The Illusion of Conscious Will (53 page)

This chapter examines why the conscious experience of will might exist at all. Why, if this experience of will is not the cause of action, would we even go to the trouble of having it? What good is an epiphenomenon? The answer becomes apparent when we appreciate conscious will as a feeling that organizes and informs our understanding of our own agency. Conscious will is a signal with many of the qualities of an emotion, one that reverberates through the mind and body to indicate when we sense having authored an action. The idea that conscious will is an
emotion of authorship
moves beyond the standard way in which people have been thinking about free will and determinism, and presses toward a useful new perspective. This chapter explores how the emotion of authorship serves key functions in the domains of achievement and morality. It seems that the feeling that we are doing things serves as a basis for what we attempt to accomplish and how we judge ourselves to be morally right or wrong.

Free Will and Determinism

A book called
The Illusion of Conscious Will
certainly gives the impression of being a poke in the eye for readers who believe in free will. It is perfectly reasonable to look at the title and think the book is all about determinism and that it will not give the idea of free will a fair hearing. Of course, the line of thought here does take a decidedly deterministic approach. For all this, though, our discussion has actually been
about
the experience of free will, examining at length when people feel it and when they don’t. The special idea we have been exploring is to explain the experience of free will in terms of deterministic or mechanistic processes.

On the surface, this idea seems not to offer much in the way of a solution to the classic dichotomy between free will and determinism. How does explaining the feeling of will in terms of deterministic principles help us to decide which one is true? Most philosophers and people on the street see this as a conflict between two big ideas, and they call for a decision on which one is the winner. As it turns out, however, a decision is not really called for. The usual choice we are offered between these extremes is a false dichotomy. It is like asking, Shall we dance, or shall we move about the room in time to the music? The dichotomy melts when we explain one pole of the dimension in terms of the other. Still, this doesn’t sit well with anyone who is wedded to the standard view, so we need to examine just how the usual choice leads us astray.

The Usual Choice

Most of us think we understand the basic issue of free will and determinism. The question seems to be whether all our actions are determined by mechanisms beyond our control or whether at least some of them are determined by our free choice. When the alternatives are described this way, many people are happy to side with one or the other. Those who side with free will view members of the opposition as nothing but
robogeeks,
creatures who are somehow disposed to cast away the very essence of their humanity and embrace a personal identity as automatons (
fig. 9.1
). Those who opt for the deterministic stance view the opposition as little more than
bad scientists,
a cabal of confused mystics with no ability to understand how humanity fits into the grand scheme of things in the universe (
fig. 9.2
). In each other’s eyes, everyone comes out a loser.

The argument between these two points of view usually takes a simple form. The robogeeks point to the array of evidence that human behavior follows mechanistic principles and take great pride in whatever data or experiences accumulate to indicate that human beings are predictable by the rules of science. Meanwhile, the bad scientists ignore all this and simply explain that their own personal experience carries the day: They know they have conscious will.
¹
My favorite illustration of the impasse between these combatants is a dialogue that Mark Twain (1906, 7-8) imagined between an old man and a young man in
What Is Man?

Young Man:
You have arrived at man, now?

Old Man:
Yes.Man the machine—man the impersonal engine. Whatsoever a man is, is due to his
make,
and to the
influences
brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed,
commanded,
by
exterior
influences—
solely
. He
originates
nothing, not even a thought.

1
. At a session on conscious will at the Tucson 2000 Consciousness conference, for instance, the philosopher John Searle raised his hand (in response to his desire to do so) no less than four times in a fifteen-minute period to show that he indeed had conscious will. As noted by Datson (1982), “Defenders of the traditional theory of volition ultimately base their case on introspective empiricism.”

Figure 9.1

Admission of guilt by robogeeks.

Y. M.
:Oh, come! Where did I get my opinion that this which you are talking is all foolishness?

O. M.
:It is a quite natural opinion—indeed an inevitable opinion—but
you
did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors.
Personally
you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of
putting the borrowed materials together
. That was done
automatically
—by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery’s construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have
not even any command over it
.

