Rebecca Wedge December 17, 2010 Professor McInerney PHIL 240: Final Essay

Perhaps one of the most well-known and equally contentious issues within philosophy is the topic of free will, or as Wegner and Carruthers refer to it, conscious will. This seems to suggest something slightly different, as if the issue is not really about whether or not man is free to make choices, but whether or not he can ever be truly conscious of the causes behind the choices he makes. And indeed, this is an important distinction laid out first by Wegner, and then by Carruthers as he critiques and modifies Wegners argument. They both ultimately arrive at the conclusion that conscious will, as typically conceived of, is nothing but an illusion. It is merely the experience of feeling as if we have control over own choices. In this paper I will examine the arguments set forth by both Carruthers and Wegner on the nature of conscious will. Further, I will argue that there are some important holes in both Carruthers and Wegners arguments, and that neither is capable of bringing a satisfactory close to this long-standing debate. First, let us examine what exactly it means to have conscious will. Wegners argument seems to be based on the idea that true conscious will is defined by our direct and immediate awareness of the forces which are behind our decision-making. Wegner completely rejects the idea that one could make a conscious decision resulting in an action that we may not

immediately see as a result of our previous decisions. Our actions are only produced by conscious will when the causal relationship between the thought and the action are immediately available to us. It will of course be Wegners claim that there is no such immediate awareness. Wegner believes that conscious will should be regarded merely as a feeling, more specifically that it is an illusion, that we have the experience of willing actions, but that our experience is not a true indication of having willed any action. As Wegner puts it the experience of consciously willing an action is not a direct indication that the conscious thought has caused the action. Wegners position is a deterministic one, and accordingly he argues further that we are never actually capable of determining the true forces guiding our actions. These are unconscious and will often have nothing to do with the reasons we try to rationally extract for our actions. For example, Wegner details a situation in which two participants one is the subject and one is a confederate who is aware of the experiment interact with a small board that is attached to a computer mouse. They are allowed to let the cursor on the screen, which displays a bunch of little pictures, move about freely until they are asked to stop on any picture they would like. During the experiment, the subject hears a list of objects read aloud, some of which correspond to pictures on the screen. The first participant is asked to rate how strongly they felt that they chose the stopping place themselves. They are not aware that the other person is a confederate who, on some trials, forces the mouse to a particular picture. Despite this, the

subject will consistently believe that they willed the choice themselves whenever the picture name is heard just before the stop. This is all that conscious will amounts to. It is simply the subjects feeling that they moved the mouse to a particular picture, even when they in fact had no control over where it stopped. The illusion of conscious will then, is the false idea that our conscious thoughts cause our actions. According to Wegner it arises from the simple mistake of confusing correlation with causality. Our thoughts come before an action, are almost always compatible with or related to that action, and so we conclude that if there are no other likely or obvious causes, our initial thought processes must have been the source of the action. We get the feeling of having consciously willed something. In fact, says Wegner, unconscious processes caused both the conscious thoughts and the action. It is a mechanism used by the mind, in which two separate unconscious processes occur. The first effectively establishes a causal link between thoughts and actions and the second is responsible for the actual experience of conscious will, giving rise to the most plausible interpretation of the actions we undertake according to the thoughts which we were conscious of at the time we undertook the action. This second interpretive mechanism is not directly involved with the formation of action, and is not necessarily concerned with producing an accurate representation of the process. Rather, its job is simply to infer the role that conscious thoughts played in the formation of an action, regardless of whether they actually played a role at all. Given this set-up, its not surprising, then, that there arise situations when the experience of

having consciously willed something affords little evidence as to whether we in fact caused the action. This seems to be an effective way of understanding certain occasions, such as the situation described earlier with the mouse and screen full of images, when the information present in our conscious understanding of the situation may lead us to falsely claim or dismiss our position as the initiator of an action. This idea is important to Wegners argument, and Carruthers points out that part of what defines the idea of conscious will is that we must be able to have immediate and recognitional access to all of our intentions. This particular component of their argument is that, as Carruthers puts it, Given that the mind-reading system has no direct access to events that take place in the practical reasoning system, but only to their globally broadcast effects, then our access to those events is always interpretative. Hence those events within practical reason dont qualify as conscious ones. Interpretation is not enough, because there is no guarantee of accuracy. This point does not seem particularly contentious; however, I think it is worth noting that Wegner and Carruthers treatment of this point makes situations involving proven false interpretations of motive seem much more common than they actually are. In fact, I would argue that in the example Wegner provides with the computer screen and mouse, the issue is not one of false interpretation. Given faulty information about the types of actions one can undertake, and about how far-reaching the consequences of those actions will be, it only makes sense that of course our interpretation of the

