![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am reading The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner. It's kinda pissing me off a bit.
Page 64: People experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action. You can infer from the title what Wegner thinks of that experience. However, I think that he's conflating a couple of meanings for the word thought. The thought that he (successfully) argues is not the cause of actions is conscious thought-- in other words, thought that one is explicitly conscious of, because it appears to one as a that silent chatter of voice inside one's head that nobody else can hear or a series of images inside one's head or somesuch. In 300+ pages Wegner does demolish the notion of this-- the color commentator of the mind, as I call it-- causes anything. But I think that's a straw man. It doesn't rule out (and it's obvious that it must be) that people's voluntary actions are caused by their cognition, which may be the churning through and comparing of various options for actions before choosing one, and yes, that cognition takes place a good deal in the unconscious realm. (Not to imply anything deeply Freudian by the use of the word "unconscious"-- just that the color commentator can't see, and thus can't comment on, the turning of a lot of the mental gears.)
So is this such a revolutionary idea, that our actions may be caused by cognition that we are unaware of rather than by thoughts that we are aware of, that it called for such a weighty book? It's made to sound like it impinges on the idea of free will, but I don't think it does. I mean, if I am aware that some choices will be good for me and some choices will be bad for me, I will take those facts into account-- assuming, of course, that the comparison of imagined outcomes is the algorithm my mind is using-- even if that calculation is done too rapidly or automatically or too peripherally to the internal narrative for me to be conscious of how I made a choice to act. But it's still me, making the choice of what I think is in my interests. My whole brain is me; there's no other party in here.* That's what I mean by free will.
* Even if I am multitudes. I suppose if you disown the part of your brain that wants cookies now more than size 6 pants off in the future, then yeah, no free will for you.
Page 64: People experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action. You can infer from the title what Wegner thinks of that experience. However, I think that he's conflating a couple of meanings for the word thought. The thought that he (successfully) argues is not the cause of actions is conscious thought-- in other words, thought that one is explicitly conscious of, because it appears to one as a that silent chatter of voice inside one's head that nobody else can hear or a series of images inside one's head or somesuch. In 300+ pages Wegner does demolish the notion of this-- the color commentator of the mind, as I call it-- causes anything. But I think that's a straw man. It doesn't rule out (and it's obvious that it must be) that people's voluntary actions are caused by their cognition, which may be the churning through and comparing of various options for actions before choosing one, and yes, that cognition takes place a good deal in the unconscious realm. (Not to imply anything deeply Freudian by the use of the word "unconscious"-- just that the color commentator can't see, and thus can't comment on, the turning of a lot of the mental gears.)
So is this such a revolutionary idea, that our actions may be caused by cognition that we are unaware of rather than by thoughts that we are aware of, that it called for such a weighty book? It's made to sound like it impinges on the idea of free will, but I don't think it does. I mean, if I am aware that some choices will be good for me and some choices will be bad for me, I will take those facts into account-- assuming, of course, that the comparison of imagined outcomes is the algorithm my mind is using-- even if that calculation is done too rapidly or automatically or too peripherally to the internal narrative for me to be conscious of how I made a choice to act. But it's still me, making the choice of what I think is in my interests. My whole brain is me; there's no other party in here.* That's what I mean by free will.
* Even if I am multitudes. I suppose if you disown the part of your brain that wants cookies now more than size 6 pants off in the future, then yeah, no free will for you.