Figure 9.2

Good scientist being bad. Courtesy Corbis Picture Library.

Y. M.
: This is too much. You think I could have formed no opinion but that one?

O. M.
: Spontaneously? No. And
you did not form that one;
your machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it.

Y. M.
: But don’t I tell it what to say?

O. M.
: There are certainly occasions when you haven’t time. The words leap out before you know what is coming.

Y. M.
: For instance?

O. M.
: Well, take a “flash of wit”—repartee. Flash is the right word. It is out instantly. There is no time to arrange the words. There is no thinking, no reflecting. Where there is a wit-mechanism it is automatic in its action, and needs no help. Where the wit-mechanism is lacking, no amount of study and reflection can manufacture the product.

Y. M.
: You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.

O. M.
: I do. Men perceive, and their brain-machines automatically combine the things perceived. That is all.

The protagonists here are arguing on different premises and so are getting nowhere. The young man (playing bad scientist) assumes as given the feeling of free will and thus marvels, apparently mouth agog, that some-one could even begin to claim it is not causal. The old man (playing robo-geek) points out examples that belie the feeling. And no one wins the argument. The usual clash fails on both sides because free will is a feeling, whereas determinism is a process. They are incommensurable.

The illogic of treating free will and determinism as equal opposites becomes particularly trenchant when we try to make free will do determinism’s causal job. What if, for example, we assume that free will is just like determinism, in that it is also a process whereby human behavior can be explained? Rather than all the various mechanistic engines that psychologists have invented or surmised in human beings that might cause their behavior, imagine instead a person in which there is installed a small unit called the Free Willer. This is not the usual psychological motor, the bundle of thoughts or motives or emotions or neurons or genes—instead, it is a black box that just
does things
. Many kinds of human abilities and tendencies can be modeled in artificially intelligent systems, after all, and it seems on principle that we should be able to design at least the rudiments of a psychological process that has the property of freely willing actions.

But what exactly do we install? If we put in a module that creates actions out of any sort of past experiences or memories, that fashions choices from habits or attitudes or inherited tendencies, we don’t get freedom—we get determinism. The Free Willer must be a mechanism that is
unresponsive to any past influence
. In
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting,
Daniel Dennett (1984) illustrates how hollow and unsatisfying free will of this kind might be. In essence, any such system makes sense only if it inserts some fickle indeterminacy into the person’s actions. Dennett points out that it is not particularly interesting or fun to have a coin flipper added to the works somewhere between “sensory input” and “behavior output.” Who would want free will if it is nothing more than an internal coin flip? This is not what we mean when we talk about our own conscious will. Trying to understand free will as though it were a kind of psychological causal process leads only to a mechanism that has no relation at all to the experience of free will that we each have every day.

People appreciate free will as a kind of personal power, an ability to do what they want to do. Voltaire (1694-1778) expressed this intuition in saying, “Liberty then is only and can be only the power to do what one will” (1752, 145). He argued that this feeling of freedom is not served at all by the imposition of randomness, asking, “Would you have everything at the pleasure of a million blind caprices?” (144). The experience of will comes from having our actions follow our wishes, not from being able to do things that do not follow from anything. And, of course, we do not cause our wishes. The things we want to do come into our heads. Again quoting Voltaire, “Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. . . . The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. The free will is an expression absolutely devoid of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated” (143). A Free Willer, in short, would not generate the experience of conscious will.

Our personal Free Willer also wouldn’t satisfy our desire to establish causality in the person. This classic problem with the theory of free will was described nicely by William James in his essay on
Pragmatism:
“If a ‘free’ act be a sheer novelty, that comes not
from
me, the previous me, but
ex nihilo,
and simply tacks itself on to me, how can
I
, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent
character
that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The chaplet of my days tumbles into a case of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine” (1910, 53). It seems quite arbitrary to single out the person for praise or blame when nothing about the person other than this random causation module can be assigned causality or responsibility. Responsibility would seem to be something we would want to attach to some lasting quality of the person. The Free Willer leaves the person responsible merely for having such a device (Miller, Gordon, and Buddie 1999).