Free will is the apparent ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been the metaphysical constraint of determinism. The opposing positions within that debate are ''metaphysical libertarianism'', the claim that determinism is false and thus that free will exists (or is at least possible); and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus that free will does not exist.

Both of these positions, which agree that causal determination is the relevant factor in the question of free will, are classed as ''incompatibilists''. Those who deny that determinism is relevant are classified as ''compatibilists'', and offer various alternative explanations of what constraints are relevant, such as physical constraints (e.g. chains or imprisonment), social constraints (e.g. threat of punishment or censure), or psychological constraints (e.g. compulsions or phobias).

The principle of free will has religious, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions.

In western philosophy

Incompatibilism

Incompatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are logically incompatible, and that the major question regarding whether or not people have free will is thus whether or not their actions are determined. "Hard determinists", such as Martin Luther and d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true. Another view is that of hard incompatibilists, which state that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism. This view is defended by Derk Pereboom.

Determinism is a broad term with a variety of meanings. Corresponding to each of these different meanings, there arises a different problem of free will. Causal determinism states that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature. Such determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Imagine an entity that knows all facts about the past and the present, and knows all natural laws that govern the universe. If the laws of nature were determinate, then such an entity would be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future, down to the smallest detail. Logical determinism is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present or future, are either true or false. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how choices can be free, given that what one does in the future is already determined as true or false in the present. Theological determinism is the idea that there is a god who determines all that humans will do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience or by decreeing their actions in advance. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free if there is a being who has determined them for us in advance.

Biological determinism is the idea that all behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic endowment and our biochemical makeup, the latter of which is affected by both genes and environment.

Other forms of determinism include: cultural determinism and psychological determinism. Combinations and syntheses of determinist theses, e.g. bio-environmental determinism, are even more common.

Traditional arguments for incompatibilism are based on an "intuition pump": if a person is like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot, then people must not have free will. This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it remains possible and plausible that we are different from such objects in important ways.

Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain." Incompatibilism is key to the idealist theory of free will. Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that free will means that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. He must be a ''causa sui'', in the traditional phrase. To be responsible for one's choices is to be the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if man has free will, then man is the ultimate cause of his actions. If determinism is true, then all of man's choices are caused by events and facts outside his control. So, if everything man does is caused by events and facts outside his control, then he cannot be the ultimate cause of his actions. Therefore, he cannot have free will. This argument has also been challenged by various compatibilist philosophers.

A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no control over these matters, we also can have no control over the ''consequences'' of them. Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free will. This is called the ''consequence argument''. Peter van Inwagen remarks that C.D. Broad had a version of the consequence argument as early as the 1930s.

The difficulty of this argument for compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature or changed the past. Hence, compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider". David Lewis suggests that compatibilists are only committed to the ability to do something otherwise if ''different circumstances'' had actually obtained in the past.

Metaphysical libertarianism

Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the individual to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that a non-physical mind overrides physical causality, so that physical events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation. This approach is allied to mind-body dualism in philosophy. According to this view, the world is not considered to be closed under physics: extraphysical factors can influence decision-making. As a matter of free belief, an extra-physical will may be decided to exist. Depending on the way the decision turns out, such views may or may not accept an independent soul said to make decisions and override physical causality.

Explanations of libertarianism that do not involve dispensing with physicalism require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior – theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Physical determinism, under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" believed to be necessary by libertarians.

Free volition is regarded as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of indeterminism. An example of this kind of approach has been developed by Robert Kane, where he hypothesises that,

"In each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposes—a hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will which has to be overcome by effort".

Although at the time C. S. Lewis wrote ''Miracles'', Quantum Mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, he stated the logical possibility that if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality.

Free will as a mix of chance and determination

In 1884 William James described a two-stage model of free will: in the first stage the mind develops random alternative possibilities for action, and in the second an adequately determined will selects one option. A number of other thinkers have since refined this idea, including Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, Alfred Mele, and Martin Heisenberg.

Each of these models tries to reconcile libertarian free will with the existence of irreducible chance (today in the form of quantum indeterminacy), which threatens to make an agent's decision random, thus denying the control needed for responsibility.

If a single event is caused by chance, then ''logically'' indeterminism would be "true." For centuries, philosophers have said this would undermine the very possibility of certain knowledge. Some go to the extreme of saying that real chance would make the whole state of the world totally independent of any earlier states.

The Stoic Chrysippus said that a single uncaused cause could destroy the universe (cosmos),

"Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected. For nothing exists or has come into being in the cosmos without a cause. The universe will be disrupted and disintegrate into pieces and cease to be a unity functioning as a single system, if any uncaused movement is introduced into it."

James said most philosophers have an "antipathy to chance." His contemporary John Fiske described the absurd decisions that would be made if chance were real,

"If volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot infer from them the character of the antecedent states of feeling. .. . The mother may strangle her first-born child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces his lately-finished statue, in the presence of no other feelings than those which before led them to cherish, to hoard, and to create."

In modern times, J. J. C. Smart has described the problem of admitting indeterminism,

"Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us: I would feel that my freedom was impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to leap into the garden and eat a slug."

The challenge for two-stage models is to admit some indeterminism but not permit it to produce random actions, as determinists fear. And of course a model must limit determinism but not eliminate it as some libertarians think necessary.

Two-stage models limit the contribution of random chance to the ''generation of alternative possibilities'' for action. But note that, in recent years, compatibilist analytic philosophers following Harry Frankfurt have denied the existence of alternative possibilities. They develop "Frankfurt-type examples" (thought experiments) in which they argue an agent is free even though no alternative possibilities exist, or the agent is prevented at the last moment by neuroscientific demons from "doing otherwise."

