The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner Read Free Book Online

can influence dramatically how we go about making sense of the event. And making sense of our own minds as mentally causal systems—conscious agents—includes accepting our feelings of conscious will as authentic.
    11 . Oliver Sacks (1994) has documented the intriguing details of a life without mind perception. He recounts his interviews with Temple Grandin, an astonishing adult with autism who also holds a Ph.D. in agricultural science and works as a teacher and researcher at Colorado State University. Her attempts to understand human events—even though she lacks the natural ability to pick up the nuances of human actions, plans, and emotions—impressively illustrate the unusual skill most people have in this area yet take for granted. Grandin has cultivated this ability only through special effort and some clever tricks of observation.
    We’re now getting close to a basic principle about the illusion of conscious will. Think of it in terms of lenses. If each person has two general lenses through which to view causality—a mechanical causality lens for objects and a mental causality lens for agents—it is possible that the mental one blurs what the person might otherwise see with the mechanical one. The illusion of conscious will may be a misapprehension of the mechanistic causal relations underlying our own behavior that comes from looking at ourselves by means of a mental explanatory system. We don’t see our own gears turning because we’re busy reading our minds.
    The Illusion Exposed
    Philosophers and psychologists have spent lifetimes thinking about how to reconcile conscious will with mechanistic causation. This problem— broached in various ways as the mind/body problem, free will vs. determinism, mental vs. physical causation, and the analysis of reasons vs. causes—has generated a literature that is immense, rich, and shocking in its inconclusiveness (Dennett 1984; Double 1991; Earman 1986; Hook 1965; MacKay 1967; Uleman 1989). What to do? The solution explored in this book involves recognizing that the distinction between mental and mechanical explanations is something that concerns everyone, not only philosophers and psychologists. The tendency to view the world in both ways, each as necessary, is what has created in us two largely incompatible ways of thinking. When we apply mental explanations to our own behavior-causation mechanisms, we fall prey to the impression that our conscious will causes our actions. The fact is, we find it enormously seductive to think of ourselves as having minds, and so we are drawn into an intuitive appreciation of our own conscious will.
    Think for a minute about the nature of illusions. Any magician will tell you that the key to creating a successful illusion is to make “magic” the easiest, most immediate way to explain what is really a mundane event. Harold Kelley (1980) described this in his analysis of the underpinnings of magic in the perception of causality. He observed that stage magic involves a perceived causal sequence —the set of events that appears to have happened—and a real causal sequence —the set of events the magician has orchestrated behind the scenes. The perceived sequence is what makes the trick. Laws of nature are broken willy-nilly as people are sawed in half and birds, handkerchiefs, rabbits, and canes appear from nothing or disappear or turn into each other and back again.
    The real sequence is often more complicated than the perceived sequence, but many of the real events are not perceived. The magician needs special pockets, props, and equipment, and develops wiles to misdirect audience attention from the real sequence. In the end, the audience observes something that seems to be simple, but in fact it may have been achieved with substantial thought, preparation, and effort on the magician’s part. The lovely assistant in a gossamer gown apparently floating effortlessly on her back during the levitation illusion is in fact being held