Why do racist oppression and capitalist exploitation often seem so inescapable and intractable? To describe and explain adequately the persistence of racist ideology, to specify its role in the maintenance of racial capitalism, and to imagine the conditions of its abolition, we must understand racist ideology as a form of false consciousness. False consciousness gets things “right” at the level of appearance, but it mistakes that appearance for a “deep” or essential truth. This chapter articulates a novel, positive account of (...) first-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about the world that are sustained and superficially justified by objective social arrangements, and of second-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about how one has come to hold the beliefs that one does. To dismantle racist ideology requires political movements that craft theoretical interventions highlighting the inessentiality and contingency of despised racial groups’ oppressed status, as well as practical interventions aimed at directly undermining the oppressive conditions that are reflected in racist beliefs about the “naturalness” or “appropriateness” of these groups’ degraded status. (shrink)

This paper resolves a paradox concerning colour constancy. On the one hand, our intuitive, pre-theoretical concept holds that colour constancy involves invariance in the perceived colours of surfaces under changes in illumination. On the other, there is a robust scientific consensus that colour constancy can persist in cerebral achromatopsia, a profound impairment in the ability to perceive colours. The first stage of the solution advocates pluralism about our colour constancy capacities. The second details the close relationship between colour constancy and (...) contrast. The third argues that achromatopsics retain a basic type of colour constancy associated with invariants in contrast processing. The fourth suggests that one person-level, conscious upshot of such processing is the visual awareness of chromatic contrasts ‘at’ the edges of surfaces, implicating the ‘colour for form’ perceptual function. This primitive type of constancy sheds new light on our most basic perceptual capacities, which mark the lower borders of representational mind. (shrink)

The academic journey to a widely acknowledged Machine Consciousness is anticipated to be an emotional one. Both in terms of the active debate provoked by the subject and a hypothesized need to encapsulate an analogue of emotions in an artificial system in order to progress towards machine consciousness. This paper considers the inspiration that the concepts related to emotion may contribute to cognitive systems when approaching conscious-like behavior. Specifically, emotions can set goals including balancing explore versus exploit, facilitate action (...) in unknown domains and modify existing behaviors, which are explored in cognitive robotics experiments. (shrink)

This study, based upon empirical phenomenological research, explores an essential phenomenon of human existence: the interpermeating communion of self and world. In interpermeation, the supposed separation of self and world is transcended. The being, energy, life, and meaning of the world "flow into" one's self and become integrated as part of who one is; simultaneously, one's being, consciousness, awareness, and self "flow into" the world and become part of the world. Conscious of interpermeation, we tend to understand ourselves and (...) reality differently, and to be more aware and compassionate with others and the natural world: awareness of interpermeation generates love as love generates awareness of interpermeation. A hermeneutic dialogue is offered between existential phenomenology, transpersonal psychology, and the world's spiritual traditions. (shrink)