Compatibilism

Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. To illustrate their standpoint, compatibilists point to cases of someone's free will being denied, through rape, murder, theft, or other examples of ones own will being forced upon another. In these cases, free will is lacking not because the past is determining the future, but because the aggressor is choosing, through their own actions the victim's desires. Compatibilists' arguments are that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' wills are the result of their own desires and are not overridden by some external force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.

Free will as lack of physical restraint

Most "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person acts on their own only when the person wanted to do the act and the person could have done otherwise, ''if the person had decided to''. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to each individual and not to some abstract notion of ''will'', asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do." In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains".

Free will as sociopolitical liberty

Another type of compatibilist might equate "free will" with what other philosophers call liberty. This can include some or all of the freedoms of negative liberty and positive liberty.

Free will as a psychological state

"Modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue that there are cases where a coerced agent's choices are still free because such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires. Frankfurt, in particular, argues for a version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The idea is that an individual can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevails over the others. A person's will is to be identified with their effective first-order desire, i.e., the one that they act on. So, for example, there are "wanton addicts", "unwilling addicts" and "willing addicts." All three groups may have the conflicting first-order desires to want to take the drug to which they are addicted and to not want to take it.

The first group, "wanton addicts", have no second-order desire not to take the drug. The second group, "unwilling addicts", have a second-order desire not to take the drug, while the third group, "willing addicts", have a second-order desire to take it. According to Frankfurt, the members of the first group are to be considered devoid of will and therefore no longer persons. The members of the second group freely desire not to take the drug, but their will is overcome by the addiction. Finally, the members of the third group willingly take the drug to which they are addicted. Frankfurt's theory can ramify to any number of levels. Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that conflicts will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference. Others argue that Frankfurt offers no adequate explanation of how the various levels in the hierarchy mesh together.

Free will as unpredictability

In ''Elbow Room'', Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will, which he further elaborated in the book ''Freedom Evolves''. The basic reasoning is that, if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future.

According to Dennett, because individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist. Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance. More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.

In the philosophy of decision theory, a fundamental question is: From the standpoint of statistical outcomes, to what extent do the choices of a conscious being have the ability to influence the future? Newcomb's paradox and other philosophical problems pose questions about free will and predictable outcomes of choices.

Free will as a pragmatically useful concept

William James' views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific grounds, nor did his own introspections support it. Moreover, he did not accept incompatibilism as formulated below; he did not believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a prerequisite of moral responsibility. In his work ''Pragmatism'', he wrote that "instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. He did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief"—it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may, through individuals' actions, become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism—the idea that progress is a real concept leading to improvement in the world.

Other views

Some philosophers' views are difficult to categorize as either compatibilist or incompatibilist, hard determinist or libertarian. John Locke, for example, denied that the phrase "free will" made any sense (compare with theological noncognitivism, a similar stance on the existence of God). He also took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant. He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to ''postpone'' a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice: "...the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose". Similarly, David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He also suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a ''velleity''), which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize that they were necessary and determined all along.

Arthur Schopenhauer put the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in these terms:

Everyone believes himself ''a priori'' to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life. ... But ''a posteriori'', through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns...

In his ''On the Freedom of the Will'', Schopenhauer stated, "You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can ''will'' only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."

Rudolf Steiner, who collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work, wrote The Philosophy of Freedom, which focuses on the problem of free will. Steiner (1861–1925) initially divides this into the two aspects of freedom: freedom of thought and freedom of action. He argues that inner freedom is achieved when we bridge the gap between our sensory impressions, which reflect the outer appearance of the world, and our thoughts, which give us access to the inner nature of the world. Acknowledging the many influences on our choice, he points to the impact of our becoming aware of just these determinants. Outer freedom is attained by permeating our deeds with ''moral imagination''. Steiner aims to show that these two aspects of inner and outer freedom are integral to one another, and that true freedom is only achieved when they are united.

The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson agrees with Locke that the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the problem. He argues that the notion of free will leads to an infinite regress and is therefore senseless. According to Strawson, if one is responsible for what one does in a given situation, then one must be responsible for the way one is in certain mental respects. But it is impossible for one to be responsible for the way one is in any respect. This is because to be responsible in some situation "S", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S⁻¹". To be responsible for the way one was at "S⁻¹", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S⁻²", and so on. At some point in the chain, there must have been an act of origination of a new causal chain. But this is impossible. Man cannot create himself or his mental states ''ex nihilo''. This argument entails that free will itself is absurd, but not that it is incompatible with determinism. Strawson calls his own view "pessimism" but it can be classified as hard incompatibilism.

Ted Honderich holds the view that "determinism is true, compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false" and the real problem lies elsewhere. Honderich maintains that determinism is true because quantum phenomena are not events or things that can be located in space and time, but are abstract entities. Further, even if they were micro-level events, they do not seem to have any relevance to how the world is at the macroscopic level. He maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if determinism is true, incompatibilists have not, and cannot, provide an adequate account of origination. He rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental notion of freedom. There are really two notions of freedom: voluntary action and origination. Both notions are required to explain freedom of will and responsibility. Both determinism and indeterminism are threats to such freedom. To abandon these notions of freedom would be to abandon moral responsibility. On the one side, we have our intuitions; on the other, the scientific facts. The "new" problem is how to resolve this conflict.

In science

Physics

Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Current physical theories cannot resolve the question of whether determinism is true of the world, being very far from a potential Theory of Everything, and open to many different interpretations.

Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, one may still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to microscopic phenomena. This is not always the case: many macroscopic phenomena are based on quantum effects. For instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows for the traditional idea of free will (based on a perception of free will — see Experimental Psychology below for distinction). If a person's action is the result of complete quantum randomness, however, this in itself would mean that such traditional free will does not exist (because the action was not controllable by the physical being who claims to possess the free will).

