The Illusion of Conscious Will (Bradford Books) [Hardcover]

Daniel M. Wegner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0262232227 | ISBN-13: 978-0262232227

Selected as a Finalist in the category of Psychology/Mental Health in the 2002 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) presented by Independent Publisher Magazine., Silver Award Winner for Philosophy in the 2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. and Selected as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2002 by Choice Magazine

Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality.

Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—-those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wegner is a terrific writer, sharing his encyclopedic purchase on the material in amusing, entertaining, and masterful ways."
— David Brizer, M.D., Psychiatric Services

"Fascinating...I recommend the book as a first-rate intellectual adventure."
— Herbert Silverman, Science Books & Films

"...Dr. Wegner's critique ... is less philosophical than empirical, drawing heavily upon recent research in cognitive science and neurology."
— John Horgan, The New York Times

"Wegner has finessed all the usual arguments into a remarkable demonstration of how psychology can sometimes transform philosophy.... [He] writes with humour and clarity."
— Sue Blackmore, TLS

"...well worth reading for [the author's]interesting analysis and insights."
— David Wilson, American Scientist

"...very convincing."
— David Wilson, American Scientist

About the Author

Daniel M. Wegner is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 419 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262232227
• ISBN-13: 978-0262232227
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #840,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

145 of 167 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but fails near the end October 9, 2002

By K. Curtin

Format:Hardcover

I loved the way this book started. For example, the evidence that people can feel they are controlling other people's actions is fascinating. The overall theory of how we feel we are willing things is well presented, as is the idea that such a feeling is an illusion. This isn't shocking stuff to some, but to others it will be a huge revelation.

I do have complaints. For the tiny ones first (big one at the end). First, I object to calling the loss of pain and loss of memory during hypnosis examples of increased mental control. By that definition, Alzheimers patients have increased control. What one isn't aware of one isn't aware of and this hardly seems like control.

As far as not being able to avoid thinking of things, it seems to me the explanation is simpler. Words conjure images, but negative words have no images associated with them so when you say "Don't think about a bear" the only word causing an image is bear, and so you think of a bear. Trying to monitor bear thoughts will lead to bear thoughts. Also he says, if you are distracted while you are trying not to do something you will be more likely to do it. I can see that since trying not to do something (like drop a jar) requires action in an opposite direction, i.e. it requires effort. But is this true when you are trying NOT to think of something? If I tried not to think of Wegner's white bear and was then asked to recite the Gettysburg address I strongly suspect I would forget the bear. Not thinking about something, unlike not doing does not require any positive action. Distraction ought to make it easier to forget and he never distinguishes between these and acts as if what is true of behavior is true of thoughts.

But my BIG complaint is the last chapter. He suddenly claims his own theories only explain why we feel will, but he tried to minimize the impact of all this on morality and even started talking about will as a causal force again. He even seemed at times when using the word will to indicate something that wasn't necessarily conscious. This is nonsense. If will isn't conscious it isn't will.

Our thoughts have causal impact on our actions, but then what is the cause of our thoughts? Clearly we don't control these either. They are a sum of what we are, what we have experienced, the way our brains are wired together etc. As far as morality I have to believe that the only thing we can judge is individual bits of behavior. Behavior is moral or not, acceptable or not and some people have a higher propensity to engage in unacceptable behaviors than others--whatever the reasons. As a society we have to judge behavior and engage in activities to modify the behavior of others when it is unacceptable and that is what our jutsice system should attempt. If an individual's behavior remains unacceptable or cannot be modified, we have an obligation to put them where they cannot engage in the behavior.

Wegner is clearly unwilling to give up on the idea that people will their behavior and are thus responbsible in the traditional way for what they do. The idea that we can use "mens rea" a guilty mind to show a person willed their actions seems like a dubious standard to me. A person may not will their behavior but later feels guilty because they realize their behavior is in violation of their own moral code. A person totally lacking a developed moral code (a sociopath, let's say) would never exhibit a guilty mind. Are such folks les guilty? Or less dangerous?

The whole issue of whether mental states should be considered in a legal system should be abandoned as far as I can see. I believe we should judge behavior and then decide what to do with the person engaging in the behavior. What we do should be motivated by our desire to 1) modify the person's behavior and 2) protect innocents. The strategy for each individual will vary depending on their mental abilities and their behavioral history etc and we may often get it wrong.

Wegner's thesis has much bigger implications for our ideas about personal responsibility than he wants to admit and ultimately he is unwilling to really stick with his guns. That was a dissappointment.

But the book has a lot of great stuff to say and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in mind/body questions.

89 of 102 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The best kept secret December 9, 2004

By Joseph Bergevin

Format:Paperback

News flash: there is no such thing as free will. I notice that this fact really irritates a lot of the reviewers here, which makes a good deal of sense. If we accept that there is no free will, we feel our own glory diminished, much as some feel when contemplating the idea that there is no afterlife. A lot of the arguments in favor of free will start with unfounded assumptions that there "must be" some form of free will, because that is the only possible explanation for order in the Universe. Order is really just a manifestation of the laws of physics, and doesn't need intelligent intervention, thank you. When a drop of water freezes into an exquisite snowflake, there is no sentience that guides it. It simply follows the path of least resistance. So too is life, and by extension, intelligence. We feel a bias towards free will because our very sense of self is derived from the ingrained feeling that our thoughts precede our actions. Oh, but do they? As the book rehashes, Libet was one of the first to test this idea emprically, and found that the sequence of electrical events in the brain that accompanied actions always began a noticeable amount of time before the conscious awareness of initiating an action. In the big picture, the vast majority of our actions are mediated by subconscious output, with a trickle of actions being refined by conscious stimuli when we have no experience with a particular situation. It is this subconscious co-opting of thought that enables us to ride a bike, walk, talk, and so on, without the need to consciously consider the steps involved. We take this for granted, but, for example, victims of stroke often find that certain actions they could once do without thinking require considerable attention if not handled automatically. We discount the idea that our actions are mainly subconscious because of the very fact that we don't consciously think about them.

