The Illusion of Conscious Will (2 page)

These two explanations are both appealing but in different ways. The scientific explanation accounts for behavior as a mechanism and appeals to that part of us that knows how useful science is for understanding the world. It would be wonderful if we could understand people in just the same way. The conscious will explanation, on the other hand, has a much deeper grip on our intuition. We each have a profound sense that we consciously will much of what we do, and we experience ourselves willing our actions many times a day. As William James put it, “The whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life . . . depends on our sense that in it things are
really being decided
from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago” (1890,453). Quite apart from any resentment we might feel on being cast into the role of mechanisms or robots, we appreciate the notion of conscious will because we experience it so very acutely. We do things, and when we do them, we experience the action in such a way that it seems to flow seamlessly from our consciousness. We feel that
we cause ourselves to behave
.

The idea of conscious will and the idea of psychological mechanisms have an oil and water relationship, having never been properly reconciled. One way to put them together—the way this book explores—is to say that the mechanistic approach is the explanation preferred for scientific purposes but that the person’s experience of conscious will is utterly convincing and important to the person and so must be understood scientifically as well. The mechanisms underlying the experience of will are themselves a fundamental topic of scientific study. We should be able to examine and understand what creates the experience of will and what makes it go away. This means, though, that conscious will is an illusion.
²
It is an illusion in the sense that
the experience of consciously willing an action is not a direct indication that the conscious thought has caused the action
. Conscious will, viewed this way, may be an extraordinary illusion indeed—the equivalent of a magician’s producing an elephant from the folds of his handkerchief. How could it seem so much like our wills cause our actions if this isn’t actually happening? To grasp how this might be, we need to begin by examining what exactly is meant by conscious will. With any luck, we will discover a large expanse of the elephant protruding from the magician’s pocket and so begin to understand how the trick works.

2
. Calling this an illusion may be a bit strong, and it might be more appropriate to think of this as a construction or fabrication. But the term
illusion
does convey the possibility that we place an erroneously large emphasis on how will appears to us and assume that this appearance is a deep insight.

Conscious Will

Conscious will is usually understood in one of two major ways. It is common to talk about conscious will as something that is experienced when we perform an action—actions feel willed or not, and this feeling of voluntariness or doing a thing “on purpose” is an indication of conscious will. It is also common, however, to speak of conscious will as a force of mind, a name for the causal link between our minds and our actions. One might assume that the
experience
of consciously willing an action and the
causation
of the action by the person’s conscious mind are the same thing. As it turns out, however, they are entirely distinct, and the tendency to confuse them is the source of the illusion of conscious will that this book is about. So, to begin, we’ll need to look into each in turn, first examining will as an experience and then considering will as a causal force.

The Experience of Conscious Will

Will is a feeling. David Hume was sufficiently impressed by this idea so that he proposed to define the will in this way, as “nothing but
the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind
” (1739, 399). This definition puts the person’s experience at the very center of the whole concept—the will is not some cause or force or motor in a person but rather is the personal conscious feeling of such causing, forcing, or motoring. Hume’s definition makes sense because the occurrence of this conscious experience is an absolute
must
for anyone to claim they’ve done something that they consciously willed.

Without an experience of willing, even actions that look entirely voluntary from the outside still fall short of qualifying as truly
willed
. Intentions, plans, and other thoughts can be experienced, and still the action isn’t willed if the person says it was not. If a person plans to take a shower, for example, and says that she intends to do it as she climbs into the water, spends fifteen minutes in there scrubbing up nicely, and then comes out reporting that she indeed seems to have had a shower but does not feel she had consciously willed it—who are we to say that she did will it? Consciously willing an action requires a feeling of doing (Ansfield and Wegner 1996), a kind of internal “oomph” that somehow certifies authentically that one has done the action. If she didn’t get that feeling about her showering, then there’s no way we could establish for sure whether she consciously willed it.

The fact that experiences of conscious will can only be established by self-reports (“I showered, yes I did”) would be quite all right if the self-reports always corresponded with some other outward indication of the experience. However, this correspondence doesn’t always happen. The experience of will that is so essential for the occurrence of consciously willed action does not always accompany actions that appear by other indications to be willed. Consider, for instance, the case of people who have
alien hand syndrome,
a neuropsychological disorder in which a person experiences one hand as operating with a mind of its own. One such per-son was the character played by Peter Sellers in
Dr. Strangelove
(
fig. 1.1
), who couldn’t control one hand and found it alternately steering his wheelchair astray and gesturing a Nazi salute.

Alien hand patients typically experience one hand as acting autonomously. They do not experience willing its actions and may find it moving at cross-purposes with their conscious intention. This syndrome is often linked with damage to the middle of the frontal lobe on the side of the brain opposite the affected hand (Gasquoine 1993), and in some people the difficulty can come and go over time (Leiguarda et al. 1993). Banks and colleagues (1989, 456) report an alien hand patient whose “left hand would tenaciously grope for and grasp any nearby object, pick and pull at her clothes, and even grasp her throat during sleep. . . . She slept with the arm tied to prevent nocturnal misbehavior. She never denied that her left arm and hand belonged to her, although she did refer to her limb as though it were an autonomous entity.”