Under the assumption of physicalism it has been argued that the laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles, regardless of whether or not free will exists. Physicist Steven Hawking describes such ideas in his book ''The Grand Design''. Furthermore, according to Hawking, these findings from quantum mechanics suggest that humans are sorts of complicated biological machines; although our behavior is impossible to predict perfectly in practice, "free will is just an illusion." In other words, he thinks that only compatibilistic (deterministic) free will is possible based on the data.

Erwin Schrödinger, a nobel laureate in physics and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, came to a different conclusion than Hawking. In his essay titled "What is Life?" he concludes "...'I' -am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." He explains this position on free will by appealing to a notion of self that is emergent from the entire collection of atoms in his body, along with certain convictions of conscious experience. However, he also qualifies the conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical implications." Contrasting the views of Hawking and Schrödinger, it is clear that even among eminent physicists there is not consensus regarding free will.

Genetics

Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior. The view of many researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of ''explanation'' with ''exculpation''". Responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, as long as behavior responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.

Neuroscience

It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making process at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential caused and preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W time.

Libet found that the ''unconscious'' brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move.

More studies have since been conducted, including some that try to:

support Libet's original findings

suggest that the cancelling or "veto" of an action may first arise subconsciously as well

explain the underlying brain structures involved

suggest models that explain the relationship between conscious intention and action

Neurology and psychiatry

There are several brain-related conditions in which an individual's actions are not felt to be entirely under his or her control. Although the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuroscientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct our experience of free will.

For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or ''"unvoluntary",'' because they are not strictly ''involuntary'': they may be experienced as a ''voluntary'' response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed. People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.

In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviors without the intention of the subject. The affected limb effectively demonstrates 'a will of its own.' The sense of agency does not emerge in conjunction with the overt appearance of the purposeful act even though the sense of ownership in relationship to the body part is maintained. This phenomenon corresponds with an impairment in the premotor mechanism manifested temporally by the appearance of the Bereitschaftspotential (see section on the Neuroscience of Free Will above) recordable on the scalp several hundred milliseconds before the overt appearance of a spontaneous willed movement. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging with specialized multivariate analyses to study the temporal dimension in the activation of the cortical network associated with voluntary movement in human subjects, an anterior-to-posterior sequential activation process beginning in the supplementary motor area on the medial surface of the frontal lobe and progressing to the primary motor cortex and then to parietal cortex has been observed. The sense of agency thus appears to normally emerge in conjunction with this orderly sequential network activation incorporating premotor association cortices together with primary motor cortex. In particular, the supplementary motor complex on the medial surface of the frontal lobe appears to activate prior to primary motor cortex presumably in associated with a preparatory pre-movement process. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, alien movements were characterized by a relatively isolated activation of the primary motor cortex contralateral to the alien hand, while voluntary movements of the same body part included the concomitant activation of motor association cortex associated with the premotor process. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a ''will of its own,'' together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original). This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will.

Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.

Determinism and emergent behavior

In some generative philosophies of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist. However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behavior from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist. In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so will be simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.

As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behavior. Yet, if ''all'' these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable. Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy.

Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, ''The Illusion of Conscious Will'' Wegner summarizes what he believes is empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner summarizes some empirical evidence that may suggest that the perception of conscious control is open to modification (or even manipulation). Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met: # The first event immediately precedes the second event, and # The first event is consistent with having caused the second event. For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs after the tree falls down (i.e., the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion, the person hears the ring of a telephone (i.e., the second requirement is not met), then that person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down.

Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference. Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people will often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have in fact not caused, and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors that they did cause. For instance, priming subjects with information about an effect increases the probability that a person falsely believes to be the cause of it. The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will (which he says might be more accurately labelled as 'the emotion of authorship') is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors, but is inferred from various cues through an intricate mental process, ''authorship processing''. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, both psychologists and philosophers have criticized Wegner's theories. Wegner has also asserted that his work informs only of the mechanism for ''perceptions'' of control, not for control itself.

Emily Pronin has argued that the subjective experience of free will is supported by the introspection illusion. This is the tendency for people to trust the reliability of their own introspections while distrusting the introspections of other people. The theory implies that people will more readily attribute free will to themselves rather than others. This prediction has been confirmed by three of Pronin and Kugler's experiments. When college students were asked about personal decisions in their own and their roommate's lives, they regarded their own choices as less predictable. Staff at a restaurant described their co-workers' lives as more determined (having fewer future possibilities) than their own lives. When weighing up the influence of different factors on behavior, students gave desires and intentions the strongest weight for their own behavior, but rated personality traits as most predictive of other people.

Psychologists have shown that reducing a person's belief in free will makes them less helpful and more aggressive. This may occur because the subject loses a sense of Self-efficacy.

In Eastern philosophy

In Hindu philosophy

The six orthodox (astika) schools of thought in Hindu philosophy do not agree with each other entirely on the question of free will. For the Samkhya, for instance, matter is without any freedom, and soul lacks any ability to control the unfolding of matter. The only real freedom (''kaivalya'') consists in realizing the ultimate separateness of matter and self. For the Yoga school, only Ishvara is truly free, and its freedom is also distinct from all feelings, thoughts, actions, or wills, and is thus not at all a freedom of will. The metaphysics of the Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools strongly suggest a belief in determinism, but do not seem to make explicit claims about determinism or free will.

A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition. However, the preceding quote has often been misinterpreted as Vivekananda implying that everything is predetermined. What Vivekananda actually meant by lack of free will was that the will was not "free" because it was heavily influenced by the law of cause and effect—"The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something behind the will which is free." Vivekananda never said things were absolutely determined and placed emphasis on the power of conscious choice to alter one's past karma: "It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But it is the strong man who stands up and says I will make my own fate."

Similarly, Vivekananda's teacher Ramakrishna Paramahansa, using an analogy said that man is like a cow tied to a pole with a rope—the karmic debts and human nature bind him and the amount of free will he has is analogous to the amount of freedom the rope allows; as one progresses spiritually, the rope becomes longer.