actions will be inaccurate. It seems plausible then, that the problem is less in our ability to interpret our actions and more in our ability, or lack thereof, to fully understand the actions we are undertaking. Faulty input will always lead to a faulty interpretation. Returning to the example at hand, we might even make the argument that the interpretation is not a false one. You could possibly undertake the movement of the mouse with the same intention, regardless of whether you are actually responsible for its movement on the screen or not. We cannot be certain that, had the subject actually been in control of the cursor, they would not have stopped over the same picture. If Wegner is going to argue that individuals cannot have access to their own intentions, it does not follow that a third-party observer would be able to understand the subjects intentions in moving the mouse much better. This seems like a plausible option since it can be difficult to tell the how movements of the mouse might actually correspond with movements of the cursor on the screen. This same mistake, regarding faulty sensory perception of an actions consequences may help to explain situations involving phantom limbs. Ultimately, one might argue, the subject is performing a real mental action perhaps actually endeavoring to move the mouse with the intent of landing on a certain picture but the way the action actually occurs may be different in that the subject did not actually move the cursor. If the cursor moves in accordance with their intent, they have no reason to doubt that they were the cause of its movement. The mistake here is in the details of how the action was carried out, not in the subjects ability to interpret their own motivations. This would seem to undermine

Wegners and Carruthers suggestion that the mind is easily fooled into accepting the wrong causes of an individuals action. Suppose we accept, however, that the mind is only capable of interpretation, that there is no direct access to our own motivations. Are we then forced to accept that conscious will is nothing but an illusion? I think not, because of something Carruthers lays out below: our conception of a decision to act, or our idea of what it is to form an intention to act, is the idea of an event that causes action either immediately, or through the operations of further reasoning processes that are purely first-order in nature (such as figuring out a sufficient means to the execution of that act). He says that the order of events must be this: The thought must occur, immediately followed by an action carrying out the intent of that thought. Wegners point in emphasizing that we are only able to interpret our motivations, is inherently tied in with the idea that we are never aware of our intentions before an action is undertaken. We undertake the action first, and then decide why we behaved in that way. Consider any action which fits this scenario. For example, without thinking, I reach over and grab a glass of water. When I stop to think about why I reached for the glass, I reason that I had been thirsty, though I was not overtly aware of my thirst causing me to reach over for the water. This is exactly what Wegner is talking about it, isnt it? It would seem that my conscious reason for grabbing the water, developed after the fact, has no causal relation with my action. But what if I had justified my action differently? What if, instead of reasoning that I was thirsty,

I had reasoned that I reached for the water because water is good to drink? Would this count as the exact same action? Perhaps the importance of my conscious thought, though it occurred after I acted, is that it separates my action now from potential actions later. Reaching over for water because I am thirsty and reaching over for water because I think it will improve my health are not the same actions. We may not be able to identify our later rationalization as the cause of our action, but it is indeed what makes it an action to begin with, it is what places our decisions in a meaningful context, and transforms mere bodily movements into a purposeful action. The feeling of conscious will is necessary in that it defines the action regardless of whether or not the thought actually caused the action; it is not merely an attempt at rationalization. All of this is important because it would seem to suggest that even if we cant know the exact causal origins of our actions, we can at least be confident that we have undertaken them, that we are the authors of our actions, so long as we accept that the conscious reasoning we provide for an action after the fact really does make a difference in the nature of that action, and that it is in fact what makes it an action. Neither Carruthers nor Wegner address the role that our conscious thoughts may have on the individuation of an action, and in doing so they leave open the idea that actions, as we understand them, cannot occur without conscious thoughts to explain them.

Works Cited: Carruthers, Peter. (2007). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Unpublished manuscript. Sharlow, Mark. (2007). Yes, We Have Conscious Will. Unpublished manuscript. Wegner, Daniel. The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press, 2002.