(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2003). A good recent review is Patrick Haggard, «Human Volition: Towards a Neuroscience of Will,»
Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9:934–946 (2008).
12. It is true that indeterminacy exists on the subatomic level, but the mind cannot somehow sneak into the physical world through indeterminate quantum processes. (Nor is chance what we want: Philosophically, randomness in the brain would be just as bad as full determination.) Quantum theories of free will are empirically false as well: There may be different kinds of brains somewhere else in the universe, but in human brains the firing of neurons and so on take place on the macroscopic scale. For such huge objects as nerve cells at 37°C body temperature, quantum events simply play no role.
13. The voluntary inhibition of voluntary actions seems to be mostly determined by unconscious events in the anterior median cortex. See M. Brass & P. Haggard, «To Do or Not To Do: The Neural Signature of SelfControl,» J. Neurosci. 27:9141–9145. (2007).
14. See T. Metzinger, «The Forbidden Fruit Intuition,» The Edge Annual Question-2006: What Is Your Dangerous Idea? www.edge.org/q2006/ q06_7.htmlfflmetzinger. Reprinted in J. Brockman, ed., What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Todays's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007), 153–155.
15. It would not be a new thought in the history of philosophy. Vasubandhu, a fourth-century Buddhist teacher and one of the most important figures in the development of Mahayana Buddhism in India, reports: Buddha has spoken thus: 'O, Brethren! actions do exist, and also their consequences (merit and demerit), but the person that acts does not. There is no one to cast away this set of elements and no one to assume a new set of them. (There exists no individual), it is only a conventional name given to (a set) of elements.' Appendix to the VIIIth chapter of Vasubandhu's Abhidarmakoga, § 9: 100.b.7; quoted after T. Stcherbatsky, «Th Soul Thory of the Buddhists,» Bull. Acad. Sci. Russ. 845 (1919).
CHAPTER 5
1. The second question, of course, is the one Descartes asked in the first Meditation, when he realized that everything he had ever believed to be certain-including his impression of sitting by the fire in his winter coat and closely inspecting the piece of paper in his hands-could equally well have occurred in a dream. What makes the problem of dream skepticism so intractable is that even in a «best-case scenario» of sensory perception, there is apparently no reliable, fool-proof method of distinguishing wakefulness and dreaming. According to dream skepticism, literally all of our experiences of waking life could be nothing more than a dream, and we are unable, even in principle, ever to decide this question with certainty. For a detailed discussion of the problem of dream skepticism, see, for instance, Barry Stroud,