The Illusion of Conscious Will (4 page)

7
. The idea that the will is a property that can vary in quantity, and that it inheres in people and has some natural force that can produce actions, nonetheless remains a useful part of some theories in modern scientific psychology (Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister 1998).

This is not to say that the concept of will power is useless. Rather, Hume’s analysis suggests that the concept of force of will, or will power, must be accompanied by careful causal inference. These ideas can be used as the basis for scientific theories of human behavior, certainly, because they serve as summaries of the degree of relationship that may exist between the mind and behavior. But we must be careful to distinguish between such
empirical will
—the causality of the person’s conscious thoughts as established by a scientific analysis of their covariation with the person’s behavior—and the
phenomenal will
—the person’s reported experience of will. The empirical will can be measured by examining the actual degree of constant conjunction between the person’s self-reported conscious thought and the person’s action, and by assessing the causal role of that thought in the context of other possible causes of the action (and possible causes of the thought as well). But the precise causal understanding of the conscious will that is captured in such discussions is not something that is linked in any direct way to the person’s experience of will.

The experience of will is merely a feeling that occurs to a person. It is to action as the experience of pain is to the bodily changes that result from painful stimulation, or as the experience of emotion is to the bodily changes associated with emotion. The person’s feeling of pain is not the same as the degree of twist applied to a person’s arm, nor is the person’s feeling of fear the same as the pattern of excitation occurring in the brain. In each case, the
experience
is incommensurable with the
occurrence
. An illusory pain is still pain, in an important sense, but it may not indicate damage at the location it signals; it may not be the
effect
of an injury at the site of
apparent
injury. Similarly, a conscious willing is still a conscious willing even when it is illusory in much the same sense: it may not be the
cause
of an action of which it is the
apparent
cause. A person’s feeling of will, and the associated report of this experience to others, is a key criterion commonly used for assessing whether conscious will has operated, but we must remember that this feeling is not the same as an empirically verifiable occurrence of mental causation.

The empirical will—the actual relationship between mind and action— is a central topic of scientific psychology. In psychology, clear indications of the empirical will can be found whenever causal relationships are observed between people’s thoughts, beliefs, intentions, plans, or other conscious psychological states and their subsequent actions. The feeling of consciously willing our actions, in contrast, is not a direct readout of such scientifically verifiable will power. Rather, it is the result of a mental system whereby each of us
estimates
moment-to-moment the role that our minds play in our actions. If the empirical will were the measured causal influence of an automobile’s engine on its speed, in other words, the phenomenal will might best be understood as the speedometer reading. And as many of us have tried to explain to at least one police officer, speedometer readings can be wrong.

Mind Perception

Why would people mistake the experience of will for an actual causal mechanism? Why is it that the phenomenal will so easily overrides any amount of preaching by scientists about the mechanisms underlying human action? Now, as a rule, when people find one particular intuition so wildly intriguing that they regularly stand by it and forsake lots of information that is technically more correct, they do so because the intuition
fits
. It is somehow part of a bigger scheme of things that they simply can’t discard. So, for example, people once held tight to the Ptolemaic idea that the sun revolves around the earth, in part because this notion fit their larger religious conception of the central place of the earth in God’s universe. Conscious will fits a larger conception in exactly this way—our understanding of
causal agents
. The intuitive experience of consciously willing our actions is something we return to again and again as we continue to assume that the experience of will reveals the force that creates our acts, mainly because we have a more general understanding of causal agency that allows this to make sense.

Causal Agency

Most adult humans have a very well-developed idea of a particular sort of entity—an entity that
does
things. We appreciate that a dog, for example, will often do things that are guided not by standard causal principles but rather by a teleological or purposive system. Dogs often seem to be goal-oriented; they behave in ways that seem to be understandable only in terms of goals (including some fairly goofy ones, yes, but goals nonetheless). They move toward things that they subsequently seem to have wanted (because they consume them or sniff them), and they move away from things that we can imagine they might not like (because the things are scary or loud or seem to be waving a rolled-up newspaper). Dogs, like horses and fish and crickets and even some plants, seem to be understandable through a special kind of thinking about goal-oriented entities that does not help us at all in thinking about bricks, buttons, or other inanimate objects.

The property of goal seeking is not something we attribute just to living things; we may appreciate this feature in computers or robots or even thermostats. But the important characteristic of such goal-seeking entities is that we understand them in terms of
where we think they are headed
rather than in terms of
where we think they have been
. Unlike a mere object, which moves or “acts” only when it has been caused to do so by some prior event, a causal agent moves or acts apparently on its own, in the pursuit of some future state—the achievement of a goal. Fritz Heider (1958) observed that people perceive persons as causal agents—origins of events—and that this is the primary way in which persons are understood in a manner that physical objects and events are not.