Mimamsa, Vedanta, and the more theistic versions of Hinduism such as Shaivism and Vaishnavism, have often emphasized the importance of free will. The doctrine of karma requires both that we pay for our actions in the past, and that our actions in the present be free enough to allow us to deserve the future reward or punishment that we will receive for our present actions.

In Buddhist philosophy

Buddhism accepts both freedom and determinism (or something similar to it), but rejects the idea of an agent, and thus the idea that freedom is a free will belonging to an agent. According to the Buddha, "There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that passes out from one set of momentary elements into another one, except the [connection] of those elements." Buddhists believe in neither absolute free will, nor determinism. It preaches a middle doctrine, named ''pratitya-samutpada'' in Sanskrit, which is often translated as "inter-dependent arising". It is part of the theory of karma in Buddhism. The concept of karma in Buddhism is different from the notion of karma in Hinduism. In Buddhism, the idea of karma is much less deterministic. The Buddhist notion of karma is primarily focused on the cause and effect of moral actions in this life, while in Hinduism the concept of karma is more often connected with determining one's destiny in future lives.

In Buddhism it is taught that the idea of absolute freedom of choice (i.e. that any human being could be completely free to make any choice) is foolish, because it denies the reality of one's physical needs and circumstances. Equally incorrect is the idea that we have no choice in life or that our lives are pre-determined. To deny freedom would be to deny the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress (through our capacity to freely choose compassionate action). ''Pubbekatahetuvada'', the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous actions, is considered a wrong view according to Buddhist doctrines. Because Buddhists also reject agenthood, the traditional compatibilist strategies are closed to them as well. Instead, the Buddhist philosophical strategy is to examine the metaphysics of causality. Ancient India had many heated arguments about the nature of causality with Jains, Nyayists, Samkhyists, Cārvākans, and Buddhists all taking slightly different lines. In many ways, the Buddhist position is closer to a theory of "conditionality" than a theory of "causality", especially as it is expounded by Nagarjuna in the ''Mūlamadhyamakakārikā''.

In other theology

The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will, particularly in Reformed circles. For if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, the status of choices as free is called into question. If God had timelessly true knowledge about one's choices, this would seem to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, then it seems that it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths—true propositions about the future.

However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient. Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher known for his homocentrism, in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that non-human animals lack free will.

Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word ''neshama'' (from the Hebrew root ''n.sh.m.'' or .נ.ש.מ meaning "breath"), but the ability to make a free choice is through ''Yechida'' (from Hebrew word "yachid", יחיד, singular), the part of the soul that is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected).

In Islam the theological issue is not usually how to reconcile free will with God's foreknowledge, but with God's ''jabr'', or divine commanding power. al-Ash'ari developed an "acquisition" or "dual-agency" form of compatibilism, in which human free will and divine ''jabr'' were both asserted, and which became a cornerstone of the dominant Ash'ari position. In Shia Islam, Ash'aris understanding of a higher balance toward predestination is challenged by most theologians. Free will, according to Islamic doctrine is the main factor for man's accountability in his/her actions throughout life. All actions taken by man's free will are said to be counted on the Day of Judgement because they are his/her own and not God's.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated from divine goodness. As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free." Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent.

Effects of the belief itself

Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed literature on the psychological effects of a belief (or disbelief) in free will. The first part of their analysis (which is all that we are concerned with here) was not meant to discover which types of free will actually exist. The researchers instead sought to identify what other people believe, how many people believed it, and the effects of those beliefs. Baumeister found that most people tend to believe in a sort of "naive compatibilistic free will".

Their findings, we will see, are that provoking disbelief in free will seems to cause various negative effects. The authors conclude that it is belief in determinism that causes those negative effects. This may not be a very justified conclusion, however. Provoking disbelief in free will is unlikely to simultaneously cause a better understanding of compatibilistic (deterministic) free will. Instead, provoking disbelief in free will probably causes a belief in simple fatalism. Unlike an accurate understanding of compatibilistic free will ("my choices have causes, and also effects - I affect my future"), a belief in fatalism ("my choices have causes, but no effects - I am powerless") threatens people's sense of self-efficacy. Fatalism should not be confused with determinism, and yet even philosophers occasionally confuse the two. It thus likely that the negative consequences below can be accounted for by participants developing a belief in ''fatalism'' as a result the sorts of experiments that attack belief in types of free will.

That having been said, after being influenced to disbelieve in free will, participants lie, cheated, and stole more. For example, after participants read an article disproving free will, they were more likely to lie about their performance on a test where they would be rewarded with cash. Provoking a rejection of free will has also been associate with increased agression and less helpful behaviour as well as mindless conformity Disbelief in free will can even cause people to feel less guilt about transgressions against others. Baumeister and colleagues also note that volunteers disbelieving in free will are less capable of counterfactual thinking. This is worrying because counterfactual thinking ("If I had done this differently...") is an important part of learning from one's choices, including those that harmed others. Again, this cannot be taken to mean that belief in determinism is to blame; these are the results we would expect from increasing people's belief in fatalism.

People consider acts more "free" when they involved opposing external forces, planning, or random actions. Intriguingly, the last behaviour, "random" actions, may not be possible; when participants attempt to perform tasks in a random manner (such as generating random numbers), their behaviour betrays many patterns.

See also

Argument from free will (the argument that free will and an omniscient God are incompatible)

Autonomy

Best of all possible worlds

Buridan's ass

Dilemma of determinism

Existentialism

Fatalism

Free will in antiquity

Free will in theology

Free will theorem

Freethought

Indeterminism

Morality

Philosophical zombie

Prevenient grace

Ilya Prigogine and the ''End of Certainty''.

