La construcción de la sensación de agencia: un enfoque desde la neurociencia y la filosofía de la mente
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This essay proposes a radical critique of the concept of agency from an interdisciplinary approach between neuroscience and philosophy of mind, adopting an eliminativist stance. It argues that agency is not an ontologically real property of the subject, but a perceptual and narrative construct generated by distributed brain mechanisms, conditioned by retrospective inferences and cognitive biases. Through the analysis of neuroscientific models and the study of pathologies, argues that the sense of agency is malleable, fallible and fabricated. Both the classical substantialist, individualist and relational conceptions are questioned, including Galen Strawson's position, which will require more detail than the others. The above positions are criticized —to a greater or lesser extent— for being ego-dualistic. It is concluded that even the most elementary forms of self-experience are based on opaque and confabulatory processes that do not justify a strong ontology of self or agent. This position has relevant implications for clinical ethics, moral responsibility, and theories of free will, and points toward a more fine-tuned and scientifically informed understanding of human subjectivity as a construct rather than as a substantial entity.
Author: Molinero Moles, Ignacio
Language: Spanish
Topic: Free Will and Agency
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7112190229