Peter Ulric Tse

Peter Ulric Tse (born Oct. 28, 1962) is an American cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College.

He began his studies at Harvard University in 1992, receiving his PhD in cognitive psychology under Patrick Cavanagh and Ken Nakayama in 1998.

Tse served as a postdoctoral researcher with Nikos Logothetis at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany.

In the domain of mid-level vision his group has worked on deciphering the rapid form-motion computations that go into the construction of subsequent conscious visual experience.

This, he argues, provides an opening for information to be downwardly causal in the universe, whether high-level supervenient events such as conscious percepts or a concept, such as that of a 'home-run' in a baseball game, or 'voting' in a democracy.

Under 'criterial causation' (see below) only physically causal paths which are also informational causal paths are permitted to occur in the nervous system and other information processing systems, such as underlie genetic inheritance, protein formation, membrane channel formation, or social interactions such as speaking or institutional interactions.

Possible physical particle-level paths which do not meet high-level informational criteria are effectively filtered out by a criterial assessment.

He points out that manipulationist and interventionist conceptions of causation, such as those of Woodward,[7] have largely neglected the 'passive' causal efficacy of manipulations of parameters for responses to subsequent inputs.

He argues that David Hume was wrong when he wrote "tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity."

In contrast, he has argued that the Libet experiments (where preceding brain activity can be used to decode picking this versus that option, such as turning left versus right, or the timing of an event, such as a finger motion, before a person becomes conscious of willing) are largely irrelevant to free will, because free will is rooted in imaginative deliberation and choosing, not picking among arbitrary and meaningless alternatives.