Nicolas Rouleau
Cooper Kansala — Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Emre Cicek — Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Vanessa Nkansah-Okoree — Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Andrew Golding — Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Nirosha Murugan — Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada / The Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA
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 neuropsychological model of free will as a conditioned illusion—a misattribution of causality reinforced through operant learning. First, we postulate that decisions and actions are determined. Then, drawing on classical findings such as the readiness potential preceding conscious intention and more recent work on active inference, we propose that the temporal contiguity of premotor and motor activations gives rise to superstitious conditioning, shaping an experience of—and belief in—free will that is compatible with determinism. Sustained by dopaminergic circuits and reinforced by sensorimotor feedback loops, our framework situates free will as an experiential phenomenon rooted in the functional neuroanatomy of learning. We discuss implications for medicine, ethics, law, and suggest conditions under which the experience of free will may be disrupted or restructured by disease, pharmacology, and reinforcement history.
Dr. Nicolas Rouleau is a neuroscientist, bioengineer, and Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University and Affiliate Scientist at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, where he previously trained as a post-doctoral fellow with Michael Levin, a pioneer in the field of minimal cognition, and David Kaplan, a renowned expert in biomaterials and neural tissue engineering. Rouleau is the last PhD student of Michael Persinger, a pioneer on electromagnetic, quantum, and non-local theories of consciousness. He has authored over 60 peer-reviewed academic journal articles in high impact journals such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, Science Advances, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. In 2021, Rouleau authored an award-winning essay for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) on the topic of the survival of consciousness after bodily death. In addition to his published works, Rouleau has presented his research at top international conferences (Society for Neuroscience, Gordon Research Conferences, BRAIN Initiative Investigators Meeting, American Physiological Society) and has been invited to participate in several leading consciousness-related meetings including the recent "Other Minds" workshop at the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science in Arizona, USA (2024), hosted by Sara Walker, and "Beyond Physicalism - Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, and Reality" workshop in Engelberg, Switzerland (2025), hosted by Christof Koch and Bernardo Kastrup. Rouleau is the PI of the Self-Organizing Units Lab (SOUL), which uses neural tissue engineering techniques and high-density microelectrode arrays (MEAs) to understand cognition in a dish, including minimal features of intelligence, agency, decision-making, and consciousness. He is also the co-inventor of photoencephalography (pEEG), a novel neuroimaging technique that measures ultraweak photon emissions from the brain to infer cognitive states.