The mind's best trick: how we experience conscious will

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Abstract

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.

Section snippets

Anomalies of will

If conscious will were an illusory add-on to action, we could begin to explain all the odd cases when action and conscious will do not properly coincide.

Apparent mental causation

If the experience of conscious will is not a direct report of the processes whereby action is produced, what is it? The likely sources of the experience of conscious will are the topic of the ‘theory of apparent mental causation’ 19, 22.

Conclusions

Does all this mean that conscious thought does not cause action? It does not mean this at all. The task of determining the causal relations between conscious representations and actions is a matter of inspection through scientific inquiry, and reliable connections between conscious thought and action can potentially be discerned by this process [37]. The point made here is that the mind's own system for computing these relations provides the person with an experience of conscious will that is

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to John Bargh, Celeste Beck and Jonathan Schooler for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Some of the research described here was supported by NIMH Grant 49127.

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