Unger has recently argued that if you are the only thinking and experiencing subject in your chair, then you are not a material object. This leads Unger to endorse a version of Substance Dualism according to which we are immaterial souls. This paper argues that this is an overreaction. We argue that the specifically Dualist elements of Unger’s view play no role in his response to the problem; only the view’s structure is required, and that is available to Unger’s opponents. (...) We outline one such non-Dualist view, suggest how to resolve the dispute, respond to some objections, and argue that ours is but one of many views that survive Unger’s challenge. All these views are incompatible with microphysicalism. So Unger’s discussion does contain an insight: if you are the only conscious subject in your chair, then microphsyicalism is false. Unger’s mistake was to infer Substance Dualism from this; for microphysicalism is not the only alternative to Dualism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Theory of Self-Conscious Life by Guido SeddoneWill DesmondSEDDONE, Guido. Hegel’s Theory of Self-Conscious Life. Leiden: Brill, 2023. 155 pp. Cloth, $138.00Guido Seddone’s monograph explores an ensemble of issues centering on what he terms Hegelian “naturalism.” He argues that “Hegel’s philosophy represents a novel version of naturalism since it stresses the mutual dependence between nature and spirit, rather than just conceiving of spirit as a substance (...) emerging and separating from bodily natural requisites.” Seddone avoids scholarly exegeses to address instead “theoretical and systematic aspects of the Hegelian philosophy.” He focusses on “life” and “self-consciousness” as the conceptual keys to those parts of Hegel that remain compelling for relevant contemporary debates. “This book is, therefore, based on the dialogue between Hegel [End Page 361] and contemporary thinkers and strives to enhance our understanding of theoretical and practical issues and to widen the grammar of the philosophical thought.” The book’s chapters proceed from the more abstract to the more concrete—essentially from issues of logic, epistemology, and psychology to morality, society, and history.Chapter 1 (“Science of Logic: The Logical Premises of Hegel’s Naturalism”) argues that the categories of “Teleology” and “Life” in Hegel’s Science of Logic mark the critical transition in his naturalism from the sciences of physics (“Mechanism”) and chemistry (“Chemism”) to biology, as well as from external nature to inner self-consciousness and cognition. Seddone helpfully points to Hegel’s revisions of Kant’s subordination of teleological language (merely heuristic) to mechanical explanation. Most promising is the comparison of the “self-referring negativity” of Hegelian “life” to discussions by Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela of the cell—whose permeable membrane enables it to be more than its merely chemical environment.Chapter 2 (“Self-Consciousness”) takes a rather bird’s-eye approach to the Phenomenology of Spirit, offering a basic reading of Hegelian self-consciousness and Geist in relation to the Cartesian cogito and Kantian unity of apperception. Scattered remarks about animal desire and the master–slave relation could be clarified to better explore a naturalistic basis of the Hegelian conception of mind. One is struck by the dearth of specific texts from the section “Self-Consciousness”: Seddone seems content with some well-known quotations (for example, Geist as an “I that is We and We that is I”) punctuating large generalizations.Chapter 3 does not quite live up to its title (“The Hegelian Theory about the (Human) Biological Organism”) in that it focuses primarily on Hegel’s “treatise about habits” in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Here habit is construed as a second nature, and hence a further step toward self-conscious, relational mind: Habits are “universal ways of the soul, i.e. ways in which individual soul [sic] incorporates feelings by evolving general rules and practices.”The last section of chapter 4 (“Extended and Embodied Mind”) reverts to habits as moments of the feeling soul but dissociates Hegel’s notion of Verleiblichung from contemporary discussions of embodied mind. By contrast, Seddone argues for retranslating Hegelian Geist as “common mind” and juxtaposes this with the related concept of mind (in, for example, Philip Pettit) as “extended” through social entities, with the result that Hegel’s approach is praised as “the state-of-the-art of this topic.”Chapter 5 (“Natural and Self-conscious Agency”) is perhaps the clearest chapter as it presents the dialectic of the abstractly universal will in the initial sections of Philosophy of Right, links this and the Hegelian conception of free agency to his logical category of “actuality,” and proceeds to an illuminating contrast of the Hobbesian and Hegelian visions of society and state. [End Page 362]In tackling attempts to reconcile “Normativity and Freedom,” chapter 6 spends over six pages rehearsing the basics of Kantian autonomy before turning to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically the master–slave dialectic (again) as the critical moment in the evolution of social norms. “My thesis is that self-conscious life needs recognition in order to achieve the higher form of independence created by social acknowledgement and justification, what [sic] fosters the condition for an authoritative reason that can be socially... (shrink)

Michael Burawoy’s recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu’s own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master’s thought, and set about revising and extending it, in the same way as Marxists did of their own master. This (...) article responds by doing precisely that. After clarifying a different reading of misrecognition, symbolic violence and habitus, it draws out a Bourdieusian theory of social change and a ‘thicker’ conception of contemporary social orders that can accommodate or dissolve Burawoy’s arguments while maintaining fundamental separation from the Marxist project. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible to perceptually represent colour relations between two objects, without perceptually representing their colours. Such primitive relational colour representation goes against the orthodox view that we represent colour relations by virtue of representing colours. I first argue that under certain assumptions, PRCR is conceptually and even nomically possible. I then compare two possible models of PRCR: the linguaform model and chromatic edge model, the latter involving iconic rather than discursive representation. I argue that the chromatic (...) edge model gives a better account of putative cases of PRCR in cerebral achromatopsia, a rare disorder of colour consciousness. (shrink)