That there is no free will is also an elegant explanation for the obvious lack of free will that we can witness in ourselves and others every day. How often do addicts of all kinds (food, drugs, gambling) explain that they cannot control their actions? Or what about spouses who cheat, drawn up in the "heat of the moment"? The temporary insanity plea? Tourette's syndrome? Obsessive-compulsive actions? Our own nightly dream worlds? People are willing to accept that they are not in control of many aspects of their behavior, but fail to make the obvious leap that they are indeed not in control of any of it. Having done something that they did not want to do, people then expose another aspect of the brain's process of illusory control by rationalizing their actions ("Another beer won't kill me","my spouse drove me to cheating","biting my fingernails kills the time"). This is the brain tipping its hand to the cards it's playing. When we see this in an extreme form, we call it a pathology (alcoholism, OCD). When we experience it in more mundane ways, we call it our thought process.

The book spends a lot of time on social aspects of will as well. We're much more likely to do certain things in groups, as we surrender some of our control to that of the group. An obvious example of this are religious ceremonies. People can go into trancelike, convulsive states when they are "slain in the spirit" of God, which they attribute to outside agencies. No one ever questions, however, why one is never visited by God while shopping at Radio Shack.

All that said, the illusion of will has a purpose. It may be an illusion, but it's still an effective and convincing one. While we may not really have free will, we still experience it all the same, and there is no reason that we should behave any differently knowing this. Beyond a dimunition of our sense of selves that accompanies the loss of will, I think that another reflexive disgust people feel about the concept stems from the percieved lack of responsibility that it implies. If I'm not in control, why blame me for what I do? It doesn't really work that way, however. Free will or no, social pressures will still work to modify behavior in individuals. Indeed, our existing penal system works as it does because it shapes the development of our subconscious minds. More simply, we don't even have the free will to act as if we have no free will.

So after all this, the issue is moot. It doesn't matter how we work, just that we do. Perhaps the most useful application of this knowledge will be in shaping our approach to altering bad behaviors. Knowing that we have no will, we can predict our more addictive and reflexive behaviors more accurately. Practial applications would be avoiding situations in which we might cave in to temptations. By taking action before we lose our apparent will, we co-opt the problems associated with it, and those insights are easily worth the price of this book.

65 of 75 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Workmanly, helpful step forward on a central question September 22, 2002

By Bob Fancher

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Wegner makes an interesting step forward in the free will/determinism debate. He argues that "conscious will" is indeed an important EXPERIENCE, which serves vital purposes; but he denies that ACTS of conscious will CAUSE the actions we believe them to cause. "Will" is not how I bring about the things I do, but perceiving and understanding what I do--though the "I" is mostly unconscious, and the causes of actions more or less entirely so.

Thus, Wegner does NOT deny that we are the authors of our own actions or that thoughts cause actions; but he denies that "will" is among the causally effective psychological events. "Will" is a way of keeping track of which actions are caused by me--by my intentions, beliefs, desires, and so forth. It is an indicator, and a vitally important one, but not more than that.

I will be surprised if this this theory turns out to be ultimately correct, mostly because Wegner seems to lack an adequate general theory of consciousness and its functions within which to house and understand will. Consciousness did not arise for no reason--any trait that occurs at a rate above chance must be naturally selected, hence evolutionarily important, and consciousness occurs in about 100% of humans and apparently huge numbers of other animal species. Consciousness could turn out to be just sort of a matter of taste, effectively useless, like the peacock's tail. But that seems unlikely, since consciousness seems to be much more universal that shiny big tails. Conscious will needs to be understood as part of consciousness, and very good science--theoretical and experiemtnal--demonstrates that consciousness has causal efficacy. (See, for instance, Bernard J. Baars' nice intro to "consciousness science" in his book, "In the Theater of Conscousness.")

That said, the feeling of willing remains distinct from other elements of consciousness--simply because each type of mental content is distinct from each other type--and thus much needs to be understood about its peculiar traits and function. Wegner certainly points in intriguing directions.

Two disappointment: First, and fairly trivial, Wegner knows very well that his theory is very, very far from being established, or even being the leading contender, and he often says so--e.g., that the evidence is "consistent with" the theory, or "suggests" the theory, or that the theory "would help" undertand various things. But being human, he can't avoid slipping into assuming and talking as though his theory is simply right--sometimes calling it an "assumption" and a "realization" in the same paragraph! I found the latter annoying.

More significant, Wegner sidesteps one central issue: Why does "will" feel free? We all know that we sometimes initate actions without feeling free to do otherwise--whenever "curiousity gets the better" of you, for instance. Other times we experience ourselves as free to will one thing or the other. Saying that will is perception of my causing my own acts does not explain the difference--and that difference is one of the main things the free will/determinism debate is about.