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Philosophers and neuroscientists study many of the same big questions about human nature, including free will, morality, perception, knowledge, and consciousness. But researchers in these disciplines rarely work together—or even understand each other.
With a goal of advancing both fields, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke University) aims to foster mutual appreciation and collaboration. To do so, his project will hold three annual summer seminars. Over the course of 14 days, ten fellows from neuroscience will study contemporary philosophy; ten fellows from philosophy will learn about recent developments in neuroscience. These seminars will include theories and methods in both disciplines.
While studying the field outside their expertise, fellows will form interdisciplinary teams that will design their own experiments on big questions. The project will fund the most promising of these experiments, carried out with guidance from project staff and reported at the next year’s seminar. Each seminar will close with a two-day public conference with leading figures from both disciplines.
The project’s outputs will include three seminars that train 60 fellows and feature around 60 speakers, as well as three conferences that educate over 300 audience members. Later outcomes will include at least 20 original research papers by the fellows and directors.
The team seeks to create lasting bonds among future leaders in philosophy and neuroscience. Through these bonds, they can continue to collaborate for many years on more interdisciplinary research projects that address big questions. This project has the potential to change both fields by stimulating new interdisciplinary courses and programs in many universities. It can also provide models of how to engage in cutting-edge scientific research on profound philosophical questions.
The sense of agency, the feeling of controlling one’s bodily actions and the world is altered in Depersonalization (DP), a condition that makes people feel detached from one’s self and body. To investigate the link between depersonalization and both implicit and explicit sense of agency, an online study was conducted using the influential Intentional Binding paradigm in a sample of non-clinical DP participants. The results did not reveal significant differences between individuals with low and high occurrences of DP experiences on the implicit and explicit sense of agency. However, participants with high occurrences of DP experiences showed a more time-sensitive explicit sense of agency and greater temporal distortions for short intervals in the absence of self-initiated motion. These results suggest that there is a discrepancy between implicit and explicit sense of agency in people with high levels of depersonalization. Altogether, these findings call for further investigations of the key role of time perception on altered sense of self and agency in both non-clinical and clinical populations, to disentangle the mechanisms associated with the explicit and implicit sense of agency.