The contribution of Sense-Certainty to the entire program of the Phenomenology of Spirit is in the proof of the inevitability of making differences. In the Introduction, the distinction between consciousness and object was presented, which justification and self-reflexive structure has to be developed in the course of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The first, elementary step is realized in the Sense-Certainty that – under the programmatic formula of “immediacy” – claims to dissolve the distinction between consciousness and object and even, more (...) generally, the very structure of distinction itself. It will be shown in what way this claim cannot be fulfilled. On the contrary, distinctions that male a difference – those, that separate the distinguished sides from one another – turn out to be inevitable. (shrink)

The essay hypothesizes a norm condition of stasis—the mood of sentient peace occupied on a quiet porch. From there the psyche is drawn upward by concept, into the benign/abstract world or downward into the pre-verbal which links us with prespeech man/woman. Is there any default position in this map of the positions of consciousness?

The two essays included here are parts of a longer study of temporality, and the genesis of the “religious.” The first part, “Multiple Nows,” depicts a universe in which a present to past relation is establishable from any and every point in consciousness. The resulting perspective differs from that offered by the linear timeline of chronological history. Remembering where I put my glasses is an historicizing act, as fully as is remembering when the Battle of Zama was fought or who (...) won there. On this alternate view of temporality the genesis of the historical perspective is the historicizing subject. The second essay, “The History of a House,” places the observer before an historical structure, then asks where the historicity in the structure is. We discover that the historicity is put there by the observer/subject. This discovery resembles our earlier discovery that historicity is generated by an infinite sequence of nows. The two essays converge on a description of historical cognition as subject-generated. (shrink)

The two essays included here are parts of a longer study of temporality, and the genesis of the “religious.” The first part, “Multiple Nows,” depicts a universe in which a present to past relation is establishable from any and every point in consciousness. The resulting perspective differs from that offered by the linear timeline of chronological history. Remembering where I put my glasses is an historicizing act, as fully as is remembering when the Battle of Zama was fought or who (...) won there. On this alternate view of temporality the genesis of the historical perspective is the historicizing subject. The second essay, “The History of a House,” places the observer before an historical structure, then asks where the historicity in the structure is. We discover that the historicity is put there by the observer/subject. This discovery resembles our earlier discovery that historicity is generated by an infinite sequence of nows. The two essays converge on a description of historical cognition as subject-generated. (shrink)

Bringing together literary scholars, computer scientists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and scholars from affiliated disciplines, this collection of essays offers important and timely insights into the pasts, presents, and, above all, possible futures of Artificial Intelligence. This book covers topics such as ethics and morality, identity and selfhood, and broader issues about AI, addressing questions about the individual, social, and existential impacts of such technologies. Through the works of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Ann Leckie, Iain (...) M. Banks, and Martha Wells, alongside key visual productions such as Ex Machina, Westworld, and Her, contributions illustrate how science fiction might inform potential futures as well as acting as a springboard to bring disciplinary knowledge to bear on significant developments of Artificial Intelligence. Addressing a broad, interdisciplinary audience, both expert and non-expert readers gain an in-depth understanding of the wide range of pressing issues to which Artificial Intelligence gives rise, and the ways in which science fiction narratives have been used to represent them. Using science fiction in this manner enables readers to see how even fictional worlds and imagined futures have very real impacts on how we understand these technologies. As such, readers are introduced to theoretical positions on Artificial Intelligence through fictional works as well as encouraged to reflect on the diverse aspects of Artificial Intelligence through its many philosophical, social, legal, scientific, and cultural ramifications. (shrink)

In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the relation of consciousness, the will, and our intentional and voluntary actions. Wegner claims that our experience and common sense view according to which we can influence our behavior roughly the way we experience that we do it is an illusion.

