Peter Ulric Tse
Peter Ulric Tse is interested in understanding, first, how matter can become conscious, and second, how conscious and unconscious mental events can be causal in a universe where so many believe a solely physical account of causation should be sufficient. He and his students carry out fMRI, EEG and psychophysics experiments in an effort to answer these philosophical questions scientifically. Details can be found in his book The Neural Basis of Free Will. He also leads a multi-university NSF consortium investigating the neural basis of volitional attention. He was raised in NYC by a German mother and Chinese father. He went to Dartmouth, where he majored in math and physics, and then to graduate school at Harvard, where he studied what visual illusions can teach us about conscious/unconscious brain processing. He has been a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth since 2001. Tse lives with his family on farmland in New Hampshire.