. What do you see as the biggest promise of the field of neuroscience of free will?
  2. What are the greatest challenges that you think this field faces?
  3. Please opine on how can an abstract notion like free will be probed experimentally.
  4. What are the advantages and challenges in collaborations between neuroscientists and philosophers when studying free will?
  5. On this note, do you think we have free will?

Interview highlights

Full interview

The 2nd International Conference on Neuroscience and Free Will

Mar 2019

The 2nd International Conference on Neuroscience and Free Will and the inaugural meeting of “Neurophilosophy of Free Will” project took place at Chapman University from March 14th to 17th, 2019.

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Philosophers and Neuroscientists Join Forces to Study Free Will

Mar 2019

Science Magazine article: Philosophers and neuroscientists join forces to see whether science can solve the mystery of free will.

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