Daniel Dennett’s compatibilism based on redefining free will via broadening the concept of self to include unconscious processes seems to disappoint certain intuitions. As Sam Harris points out, it changes the subject from the free will we seem to intuitively care about – conscious free will. This compatibilism is untenable since conscious will seems to be an illusion. However, if we take Dennett’s idea of “atmosphere of free will” and view conscious (...) class='Hi'>will as an important concept or “user illusion” which is one of the atmosphere’s building blocks, we can see how a new compatibilism could be reached. Although from the point of view of scientific thinking conscious will seems illusory, inspired by Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of manifest and scientific images we can start to understand free will as existing on its own conceptual level. The confusion stems from mixing the two frameworks. Kompatibilismus Daniela Dennetta, založený na redefinování svobodné vůle skrze rozšíření konceptu „já“ o nevědomé procesy, se zdá být v nesouladu s jistými intuicemi. Jak upozorňuje Sam Harris, vyhýbá se té svobodné vůli, o kterou nám zřejmě intuitivně jde – vědomé svobodné vůli. Tento kompatibilismus je neudržitelný, protože vědomá vůle se zdá být iluzí. Když ale přijmeme Dennettovu myšlenku „atmosféry svobodné vůle“ a nahlédneme vědomou vůli jako důležitý koncept nebo „uživatelskou iluzi“, která je součástí této atmosféry, můžeme najít cestu k novému kompatibilismu. Ačkoliv se z vědeckého pohledu zdá být vědomá vůle iluzí, inspirováni koncepcí zjevného a vědeckého obrazu Wilfrida Sellarse můžeme porozumět svobodné vůli jako existující na své vlastní konceptuální úrovni. Zmatení přichází právě s mícháním zmiňovaných dvou rámců. (shrink)

Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred (...) Mele shows that the evidence offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions. In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this. Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book. (shrink)

We all seem to think that we do the acts we do because we consciously choose to do them. This commonsense view is thrown into dispute by Benjamin Libet's eyebrow-raising experiments, which seem to suggest that conscious will occurs not before but after the start of brain activity that produces physical action.

We all seem to think that we do the acts we do because we consciously choose to do them. This commonsense view is thrown into dispute by Benjamin Libet's eyebrow-raising experiments, which seem to suggest that conscious will occurs not before but after the start of brain activity that produces physical action.

Empirical evidence challenges many of the assumptions that underlie traditional philosophical and commonsense conceptions of human agency. It has been suggested that this evidence threatens also to undermine free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, I will focus on the purported threat to moral responsibility. The evidence challenges assumptions concerning the ability to exercise conscious control and to act for reasons. This raises an apparent challenge to moral responsibility as these abilities appear to be necessary for (...) morally responsible agency. I will argue that this challenge collapses once the underlying conditions on moral responsibility are specified in sufficient detail. I will argue, in other words, that the empirical evidence does not support a challenge to the assumption that we are, in general, morally responsible agents. In the final section, I will suggest that empirical research on human agency is nevertheless relevant to various questions about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Recent studies within neuroscience and cognitive psychology have explored the place of conscious willing in the generation of purposive action. Some have argued that certain findings indicate that the commonsensical view that we control many of our actions through conscious willing is largely or wholly illusory. I rebut such arguments, contending that they typically rest on a conflation of distinct phenomena. Nevertheless, I also suggest that traditional philosophical accounts of the will need to be revised: a raft (...) of studies indicate that control over one’s own will among human beings is limited, fragile, and – insofar as control depends to an extent on conscious knowledge – admitting of degrees. I briefly sketch several dimensions along which freedom of the will may vary over time and across agents. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will. I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left out in Wegner’s (...) account of conscious will. This substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will (MIT Press, 2002). I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left (...) out in Wegner’s account of conscious will. This substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

Wegner (2002) fails to (1) distinguish conscious will and voluntariness; (2) account for everyday willed acts; and (3) individuate thoughts and acts. Wegner incorrectly implies that (4) we experience acts as willed only when they are caused by unwilled thoughts; (5) thoughts are never true causes of actions; and (6) we experience ourselves as first performing mental acts which then cause our intentional actions.