This idea was illustrated in a classic study by Heider and Simmel (1944) in which people were asked to comment on a cartoon film of the motions of geometric objects—a big triangle
T
, a little triangle
t
, and a little circle
c
—around a box with an opening in it (
fig. 1.4
). The objects moved in the film in such a way that people almost always described
T
as chasing
t
and
c
around a house. People did not report any of the physical forces or interactions one might expect if these items were apprehended as physical objects. The objects weren’t dropping or bumping or colliding but rather chasing and following and seeking. Apparently, the perception of causal agency can displace the usual way we have of perceiving physical objects, given the right circumstances.
⁸

Figure 1.4

A frame from Heider and Simmel’s film of the movements of a dysfunctional family of geometric figures. From Heider and Simmel (1944). Courtesy Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Of course, people are not simple geometric objects bouncing around a screen, and they have a considerable advantage over dogs, too. Their consciousness allows them the luxury of some insight into their own causal agency. People have access to an intricate mental dashboard display of cues regarding their goals because lots of cues to their agency appear in their thoughts and words. For this reason the inner workings of their causal agency can be interpreted in great depth. We may often learn from people what they think in advance of their actions, and we occasionally have this information available for ourselves as well, so we can construct elaborate understandings of likely actions and goals. The conscious causal agency of human beings is accompanied, in particular, by relevant
intentions, beliefs, desires,
and plans. Let’s consider each of these for a moment, even though they are rather elementary, just to re-mind ourselves how causal agency looks from the inside of the conscious causal agent.

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. Heider (1958) went on to analyze the features of the perception of personal causation, which eventually gave rise to the field of attribution theory in social psychology (Gilbert 1998; Jones et al. 1972; Taylor and Fiske 1978). Unfortunately, this analysis failed to capitalize on the idea that causal agents are perceived as goal-oriented, and instead persevered on the notion that causal agents are perceived as performing behaviors that are themselves caused in some way (by factors that are either internal or external to the person). This led to immense confusion in the social psychological study of how people explain active, goal-seeking behavior (see the helpful correctives by Gilbert 1998; Kruglanski 1975; Malle 1999).

Intention
is normally understood as an idea of what one is going to do that appears in consciousness just before one does it. This is the thought that people usually associate most strongly with causing the action. Consider, for example, the case of watering the plants. If we actually remember to do this, the act typically seems like something we had the intention to do. In a study by Malle and Knobe (1997), people who rated the intentionality of twenty different behaviors put watering the plants at the top of the list along with such things as inviting a friend to lunch and refusing a salesman’s offer. Behaviors such as sweating and yawning were rated as far less intentional. Although perceiving the causal agency of a dog might involve only figuring out what its goal might be, perceiving the causal agency of a person offers the additional prospect of considering what the person reports the goal might be—his or her professed intention. And perceiving causal agency in oneself involves coming to an understanding of one’s actions in light of one’s own conscious intentions.

We usually expect that a person who waters the plants has yet other conscious thoughts that are relevant to the watering. This person seems to have
beliefs
(“The plants need water,” “This is water in my watering can”), for example, because it usually takes some understanding of the world and of the nature of the action to completely characterize what is going to be done. Such world knowledge seems particularly necessary for doing things that are extended or consequential (Danto 1963; Goldman 1970; Melden 1961). It doesn’t take much in the way of knowledge about the world to wiggle your ears or bend a finger, but you must have a set of relevant beliefs and understandings about how your basic bodily movements will yield more distant effects if you want to do anything beyond wiggling and bending. Basic bodily actions thus seem to be nested within higher-level actions (“I bent my arm” is part of “I tilted the watering can,” which is part of “I watered the plant”), even though all of them may be happening at once. We can describe an action at any of these different levels (Vallacher and Wegner 1985; 1987). However, at each higher level, more needs to be known and believed about the context in which the basic bodily movement is occurring for that action to be understood. The more we can imagine that an agent knows or believes about the world, the more extended and involved are the actions and goals we can imagine the agent pursuing.

As a rule, the perception of human causal agency also involves under-standing the person’s
desire
(“I’m watering these plants in hopes of winning the All Green Thumbs Award again this year”). Desires are not always the same as intentions because they are sometimes descriptive of future circumstances that cannot be fulfilled with this act alone. In desiring a gardening award, for instance, one may intend to water the plants, but getting the award will also depend on other things such as competitors’ plants, judges’ decisions, and so on. In other cases, however, desire and intention seem to be the same, in that a person might conceivably want to water the plants only for the sheer fact of watering those plants. Still, it doesn’t make much sense to attribute agency for an action to a conscious mind that doesn’t want
something,
and for this reason philosophers of action seem to agree that a mental representation of one’s desire is a key feature of the conscious willing of action (Anscombe 1957; Davidson 1963).

One other category of thoughts relevant to conscious will also can be important:
plans
. In a way, a plan is simply an intention that appears in mind some significant interval before the action. Searle (1983), for ex-ample, distinguishes between “prior intention” and “intention in action,” and Bratman (1984; 1987) makes a similar distinction. Such prior intentions, or plans, are not usually seen as having the same causal role in our actions that immediate intentions have. I have a good idea, for ex-ample, that I will be going to Hawaii with my family next month (Oh boy!), and barring a calamity this is probably what I will do. And it is re-assuring to know in this regard that there is a large research literature showing that people often do what they plan (Ajzen 1991; Gollwitzer 1993; Miller, Galanter, and Pribram 1960; Schank and Abelson 1977). Plans go awry, however. My cautious hedging about the upcoming Hawaii trip indicates that even the best laid plans . . . well you know the rest. Conscious plans to act do not seem to
compel
behavior in the sense that once the plan is in place the behavior always occurs. Instead, plans just prepare the way. Often, they involve detailed specifications of how to act—the means or subacts of an action—and they thus make it more likely that when a situation arises in which the behavior is appropriate, the behavior can occur successfully.