Consciousness and free will viewed through the lens of decision making
4:00 pm, December 7^th, 2022

Building on the foundation of the previous lecture, I will shape the window on cognition into a lens through which seemingly elusive problems may be rendered conspicuous. I will present experimental evidence that the transition from non-conscious mental processing to conscious awareness is, in essence, a decision. The experiment uses Libet’s mental chronometry, so it also touches on the topic of free will and responsibility. I will expand on the intentional—as opposed to representational—framework for the brain’s computational architecture, introduced in Lecture 1, to sketch a view of knowledge and phenomenology as affordance, focusing mainly on the parietal cortex. All experiences afford the possibility of reporting to another agent—or to oneself in the future. I will explain why this special “reporting affordance” brings consciousness into focus.