Wegner (Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press) argues that conscious will is an illusion, citing a wide range of empirical evidence. I shall begin by surveying some of his arguments. Many are unsuccessful. But one—an argument from the ubiquity of self-interpretation—is more promising. Yet is suffers from an obvious lacuna, offered by so-called ‘dual process’ theories of reasoning and decision making (Evans, J., & Over, D. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. Psychology Press; Stanovich, (...) K. (1999). Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum; Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge University Press). I shall argue that this lacuna can be filled by a plausible a priori claim about the causal role of anything deserving to be called ‘a will.’ The result is that there is no such thing as conscious willing: conscious will is, indeed, an illusion. (shrink)

This essay aims to explore imitation in social contexts. The argument that summarizes my claim is that the perception of other people’s behaviour conditions the agent in imitating that behaviour, as evidence from social psychology holds :893–910, 1999; Bargh and Ferguson in Psychol Bull 126:925–945, 2000; Bargh and Ferguson in Trends Cogn Sci 8:33–39, 2004), but what the agent perceives and experiences becomes potential motives for her actions only through her identification with a particular way of being and acting. Therefore, (...) although the agent’s actions are conditioned by perceptual stimuli, the latter are not the cause of the actions. The agent is the ultimate cause. That is, a convergence between perceptual stimuli and conscious will. I take this latter conclusion to suggest a compatibilist approach whereby action in a social situation would require the perceptual conditioning as much as the freedom and consciousness of the agent. (shrink)

We suggest that certain experiences reported by patients with schizophrenia show that priority, consistency, and exclusivity are not sufficient for the experience of willing an action. Furthermore, we argue that even if priority, consistency, and exclusivity cause the experience of being the author of an action, this does not mean that conscious will is an illusion.

Rakover has thought about the nature of explanation for a long time and he has written some insightful pieces on the possibility of incorporating mentalistic language into serious explanations of our activities. Here he takes an extreme tack and grounds his arguments on the oldest of all chestnuts, the mind/body problem. Ironically, as an undergraduate he may have misinterpreted the words of his favorite professor so as to lead him to agonize for decades over the proper interpretation of private experience (...) [for him it’s “mentalistic”]. This has ultimately led to this article, proposing a Multi-Explanation Framework that mixes what he calls “mentalistic” and “mechanistic” elements in behavioral sequences, incorporating a Mentalistic Purposive Explanation Scheme that has the virtue, in his eyes, of adding what “radical behaviorism” lacks. The reader is left with the impression that the explanations produced using this framework would seem more satisfying only because the vocabulary involved is the one we learned as children, and that their usefulness would be no more than that of the folk psychology that has always prevailed. Rakover and many others confuse radical behaviorism with behavior analysis, which leads to tiresome and pointless critiques of the former. (shrink)

The commentators' responses to The Illusion of Conscious Will reveal a healthy range of opinions – pro, con, and occasionally stray. Common concerns and issues are summarized here in terms of 11 “frequently asked questions,” which often center on the theme of how the experience of conscious will supports the creation of the self as author of action.

My aim in this article is to ascertain whether any of the interesting phenomena that Daniel Wegner discusses in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) falsify a certain hypothesis about intentional actions. Here is a rough, preliminary statement of the hypothesis: Whenever human agents perform an overt intentional action, A, some intention of theirs is a cause of A. The hypothesis is refined in section. In section 2, I turn to this article's main question.

