Superstitious conditioning shapes the illusory experience of free will under causal determinism.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2026 Cooper Kansala, Emre Cicek, Vanessa B Nkansah-Okoree et al.
Discussions of free will often center on the question of whether actions are determined, with a special focus on causes, effects, and when subjects experience the desire to act relative to neural events. However, because the only evidence for the existence of free will is the subjective experience itself, explanation must center on the phenomenal: why do we feel free? Here, we propose a...