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

up by a 600-pound pneumatic lift hidden behind a specially rigged curtain. It is the very simplicity of the illusory sequence, the shorthand summary that hides the magician’s toil, that makes the trick so compelling. The lady levitates. The illusion of conscious will occurs in much the same way.
    The real causal sequence underlying human behavior involves a massively complicated set of mechanisms. Everything that psychology studies can come into play to predict and explain even the most innocuous wink of an eye. Each of our actions is really the culmination of an intricate set of physical and mental processes, including psychological mechanisms that correspond to the traditional concept of will, in that they involve linkages between our thoughts and our actions. This is the empirical will. However, we don’t see this. Instead, we readily accept a far easier explanation of our behavior: We intended to do it, so we did it.
    The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1973) remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (21). Clarke was referring to the fantastic inventions we might discover in the future or in our travels to advanced civilizations. However, the insight also applies to self-perception. When we turn our attention to our own minds, we are faced with trying to understand an unimaginably advanced technology. We can’t possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine. So we develop a shorthand, a belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts. We believe in the magic of our own causal agency.
    The mind is a system that produces appearances for its owner. Things appear silver, for example, or they appear to have little windows, or they appear to fly, as the result of how the mind produces experience. And if the mind can make us “experience” an airplane, why couldn’t it produce an experience of itself that leads us to think that it causes its own actions? The mind creates this continuous illusion; it really doesn’t know what causes its own actions. Whatever empirical will there is rumbling along in the engine room—an actual relation between thought and action—might in fact be totally inscrutable to the driver of the machine (the mind). The mind has a self-explanation mechanism that produces a roughly continuous sense that what is in consciousness is the cause of action—the phenomenal will—whereas in fact the mind can’t ever know itself well enough to be able to say what the causes of its actions are. To quote Spinoza in The Ethics (1677), “Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined. Their idea of free-dom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions” (pt. II, 105). In the more contemporary phrasing of Marvin Minsky (1985);“None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control . . . . Perhaps it would be more honest to say, ‘My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand’ ” (306).

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    Brain and Body
    Conscious will arises from processes that are psychologically and anatomically distinct from the processes whereby mind creates action .
    The feeling we call volition is not the cause of the voluntary act, but simply the symbol in consciousness of that stage of the brain which is the immediate cause of the act.
    T. H. Huxley,
    On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata (1874)
    It is not always a simple matter to know when someone is doing something on purpose. This judgment is easy to make for animated cartoon characters because a lightbulb usually appears over their heads at this time and they then rear back and look quickly to each side before charging off to do