In this paper I examine Daniel M. Wegner's line of argument against the causal efficacy of conscious will, as presented in Wegner's book "The Illusion of Conscious Will" (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). I argue that most of the evidence adduced in the book can be interpreted in ways that do not threaten the efficacy of conscious will. Also, I argue that Wegner's view of conscious will is not an empirical thesis, (...) and that certain views of consciousness and the self are immune to Wegner's line of argument. (shrink)

The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, (...) dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will – cases when actions occur without will or will occurs without action. This book brings these cases together with research evidence from laboratories in psychology to explore a theory of apparent mental causation. According to this theory, when a thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action, is consistent with the action, and appears exclusive of salient alternative causes of the action, we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action. Experiences of conscious will thus arise from processes whereby the mind interprets itself – not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced. Key Words: apparent mental causation; automatism; conscious will; determinism; free will; perceived control. (shrink)

Wegner's conclusion that conscious will is an illusion follows from a key omission in his analysis. Although he describes conscious will as an experience, akin to one of the senses, he omits its objective correlate. The degree to which behavior can be influenced by its consequences (voluntariness) provides an objective correlate for conscious will. With conscious will anchored to voluntariness, the illusion disappears.

The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, (...) dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced. (shrink)

We often consciously will our own actions. This experience is so profound that it tempts us to believe that our actions are caused by consciousness. It could also be a trick, however – the mind’s way of estimating its own apparent authorship by drawing causal inferences about relationships between thoughts and actions. Cognitive, social, and neuropsychological studies of apparent mental causation suggest that experiences of conscious will frequently depart from actual causal processes and so might not reflect (...) direct perceptions of conscious thought causing action. (shrink)

Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological (RPs). With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning, the main negative RP shift begins at about200 ms. Control experiments, in which a skin stimulus was timed (S), helped evaluate each subject's error in reporting the clock times for awareness of any perceived event.

Given its ubiquitous presence in everyday experience, it is surprising that the phenomenology of doing—the experience of being an agent—has received such scant attention in the consciousness literature. But things are starting to change, and a small but growing literature on the content and causes of the phenomenology of first-person agency is beginning to emerge.2 One of the most influential and stimulating figures in this literature is Daniel Wegner. In a series of papers and his book The Illusion of (...) class='Hi'>Conscious Will (ICW) Wegner has developed.. (shrink)

This book is a tour de force in showing that what we believe to be actions dictated by conscious will are not, in fact, wholly dictated by conscious will. However, Wegner has fallen into the trap of making claims that go beyond his data to make his case more compelling and newsworthy. Psychology needs to be informed by common sense.

While epiphenomenalism—i.e., the claim that the mental is a causally otiose byproduct of physical processes that does not itself cause anything—is hardly ever mentioned in philosophical discussions of free will, it has recently come to play a crucial role in the scientific attack on free will led by neuroscientists and psychologists. This paper is concerned with the connection between epiphenomenalism and the claim that free will is an illusion, in particular with the connection between epiphenomenalism and willusionism, (...) i.e., with the thesis that there is empirical evidence for a thoroughgoing skepticism with regard to free will that is based on the claim that mental states are epiphenomena. The paper discusses four arguments for willusionism that in some form or other appeal to epiphenomenalism and argues that three of them can be discarded relatively easily. The fourth one, based on Daniel Wegner’s theory of apparent mental causation and his claim that free will is an illusion because the feeling of conscious will is epiphenomenal with regard to the corresponding voluntary actions, is dealt with in more detail. The overall verdict is negative: there is no empirical evidence for any kind of epiphenomenalism that would warrant the claim that free will is an illusion. Whatever it is that makes free will the object of contention between neuroscience and philosophy, epiphenomenalism provides no reason to think that free will is an illusion. (shrink)

The belief that conscious will is merely "an illusion created by the brain" appears to be gaining in popularity among cognitive neuroscientists. Its main adherents usually refer to the classic, but controversial 'Libet-experiments', as the empirical evidence that vindicates this illusion-claim. However, based on recent work that provides other interpretations of the Libet-experiments, we argue that the illusion-claim is not only empirically invalid, but also theoretically incoherent, as it is rooted in a category mistake; namely, the presupposition that (...) neuronal activity causes conscious will. We show that the illusion-claim is based on the behaviorist 'input-output' paradigm, and discuss the notions of 'self-organization' and 'self-steering' to provide an alternative perspective on the causal efficacy of conscious will. In the final sections, a tentative theoretical picture is sketched of conscious will as an instance of self-steered self-organization. We conclude that the subjective experience of conscious will is not a misguided one, but rather that the mechanisms supporting conscious will are considerably more complex than mainstream cognitive neuroscience currently acknowledges. (shrink)

