DISTRIBUTED COGNITION AND THE WILL - INDIVIDUAL VOLITION AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

Recent scientific findings about human decision making would seem to threaten the traditional concept of the individual conscious will. The will is threatened from below by the discovery that our apparently spontaneous actions are actually controlled and initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness, and from above by the recognition that we adapt our actions according to social dynamics of which we are seldom aware. In Distributed Cognition and the Will, leading philosophers and behavioral scientists consider how much, if anything, of the traditional concept of the individual conscious will survives these discoveries, and they assess the implications for our sense of freedom and responsibility.The contributors all take scienceseriously, and they are inspired by the idea that apparent threats to the cogency of the idea of will might instead become the basis of its reemergence as a scientific subject. They consider macro-scale issues of society and culture, the micro-scaledynamics of the mind/brain, and connections between macro-scale and micro-scale phenomena in the self-guidance and self-regulation of personal behavior.