Problem of evil (for which human free will is offered as one explanation)

Problem of future contingents

Responsibility assumption

Shoehorn

Voluntarism (metaphysics)

References

Further reading

Bischof, Michael H. (2004). ''Kann ein Konzept der Willensfreiheit auf das Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten verzichten? Harry G. Frankfurts Kritik am Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten (PAP).'' In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung (ZphF), Heft 4.

Dennett, Daniel C. (2003). ''Freedom Evolves''. New York: Viking Press ISBN 0-670-03186-0

Epstein J.M. (1999). ''Agent Based Models and Generative Social Science.'' Complexity, IV (5).

Gazzaniga, M. & Steven, M.S. (2004) Free Will in the 21st Century: A Discussion of Neuroscience and Law, in Garland, B. (ed.) ''Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind and the Scales of Justice'', New York: Dana Press, ISBN 1-932594-04-3, pp51–70.

Goodenough, O.R. (2004) Responsibility and punishment, ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences'' (Special Issue: Law and the Brain), 359, 1805–1809.

Harnad, Stevan (2009) The Explanatory Gap ''PhilPapers''

Hofstadter, Douglas. (2007) ''I Am A Strange Loop.'' Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03078-1

Kane, Robert (1998). ''The Significance of Free Will.'' New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-512656-4

Lawhead, William F. (2005). ''The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach.'' McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages ISBN 0-07-296355-7.

Libet, Benjamin; Anthony Freeman; and Keith Sutherland, eds. (1999). ''The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will''. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Collected essays by scientists and philosophers.

Morris, Tom ''Philosophy for Dummies.'' IDG Books ISBN 0-7645-5153-1.

Muhm, Myriam (2004). Abolito il libero arbitrio — Colloquio con Wolf Singer. ''L'Espresso'' 19.08.2004 larchivio.org

Nowak A., Vallacher R.R., Tesser A., Borkowski W. (2000). Society of Self: The emergence of collective properties in self-structure. ''Psychological Review.'' 107

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1839). ''On the Freedom of the Will.'', Oxford: Basil Blackwell ISBN 0-631-14552-4.

Van Inwagen, Peter (1986). ''An Essay on Free Will.'' New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-824924-1.

Velmans, Max (2003) ''How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains?'' Exeter: Imprint Academic ISBN 0-907845-39-8.

Wegner, D. (2002). ''The Illusion of Conscious Will.'' Cambridge: Bradford Books

Williams, Clifford (1980). ''Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue''. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.

John Baer, James C. Kaufman, Roy F. Baumeister (2008). ''Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will''. Oxford University Press, New York ISBN 0-195-18963-9

External links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries:

* "Free Will"

* "Incompatibilism"

* "Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will"

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Foreknowledge and Free Will" by Norman Swartz.

"Free Will" by Galen Strawson in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Free Will" in Catholic Encyclopedia

The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website edited by Ted Honderich

History of the Free Will Problem by Bob Doyle (inventor)

MSNBC article on recent Free will research

The Skeptics Dictionary on 'free will'

Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will, slightly modified for easier reading

Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again by ''Time'' magazine

Category:Causality Category:Concepts in ethics Category:Metaphysics Category:Philosophical problems Category:Philosophy of life Category:Philosophy of religion Category:Theology

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region	Western Philosophy
era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
color	#B0C4DE
name	Daniel Clement Dennett
birth date	March 28, 1942
birth place	Boston, Massachusetts
school tradition	Analytic philosophy
main interests	Philosophy of mindPhilosophy of biologyPhilosophy of scienceCognitive science
notable ideas	HeterophenomenologyIntentional stanceIntuition pumpMultiple Drafts ModelGreedy reductionism
alma mater	Harvard University (B.A.)University of Oxford (D.Phil.)
influences	Gilbert Ryle W. V. QuineWilfrid Sellars Wittgenstein Charles Darwin David Hume Alan Turing Richard Dawkins
influenced	Richard Dawkins Douglas Hofstadter Geoffrey Miller }}

Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.

Early life and education

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W. V. Quine. In 1965, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College.

Academic career

As of April 2009, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts University.

Dennett describes himself as "an autodidact — or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists."

He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Free will

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" — Chapter 15 of his 1978 book ''Brainstorms,'' Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.

Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control ''after'' the chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is ''determined'' by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the ''libertarian'' sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.

Other philosophical views

Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in ''Brainchildren'') that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his original dissertation, ''Content and Consciousness'', he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed true to this distinction. Just as ''Content and Consciousness'' has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided ''Brainstorms'' into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in ''The Intentional Stance'' and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in ''Consciousness Explained''. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views.

In ''Consciousness Explained'', Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an integral part of his program. He defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. Much of Dennett's work since the 1990s has been concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (''Kinds of Minds''), to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (''Freedom Evolves''). In his 2006 book, ''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'', Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.

Dennett self-identifies with a few terms:

Yet, in ''Consciousness Explained'', he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist". In ''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'' he admits to being "a bright", and defends the term.

Role in evolutionary debate

Dennett sees evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process (though he spells out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness). This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e. its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one).

Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with his theory of the intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins. In ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea'', Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Strong disagreements have been launched against Dennett from Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".

Dennett's theories have had a significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He has also written about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, most recently in his "Brains, Computers, and Minds," a three part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.

He has recently been doing research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a "Don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. That made unbelieving preachers feel isolated but they did not want to lose their jobs and sometimes their church-supplied lodgings and generally consoled themselves that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual. The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include other denominations and non-Christian clerics.

Personal life

Dennett lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren. He is also an avid sailor.

