The Illusion of Conscious Will (37 page)

There are many examples of acting “on behalf” of one’s group when the group couldn’t care less about or even disapproves of one’s action. The husband who buys tickets for the couple to go to the Monster Truck Noise Derby may be thinking this is something his wife would actually want them to attend. And the wife who buys tickets for them to see the Vegetarian Ballet may also be laboring under the false assumption that this is the group will. People do things in pursuit of group goals all the time, often without even checking on whether the intentions they have formulated for the group correspond with what the group would want. When a white supremacist acts on behalf of the “white race,” when a religious politician acts on behalf of moral individuals everywhere, when a feminist acts on behalf of all women—when any individual acts as a group member rather than as an individual—there is the ever-present possibility that the intentions of the self may unknowingly be substituted for those of the group. Individuals may project actions to the groups to which they belong, causing the group to act but failing to recognize that the action may be solely their own.

Fictions of Action Projection

People are profoundly interested in maintaining the fiction that they have conscious will. Indeed, the lengths to which they will go to uphold this illusion are amazing, particularly when they get caught up in trying to be ideal agents. But here we have run into a phenomenon that is the exact opposite of such illusion making. Action projection involves frittering away one’s precious action, squandering its authorship on other people who really have not willed it at all. To produce such projection, there must be some powerful forces at work, forces strong enough to dispel the quite normal human tendency to grasp every loose action we find lying in the shadows and to hold it up to the light to claim “I did it!”

Action projection must involve errors that are so befuddling that they can counteract the fundamental illusion of will. Although there are no doubt a number of these, it is possible to summarize much of what we’ve explored in this chapter in terms of just four such errors or fictions—the fictions of inaction, reaction, stimulation, and collaboration—a quartet of mistakes people make that seem to underlie many of the cases of action projection. These mistakes are possible because of the basic obscurity of the source of our own action—the fact that we are not intrinsically informed of our own authorship and instead must build it up virtually out of perceptions of the thoughts and actions we witness in consciousness. Starting in this essential muddle, we can become confused and fall into action projection as a result of the following fictions.

The Inaction Fiction

Many cases of action projection arise simply because people are not conscious of everything they do. They think that they are inactive, when in truth they are doing something. This was the basis of the autokinetic effect—when the unnoticed movements of one’s own body and eyes are attributed to a stationary light source. By the same token, believing in his own inaction was the underlying factor in von Osten’s attribution of cleverness to Hans the horse. The trainer was performing an unconscious action—an action with no preview in the form of conscious thought and no subsequent evidence of its occurrence in the form of an attention-drawing bodily movement. The actions we don’t notice ourselves doing may not escape the attention of others, however, particularly if the others are as clever as Hans. The responses these others make to what they see us doing may end up being clever, interesting, unusual, hostile, loving, or otherwise meaningful. We will fail to appreciate that we have actually produced that meaning, however, as long as we continue to believe we have done nothing. Because we can never know all the little quirks of our faces and bodies, all the yawns and grimaces and quivers and side-ways looks and random nervous glances our bodies give off, we will forever be reading more into our social world than is there to begin with. People are destined by the lack of consciousness of much of their own behavior to attribute to others the impetus for what they themselves have set in motion.

The Reaction Fiction

People abdicate action to others by assuming that they themselves are simply reacting to what the other has done. This basis of action projection is important in how facilitated communication operates. Facilitators typically assume that the communicator is acting sensibly and that their own behavior at the keyboard is merely a matter of finishing, polishing, or bringing out the meaning that was already there in the message that was started. The reaction fiction operates acutely when people punctuate their interaction in a way that interprets their own behavior as a response to the other person’s behavior rather than as a cause of the other person’s behavior. Because behaviors of people are interleaved in interaction, the assumption of a
purely reactive stance
is inevitably false in almost every case. Actions are both causes and effects in the cycle of interaction, and a set to assume that one’s actions are only effects will fail to acknowledge whatever causal features they may have. In thinking that we are merely reacting to others, we can create (in our minds) other people who are fantastically effective—communicating beyond their abilities (as in FC) or dominating the interaction with superhuman competence (as in the wife/husband vicious circle of interaction). Such curiously strong will from others should be a clue.

The Stimulation Fiction

Another way action projection comes about is through the mistaken idea that one is merely stimulating, helping, or prompting the other person to act. When one interprets one’s own behavior as merely getting the other person started, the power of these prompts can be seriously underestimated. Many of the behaviors that facilitators did to stimulate communicators in FC were the beginnings of words or sentences that eventually became whole communications. And the interpretation of one’s behavior as “helping” is similarly likely to produce the projection of action to the person being helped. This fiction is particularly likely to arise in interactions with beloved animals or babies, when we are radically disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt at every turn. When we desperately want baby to take a first step, or the pet to survive an hour on the carpet with no mistakes, we can give our own contributions so little regard that we merrily project success to our charges. We believe, certainly, that we have stimulated them to behave. But we regard this stimulation less as causal and more as helping to provide the proper conditions for the other to be causal. Thus, we project our action onto them. Next time when we’re not there, they will fall down or wet the carpet, depending on who’s who.

