Mind Matters
Professor Peter Tse ’84 melds philosophical questions with neurological answers.
“Like a lot of young people who have a strict Chinese father, I felt very much compelled to go into the hard sciences,” says the former physics and math major. “But really, what I found most interesting about physics were the metaphysical questions, like is the universe deterministic or indeterministic?”
Now a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the College, Tse remains compelled to pose what he calls life’s “big- gest of the big questions.” Such as: What is
free will? Is the human brain hard-wired for free will? What is the neural basis of human imagination? “We’re now at a level where neu- roscientific data can constrain or even answer some of these questions,” Tse says. “Although philosophy has been very good at raising these questions, it has been pretty poor at answering them.”
A Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in April will allow Tse to explore those questions further by completing the final two books in a series he’s writing that focuses on the neural basis of human freedom and willpower.
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