I discuss the suggestion that conscious will is an illusion. I take it to mean that there are no conscious decisions. I understand ‘conscious’ as accessible directly and ‘decision’ as the acquisition of an intention. I take the alternative of direct access to be access by interpreting behaviour. I start with a survey of the evidence in support of this suggestion. I argue that the evidence indicates that we are misled by external behaviour into making false (...) positive and false negative judgements about our own decisions. Then I turn to a challenge to this suggestion. What could we interpret in cases when there is no external behaviour? I propose the response that we interpret internal behaviour. We can understand internal behaviour as mental simulation of external behaviour, which can proceed by way of conscious mental imagery. I argue that the proposal has the following advantages. It helps us explain more evidence than we could otherwise. It relies mostly on mechanisms that we already have reason to believe in. And it receives support from the available neurological evidence. I also suggest a way to test the proposal in future empirical research. I conclude by discussing the limitations of the proposal and its implications for the wider debates about the imagination and the will. (shrink)

In The illusion of conscious will , Daniel Wegner offers an exciting, informative, and potentially threatening treatise on the psychology of action. I offer several interpretations of the thesis that conscious will is an illusion. The one Wegner seems to suggest is "modular epiphenomenalism": conscious experience of will is produced by a brain system distinct from the system that produces action; it interprets our behavior but does not, as it seems to us, cause it. (...) I argue that the evidence Wegner presents to support this theory, though fascinating, is inconclusive and, in any case, he has not shown that conscious will does not play a crucial causal role in planning, forming intentions, etc. This theory's potential blow to our self-conception turns out to be a glancing one. (shrink)

The role of consciousness in the production of actions has received much attention from philosophy and neuroscience. Wegner claims that what he calls the conscious will plays no role in the causal production of human actions, and that it is just an illusion. I will argue that Wegner’s claim is mistaken, because his defense of the alleged illusion rests on how he conceives of what the Readiness Potential represents in a key experiment—Libet’s experiment—and this conception is mistaken. (...) Therefore, Wegner has not offered a convincing reason to believe that humans are deluded about the way they produce their actions. (shrink)

This article examines three aspects of the problem of understanding Benjamin Libet’s idea of conscious will causally interacting with certain neural activities involved in generating overt bodily movements. The first is to grasp the notion of cause involved, and we suggest a definition. The second is to form an idea of by what neural structure(s) and mechanism(s) a conscious will may control the motor activation. We discuss the possibility that the acts of control have to do (...) with levels of supplementary motor area activity and with the activation of populations of excitatory and inhibitory interneurons. The third aspect is to conceive of the main features of Libet’s proposed conscious mental field (CMF). We consider both an ontological and an epistemological interpretation of the CMF being nonphysical. In an attempt to refute the idea that Libet’s dualist mind–brain interactionism would violate the law of conservation of energy, we suggest that a CMF may alter the probability of the ion-channel gating by influencing structures of a size to which quantum mechanics needs to be applied. We argue that given the suggested definition of cause, and given the epistemological interpretation of the CMF being nonphysical, nothing would necessarily rule out that an element of a CMF, conscious will, may causally interact with neural activities in the brain. This defense of the idea of conscious will being causally efficacious has a bearing not only on the understanding of the mind–brain relation but also on the free will debate. (shrink)

In "The Illusion of Conscious Will," Daniel Wegner (2002) argues that our commonsense belief that our conscious choices cause our voluntary actions is mistaken. Wegner cites experimental results that suggest that brain processes initiate our actions before we become consciously aware of our choices, showing that we are systematically wrong in thinking that we consciously cause our actions. Wegner's view leads him to conclude, among other things, that moral responsibility does not exist. In this article I propose (...) some ways that traditional philosophical defenders of moral responsibility, both compatibilists and libertarians, might accept Wegner's empirical premise regarding the will but amend their theories so that they may reject his conclusion regarding moral responsibility. (shrink)