In October 2006, Dennett was hospitalized due to an aortic dissection. After a nine-hour surgery, he was given a new aorta. In an essay posted on the Edge website, Dennett gives his firsthand account of his health problems, his consequent feelings of gratitude towards the scientists, cardiologist, surgeons, EMT's, phlebotomists, orderlies, housekeepers, physician assistants, X-ray technicians, meal-bringers, launderers, physical therapists, perfusionist, neurologist, and nurses whose hard work made his recovery possible, and his complete lack of a "deathbed conversion". By his account, upon having been told by friends and relatives that they had prayed for him, he resisted the urge to ask them, "Did you also sacrifice a goat?"

Selected books

''Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology'' (MIT Press 1981) (ISBN 0-262-54037-1)

''Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting'' (MIT Press 1984) — on free will and determinism (ISBN 0-262-04077-8)

''The Mind's I'' (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2)

''Content and Consciousness'' (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed. January 1986) (ISBN 0-7102-0846-4)

(First published 1987)

''Consciousness Explained'' (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0-316-18066-1)

''Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life'' (Simon & Schuster; reprint edition 1996) (ISBN 0-684-82471-X)

''Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness'' (Basic Books 1997) (ISBN 0-465-07351-4)

''Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind)'' (MIT Press 1998) (ISBN 0-262-04166-9) — A Collection of Essays 1984–1996

''Freedom Evolves'' (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN 0-670-03186-0)

''Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness'' (MIT Press 2005) (ISBN 0-262-04225-8)

''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'' (Penguin Group 2006) (ISBN 0-670-03472-X).

''Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language'' (Columbia University Press 2007) (ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7), co-authored with Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle

''Science and Religion'' (Oxford University Press 2010) (ISBN 0-199-73842-4), co-authored with Alvin Plantinga

See also

''The Atheism Tapes''

Cartesian materialism

''Conscious Robots''

Evolutionary psychology of religion

Greedy reductionism

Geoffrey Miller

Heterophenomenology

Intentional stance

List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates

Memetics

Multiple drafts theory of consciousness

Philosophy of Religion

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

Further reading

John Brockman (1995). ''The Third Culture''. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80359-3 (Discusses Dennett and others).

Daniel C. Dennett (1997), "Chapter 3. True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works", in John Haugeland, ''Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence''. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN 0-262-08259-4 (reprint of 1981 publication).

Andrew Brook and Don Ross (editors) (2000). ''Daniel Dennett''. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00864-6

Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson (editors) (2000) ''Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment'' Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18200-9

John Symons (2000) ''On Dennett''. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. ISBN 0-534-57632-X

Matthew Elton (2003). Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception. Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press. ISBN 0-7456-2117-1

P.M.S. Hacker and M.R. Bennett (2003) ''Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience''. Oxford, and Malden, Mass: Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-0855-X (Has an appendix devoted to a strong critique of Dennett's philosophy of mind)

Notes

References

External links

Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr atThe MIT Press

Faculty webpage

Daniel C. Dennett at Internet Movie Database

Scientific American Frontiers Profile: Daniel Dennett 2000-12-19

Searchable bibliography of Dennett's works

Daniel Dennett on Information Philosopher

; Media

Edge/Third Culture: Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel Dennett multimedia files

Profile at TED several videos on dangerous memes, consciousness, others

Radio interview on ''Philosophy Talk'' 2006-01-17

The Nature of Knowledge Lecture at the University of Edinburgh 2006-03-14

On Preaching and Teaching ''The Science Network'' interview with Daniel Dennett 2007-11-02

''The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies'' video interview with Daniel Dennett 2010-03-05

Category:1942 births Category:20th-century philosophers Category:21st-century philosophers Category:American atheists Category:American philosophers Category:Analytic philosophers Category:Atheist philosophers Category:Atheism activists Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Category:Wesleyan University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford Category:Living people Category:Memetics Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Philosophers of religion Category:Philosophers of science Category:Tufts University faculty Category:Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Category:Jean Nicod Prize laureates Category:American non-fiction writers Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Evolutionary psychologists Category:American skeptics Category:American humanists

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Raymond Tallis F.Med.Sci., F.R.C.P., F.R.S.A. (born 1946 in Liverpool) is a British philosopher, humanist, poet, novelist, cultural critic and retired medical doctor.

Medical career

On leaving Liverpool College, Tallis gained an Open Scholarship to Keble College, University of Oxford where he completed a degree in Animal Physiology in 1967. He completed his medical degree in 1970 at the University of Oxford and St Thomas' Hospital in London. From 1996 to 2000, he was Consultant Adviser in Care of the Elderly to the Chief Medical Officer. In 1999-2000, he was Vice-Chairman of the Stroke Task Force of the Advisory Group developing the National Service Framework for Older People. He has been on the Standing Medical Advisory Committee and the Council of the Royal College of Physicians and was secretary of the Joint Specialist Committee of the Royal College on Health Care of the Elderly between 1995 and 2003. He was a member of the Joint Task Force on Partnership in Medicine Taking, established by the Secretary of State for Health in 2001. For three years he was a member of one of the appraisal panels of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence. He retired in 2006 as Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester.

Philosophical works

Tallis has attacked Post-structuralism in books such as ''Not Saussure'', ''Theorrhoea and After'' and the assumptions of much artificial intelligence research in his book ''Why the Mind is Not a Computer: A Pocket Dictionary on Neuromythology''. He has also published volumes of poetry, plays and novels. His philosophical writings have attempted to supply an anthropology that acknowledges what is distinctive - and remarkable - about human beings. To this end he has written a trilogy of books entitled ''The Hand''; ''I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being''; and ''The Knowing Animal''.

In 2007, Raymond Tallis finished ''Unthinkable Thought: The enduring significance of Parmenides''. In April 2008, his book about the human head, ''The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head'', was published. His book ''Michelangelo's Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence'' was published in 2010.

''Aping Mankind'' was published in 2011.

Other work

He is on the list of Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association. Tallis is also a Patron of Dignity in Dying. On 15 September 2010, Tallis, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.