Should the alien hand’s movements be classed as willed or unwilled? On the one hand (pun couldn’t be helped), the alien hand seems to do some fairly complicated things, acts we might class as willful and voluntary if we were just watching and hadn’t learned of the patient’s lamentable loss of control. In the case of another patient, for example, “While playing checkers on one occasion, the left hand made a move he did not wish to make, and he corrected the move with the right hand; however, the left hand, to the patient’s frustration, repeated the false move. On other occasions, he turned the pages of the book with one hand while the other tried to close it; he shaved with the right hand while the left one unzipped his jacket; he tried to soap a washcloth while the left hand kept putting the soap back in the dish; and he tried to open a closet with the right hand while the left one closed it” (Banks et al. 1989, 457). By the looks of it, the alien hand is quite willful. On the other hand (as the pun drags on), however, the patient does not experience these actions as consciously willed. One patient described the experience as a feeling that “someone from the moon” was controlling her hand (Geschwind et al. 1995, 803).

Figure 1.1

Dr. Strangelove. Courtesy Archive Photos.

Brain damage is not the only way that the experience of will can be undermined. Consider, for instance, the feelings of involuntariness that occur during hypnosis. Perhaps the most profound single effect of hypnosis is the feeling that your actions are happening to you rather than that you are doing them (Lynn, Rhue, and Weekes 1990). To produce this experience, a hypnotist might suggest, “Please hold your arm out to your side. Now, concentrate on the feelings in your arm. You will find that your arm is becoming heavy. It feels as though a great weight were pulling it down. It is so very heavy. It is being pulled down, down toward the ground. Your arm is heavy, very heavy. It is getting so heavy you can’t resist. Your arm is falling, falling down toward the ground.” With enough of this patter, many listeners iwll indeed experience the arm’s becoming heavy, and some will even find their arm falling down. When quizzed on it, these individuals often report that they felt no sense of moving their arm voluntarily but rather experienced the downward movement as something that happened to them. This doesn’t occur for everyone in this situation, only some proportion, but it nonetheless indicates that the experience of will can be manipulated in a voluntary action.

In the case of hypnotic involuntariness, the person has a very clear and well-rehearsed idea of the upcoming action. Admittedly, this idea of the action is really phrased more as an expectation (“My arm will fall”) than as an intention (“I will lower my arm”), but it nonetheless occurs before the action when an intention normally happens, and it provides a distinct preview of the action that is to come (Kirsch and Lynn 1998; Spanos 1986). Hypnotic involuntariness thus provides an example of the lack of experience of will that is even more perplexing than alien hand syndrome. With alien hand, the person simply doesn’t know what the hand will do, but with hypnosis, conscious will is lacking even when knowledge of the action is present. And without the
experience
of willing, even this foreknowledge of the action seems insufficient to move the action into the “consciously willed” category. If it doesn’t feel as though you did it, then it doesn’t seem that the will was operating.

Figure1.2

A table-turning séance. From
L’Illustration
(1853).

Another case of the absence of experience of will occurs in
table turning,
a curious phenomenon discovered in the spiritualist movement in Europe and America in the mid-nineteenth century (Ansfield and Wegner 1996; Carpenter 1888; Pearsall 1972). To create this effect, a group of people sit gathered around a table, all with their hands on its surface. If they are convinced that the table might move as the result of spirit intervention (or if they are even just hoping for such an effect) and sit patiently waiting for such movement, it is often found that the table
does
start to move after some time (
fig.1.2
). It might even move about the room or begin rotating so quickly that the participants can barely keep up. Carpenter (1888, 292-293) observed that “all this is done, not merely without the least consciousness on the part of the performers that they are exercising any force of their own, but for the most part under the full conviction that they are not.”

In one exemplary case, the Reverend N. S. Godfrey, his wife, and a friend one evening in June 1852 placed their hands on a small mahogany table and found that after forty-five minutes it began to move. With two family servants and the local schoolmaster as witnesses, the group carried out experiments and found that the table would move in various ways, some of which seemed particularly sinister. At one point something “caused the table to revolve rapidly,” yet then, as Godfrey relates, “a bible was quietly laid upon the table and it stopped! We were horror struck!” (1853, 23). Questions were asked of the table, and responses were given by a leg’s rising and knocking on the floor, and interchanges ensued that convinced those assembled that there was a devil inhabiting the table and causing it to move.

The table-turning curiosity was sufficiently celebrated and controversial to attract the attention of the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, who proceeded to test the source of the table movement. He placed force measurement devices between participants’ hands and the table, and found that the source of the movement was their hands and not the table (Faraday 1853). All one needs to do, actually, is to use a dusty table and observe the direction of the streaks left by participants’ slipping hands. The streaks run away from their hands in the direction opposite the table movement (as one would expect if people’s fingers slipped a bit as they pushed the table) rather than toward the movement (as one would expect if the table were pulling them along and their fingers were slipping as they fell behind). Apparently, in attributing the table movement to the spirit, the participants did not have sufficient experience of will to recognize the source of their own voluntary actions. Indeed, the Reverend Godfrey disputed Faraday’s findings vehemently: “[We] imparted the motion, he tells us,
which we did not
.”