The Collaboration Fiction

Action projection is also likely to ensue when people become involved in what they believe to be collaborative action. In the process of acting together, the individuals may often find it useful to assume that their own intentions are those of the group. In many coaction situations, this is probably a very realistic and efficient assumption. Yet there may be individual intentions that depart notably from what the group might decide were it polled, and the assumption of agreement could thus be wrong. The fiction of coaction in this case would result in individual action that issues from the individual but that is incorrectly believed to be emanating from the group. The projection of action to close partners or to groups with whom one frequently collaborates would seem to be particularly likely because the assumption of agreement in these instances would be most pervasive.

Despite all we have explored in this chapter, the projection of action to others is still not well understood in current scientific psychology. For this reason, the four fictions outlined here should be taken as guides to potentially important sources of action projection, not as bedrock principles. The phenomena of action projection do seem to have common features, but much new research will need to be done on these before we can begin to know when and how action projection is most likely to occur.

7

Virtual Agency

When people project action to imaginary agents, they create virtual agents, apparent sources of their own action. This process underlies spirit possession and dissociative identity disorder as well as the formation of the agent self.

A device should not be described as being a rational agent . . . unless there are specific grounds for attributing to the device the understanding (or apparent understanding, since the illusion is all we are interested in at this stage) that it
is
a rational agent.

Leonard Angel,
How to Build a Conscious Machine
(1989)

The ventriloquist Edgar Bergen became famous in the 1930s with his dummy Charlie McCarthy (
fig. 7.1
). His act was immensely popular on radio, and there were many news items on Bergen’s colorful life and times. One account goes like this:

One day, a visitor came into Bergen’s room and found him talking—not rehearsing—with Charlie. Bergen was asking Charlie a number of philosophical questions about the nature of life, virtue, and love. Charlie was responding with brilliant Socratic answers. When Bergen noticed that he had a visitor, he turned red and said he was talking with Charlie, the wisest person he knew. The visitor pointed out that it was Bergen’s own mind and voice coming through the wooden dummy. Bergen replied, “Well, I guess ultimately it is, but I ask Charlie these questions and he answers, and I haven’t the faintest idea of what he’s going to say and I’m astounded by his brilliance.” (Siegel 1992, 163)
¹

The experience of losing the authorship of one’s action to an imagined agent is the topic of this chapter. This transformation is sufficiently bizarre that it has been something of an obsession in both the popular press and in scientific literature. Much of the liveliness of the field of anthropology, for instance, has to do with the documentation of intriguing practices of spirit possession in various cultures around the world. Cases of spirit mediumship and channeling in this culture, meanwhile, as well as manifestations of the Holy Spirit such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), are ever-popular topics of press coverage and cable TV documentaries. And the phenomena of dissociative identity disorder (DID; known earlier as multiple personality) have been the focus of novels and films, not to mention a matter of ongoing active debate in scientific psychology (Acocella 1999; Gleaves 1996; Putnam 1989; Ross 1988; Spanos 1994).

1.
Unfortunately, the source of this story is not documented by Siegel. I’ve not been able to verify it from other sources, so the account may be a bit of Hollywood mythology. The experience it suggests does occur verifiably in related circumstances, however, so I include it here for its entertainment value.

Figure 7.1

Edgar Bergen with dummy Charlie McCarthy and their friend Marilyn Monroe. From Bergen (1984).

Most people faced with accounts of these anomalies of conscious agency have great difficulty imagining something like this happening to them. What would it be like to have a spirit take over your body? Where would “you” go at that time? If you had multiple personalities, what would it be like to switch between them? And if you leave one “self” and become another, what was the new one doing for your whole life until it just now popped into being? There are skeptics who reject these phenomena as faked (e.g., Aldridge-Morris 1989; Spanos 1994), perhaps in part because it seems so difficult to understand what it would be like to have this happen. Indeed, Aristotle’s theory of spirit possession in ancient Greece involved suspicion that the possessed were merely pretending, play-acting the role of a spirit as in the theater (Stoller 1995). We can’t appreciate how a subjective self might go away or how another might be created because we
are
such selves and can’t imagine going out of existence and coming back as something else. To confront the topic of virtual authorship, then, is to try to understand how the very seat of human agency can be transformed (Matthews 1998; Wilkes 1988). The standard one person/one agent equation is seriously challenged, and we are vexed by the question of what it is like to be the person who changes subjective senses of self in this way. How could Bergen play the dummy and yet think that the dummy was someone else?

Our explorations in prior chapters have given us some helpful tools for thinking about these puzzling phenomena. In essence, these curiosities of agency can be understood as forms of action projection and are likely to follow the principles of apparent mental causation. However, they do so with an important twist. To this point, the examples of action projection we have examined are errors in the partitioning of causation among real agents—errors in which the person perceives that some other agent is causing action that is really attributable to the self. In these cases, there are no necessary implications of action projection for the identity of the first person—the one who is doing the projecting—in that this person can certainly continue to exist and be the author of other actions even as the action projection is going on. It is just that some of the self’s actions are lost, transferred to an other’s authorship. What happens, though, when there is in fact
no other real agent
present? When a person attributes agency for the self’s actions to a spirit, to God, to another personality, to a wooden dummy, or to some agent or entity only the person has imagined, where do the actions go? And more important—what remains? In particular, what is left when all one’s actions are projected away from self to some imaginary agent that is not self? Is anything left over that one could experience as self?