References

External links

Raymond Tallis's web site

Copac listing of his published works

Little Atoms Interview - Hunger: The Art of Living

Raymond Tallis discusses Parmenides on ''Philosophy Bites'' podcast

Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Keble College, Oxford Category:English academics Category:English non-fiction writers Category:English philosophers Category:English humanists Category:English poets Category:Medical academics Category:Academics of the University of Manchester

{{infobox scientist |name

Steven Arthur Pinker |image Steven_Pinker_Göttingen_10102010c_crop.JPG |image_size |caption Steven Pinker (''Göttingen, 2010'') |birth_date September 18, 1954 |birth_place Montréal, Québec, Canada |residence United States of America |citizenship Canadian-American |ethnicity Jewish Canadian-American |field evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics |work_institution |alma_mater Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University |doctoral_advisor |doctoral_students |known_for How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate |prizes Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society) }}

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His academic pursuits include experiments on mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his less academic books, he argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include ''The Language Instinct'' (1994), ''How the Mind Works'' (1997), ''Words and Rules'' (2000), ''The Blank Slate'' (2002), and ''The Stuff of Thought'' (2007).

Biography

Career

Pinker was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada in 1954, and graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Pinker was named one of ''Time Magazine's'' 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004 and one of ''Prospect'' and ''Foreign Policy'''s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In 2010, he was named by ''Foreign Policy'' magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers' remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the ''New York Times''. Gladwell published a rebuttal in the ''Times'' regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal. The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows.

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Personal

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of ''The Sexual Paradox''. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, ''I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.'' As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as ''neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian''. Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.

Theories of language and mind

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In ''The Language Instinct'' (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work

Pinker's books, ''The Language Instinct'', ''How the Mind Works'', ''Words and Rules'', ''The Blank Slate'', and ''The Stuff of Thought'' combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. ''The Language Instinct'' has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, ''The 'Language Instinct' Debate''. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's ''Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling)'', which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography

Books

''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984)

''Visual Cognition'' (1985)

''Connections and Symbols'' (1988)

''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989)

''Lexical and Conceptual Semantics'' (1992)

''The Language Instinct'' (1994)

''How the Mind Works'' (1997)

''Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language'' (1999)

''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' (2002)

''The Best American Science and Nature Writing'' (editor and introduction author, 2004)

''Hotheads'' (an extract from ''How the Mind Works'', 2005)

''The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature'' (2007)

''The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes'' (2011)

Articles and essays

Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), ''Language evolution: States of the Art'' New York: Oxford University Press.

S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" ''Chicago Sun-Times'', July 15, 2007

A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References

External links

C-SPAN BookTV In Depth video interview with Steven Pinker, 3 hrs.

Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation

Steven Pinker: The stuff of thought TED, July, 2005

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence TED, March, 2007

Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"

Steven Pinker discusses the evolutionary psychology of morality in "The Moral Instinct" ''The New York Times'', January 13, 2008

Steven Pinker on The Hour

Steven Pinker 2003 TEDTalk: Chalking it up to the blank slate

;Debates

The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose

The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke

Radio interview on ''Philosophy Talk''

;Vitae

Steven Pinker's Website

Time magazine page on Pinker

Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files

"Steven Pinker: the mind reader," ''The Guardian'' Profile, November 6, 1999

Live interview with Steven Pinker on ''The Blank Slate''

Online video interview with Pinker

"Basic Instincts" - ''The Guardian'' profile by Oliver Burkeman, September 22, 2007.

Advisory board biography for the Secular Coalition for America

;Reviews

Article on The Language Instinct by Theodore Dalrymple

Louis Menand's critique of The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, originally published in ''The New Yorker'' magazine

"Meet the Flintstones" by Simon Blackburn, a critique of The Blank Slate.

Biology vs. the Blank Slate ''Reason'' magazine interview with Pinker

Evolutionary Psychology of Religion

"The Blind Programmer", a review of ''How the Mind Works'' by Edward Oakes.

Steven Pinker to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2007

Category:1954 births Category:Living people Category:American atheists Category:American linguists Category:American psychologists Category:American science writers Category:Canadian atheists Category:Canadian skeptics Category:Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Category:Jewish Canadian writers Category:McGill University alumni Category:American people of Canadian-Jewish descent Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Evolutionary psychologists Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty Category:Jewish atheists Category:People from Montreal Category:Anglophone Quebec people Category:American humanists Category:Dawson College alumni Category:Canadian linguists Category:Canadian psychologists Category:Canadian science writers

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name	Natalia Kills
background	solo_singer
birth name	Natalia Keery-Fisher
alias	Candy Rapper, Verbz, Verbalicious, Natalia Noemi Cappuccini
birth date	August 15, 1986
birth place	Bradford, West Yorkshire, England
genre	Pop, electropop
occupation	Singer-songwriter, actress, director
instrument	Vocals, drums, guitar
years active	1995–present
label	Adventures in Music, will.i.am, Cherrytree, Kon Live, Interscope, Bozadya, Dandyville
associated acts	Far East Movement LMFAO will.i.am
url	}}

Natalia Keery-Fisher (born 15 August 1986) is an English singer-songwriter, actress, and short-film director who performs under the stage name Natalia Kills. She released her first single "Don't Play Nice" under the name Verbalicious in February 2005. She released her debut album, ''Perfectionist'', under the name Natalia Kills in April 2011.

Life and career

Early life

Keery-Fisher was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, to a Jamaican father and Uruguayan mother, where she attended Bradford Girls' Grammar School. In addition, she studied classical drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Career beginnings

Keery-Fisher made her acting debut at age 9 in 1995 in ''New Voices''. She had a regular role as Sima in the sitcom ''All About Me'' and also played Amy Franks in the BBC's long-running radio drama ''The Archers''. During her time on television and radio she began writing songs, some of which were featured in films and television shows, including ''Bring It On 4'', ''Sleepover'', ''Just My Luck'' and ''Entourage''. After finishing ''The Archers'' in 2003, she attributes her musical breakthrough to winning a Radio 1 MC Battle in Leeds, under the name Candy Rapper, in 2003. She auditioned for the part of Princess Amidala in Star Wars but did not get the part but noted that "I auditioned in front of George Lucas, it was amazing".

She signed to the UK record company "Adventures in Music", releasing her debut single "Don't Play Nice" in March 2005. The song charted at 11 in the UK. She later filed to be released from all recording/management agreements after the record label filed for bankruptcy.

In January 2008, will.i.am signed Keery-Fisher to Interscope Records via his will.i.am Music Group imprint. She was noticed for her demo EP ''Wommanequin'', which she produced and wrote herself. Once signed to Interscope, she was placed with Cherrytree Records. Cherrytree encouraged her to find a name that was more direct and descriptive, and she then came up with the name Natalia Kills. She also wrote songs for French recording artist M. Pokora and met underground director Guillaume Doubet, with whom she now directs all her visuals in Paris.

2010–present: ''Perfectionist''

Kills' debut album ''Perfectionist'' was released April 2011 in Germany. She has also produced and co-directed a mini-series, ''Love Kills xx'', and a film under the working tittle ''The Exhibition'', which have been made concurrently with the album, the latter acting as the soundtrack to the film. The album's first single, "Mirrors", was released in US in August 2010 and in the UK in April 2011. Her second single, "Wonderland", was released on in April 2011 in Germany. The track In October 2010, was featured in the 2011 film ''Beastly'' starring Vanessa Hudgens.

Kills opened for Kelis' European All Hearts Tour, as well as supporting Robyn on her Body Talk Tour in November 2010 and early 2011. Kills supported Ke$ha on the UK leg of her Get Sleazy Tour alongside LMFAO. Throughout August and September 2011, Kills will support Katy Perry on her California Dreams Tour for eight dates.

Discography

Studio albums

{|class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;" border="1" |+ List of albums, with selected chart positions ! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Title ! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Album details ! scope="col" colspan="6" | Peak chart positions |- ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | UK ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | AUT ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | CAN ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | GER ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | SWI ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | US |- ! scope="row" | ''Perfectionist'' |

Released: 1 April 2011

Label: Interscope, Universal

Format: CD, digital download

| — || 35 || 36 || 50 || 94 || 134 |}

Singles

{|class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;" border="1" |+ List of singles, with selected chart positions ! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Single ! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Year ! scope="col" colspan="7" | Peak chart positions ! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Album |- ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | UK ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | AUT ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | CAN ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | GER ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | POL ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | SWI ! scope="col" style="width:3em;font-size:85%;" | USDance |- ! scope="row" | "Don't Play Nice" (as Verbalicious) | 2005 | 11 | — | — | — | — | — | — | Non-album single |- ! scope="row" | "Mirrors" | 2010 | — | 7 | 46 | 10 | 2 | 52 | 3 | rowspan="3" | ''Perfectionist'' |- ! scope="row" | "Wonderland" | rowspan="2" | 2011 | — | 55 | — | 45 | 44 | — | — |- |- ! scope="row" | "Free" (feat. will.i.am) | — | 5 | — | — | — | — | — |- |colspan="10" style="font-size:9pt"|"—" denotes releases that did not chart. |}

As featured artist

{|class="wikitable" style=text-align:center; |- !rowspan="2"|Year ! rowspan="2"| Single ! colspan="6"| Peak chart positions ! rowspan="2"| Album |- !style="width:3em;font-size:75%"|UK !style="width:3em;font-size:75%"|BEL !style="width:3em;font-size:75%"|CAN !style="width:3em;font-size:75%"|FRA !style="width:3em;font-size:75%"|IRE !style="width:3em;font-size:75%"|SWE |- | 2007 |align="left"| "They Talk Shit About Me" (with M. Pokora) |align="center"| — |align="center"| 3 |align="center"| — |align="center"| 24 |align="center"| — |align="center"| — | ''MP3'' |- |rowspan="1"| 2011 |align="left"| "Champagne Showers" (with LMFAO) |align="center"| 32 |align="center"| 23 |align="center"| 63 |align="center"| 30 |align="center"| 15 |align="center"| — | ''Sorry for Party Rocking'' |- | colspan="17" style="text-align:center; font-size:8pt;"| "—" denotes song that did not chart or was not released |}

Guest appearances

{|class="wikitable" style=text-align:center; |- !|Year ! Single ! Album |- |2011 |align="left"| "2 Is Better" (Far East Movement featuring Natalia Kills and Ya Boy) | ''Free Wired'' |}

Promotional singles

"Zombie" (2009)

"Activate My Heart" (2010)

Filmography

''All About Me'' ''No Angels (TV series) ''Cape Wrath (TV series)

Year !! Title !! Role !! Notes
1995	''New Voices''	Pearl
rowspan="3"	2003	|	Sima	TV series, 22 episodes
''Casualty (TV series)	Casualty ''	Samina Khan
''Coronation Street''	Laura Mangen
rowspan="2"	2004		Hazel Perry
''Blue Murder (UK TV series)	Blue Murder ''	Anisa Khan
2005	No Angels'' ||	Sujata	TV series, 1 episode
rowspan="2"	2006	''Silent Witness''	Kelly Wetherby
'' Tripping Over ''	Julie
	2007	Cape Wrath'' ||	Kerry	TV series, 1 episode

References

External links

Natalia Kills interview with Girls Talkin Smack

Category:1986 births Category:British people of Uruguayan descent Category:English female singers Category:English people of Jamaican descent Category:English pop singers Category:English singer-songwriters Category:English television actors Category:English-language singers Category:Interscope Records artists Category:Living people Category:People from Bradford

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