What Consciousness Really Is
Now that the “freedom-stealing” specter of determinism has been banished, the question of what consciousness actually is still needs answering. For Wegner, understanding consciousness requires a two-angled approach, consisting of scientific inquiry into the physical mechanisms responsible for the feeling of conscious will, and investigation into how people psychologically experience conscious will. The answer to the question about what consciousness really is lies at the heart of an infectious misunderstanding about what actually causes our actions. The misunderstanding stems from confusion about the relationship between the “force” of will and the “feeling” of will (Wegner 12). In order to understand why Wegner believes the experience of conscious will and its perceived causal effects on behavior are an illusion, it is important to have a grasp of the theory of apparent mental causation, which is the cornerstone of Wegner’s work.
The gist of apparent mental causation is that conscious will is felt regardless of the causal connections that may or may not exist between a person’s thoughts and actions. As in the case of automatisms and other psychological experiments cited by Wegner, the experience of conscious will can be amplified or diminished independently from the conditions that cause an action. This argument has a skeptical ring to it, driven by the same fundamental uncertainty of causal analysis in general. How can a person be sure their thoughts cause their actions when it’s entirely possible something else is actually responsible? Since we are not always aware of the functional mechanisms behind conscious processes, we must rely on appearances and the old adage still holds:
Appearances can be deceiving.
The model of apparent mental causation pegs unconscious forces as the real author of our actions (Wegner 68). Unconscious forces are responsible for the actual causal connection leading to action. However, the features of consciousness cause the brain to reveal another causal path to itself leading from a thought about the action directly to the action itself.
This apparent causal pathway is illusory because it leads to the assumption that a thought or experienced intention actually causes an action.
“MOOOHOOOHAHAHAHA!”
According to Wegner, there are three major points of criteria used in making causal inferences about thoughts and actions.
1. Priority
Priority refers to the timeframe in which thoughts occur with respect to actions.
Wegner performed the I-Spy experiment to show how manipulating temporal priority can obscure the experience of conscious will. In this study, an unwitting participant and an experimenter posing as a participant moved a cursor on a computer screen over images while receiving voice instructions about the images via headphones. At specific times during the exercise, the experimenter forced the mouse to stop on a particular image based on an instruction received via the headphones. The images settled on during these forced stops also corresponded to the word heard by the participant. These forced stops occurred at varying time intervals from when the image-word was heard by the unwitting participant, which manipulated the temporal priority of the thoughts pertaining to the action of stopping on the images. At the end of each round, the participant rated his/her experience of intention in selecting the image. After repeated trials, patterns of increasing sense of intention emerged as the timeframe between the audible word and the forced stop decreased. This illustrates how controlling temporal priority with regard to thought-action association can result in a false sense of conscious will that trends upward as the time between the thought and the action decreases. So at least in some cases like these, conscious will is felt in the absence of any causal relation between a relevant thought and an associated action.
2. Consistency
Consistency requires the perception of a meaningful association between a thought and an action.
As evidence for the consistency principle, Wegner talks about a study where one person is led to perceive another person’s hands as their own. In this experiment, a person wraps their arms around the study participant and performs hand actions that eventually elicit feelings of will and empathic ownership in the participant when the actions are telegraphed by speech or a certain amount of repetition. Strong skin-conductance and emotional responses were observed in participants that viewed one hand slapping the other with a stretched rubber band (Wegner 81).
Spontaneous ideas and personal revelations are more common cases where consistency influences the experience of conscious will. People often amaze themselves by coming up with creative ideas that don’t seem related to what they were previously thinking about. As a result of this gap in perceived consistency, many people feel less control over spontaneous ideas versus ideas that are deliberated over longer.
According to Wegner, the pathology suffered by schizophrenics can also be explained in terms of the consistency principle. The hallucinated voices or dissonant thoughts of a schizophrenic are likely caused by some traumatic or substance-related dissociation that disrupts their perception of mental consistency.
3. Exclusivity
Exclusivity refers to whether a thought is perceived as the only cause of an action (Wegner 69).
The exclusivity principle comes into play when other perceived causal factors enter the scene. When the occurrence of an action is “crowded” with other agents or causally contributing events, the experience of conscious will is normally diminished. This is the reason diffusion of responsibility in a crowd can lead to vicious behavior that no single person would likely engage in otherwise. It’s the same reason unethical schemes cause less moral friction within most individuals when more conspirators are involved. It may also account for the cruel actions of individuals involved in oppressive regimes and the rampancy of corporate corruption.
Furthermore, the perception of exclusivity can be affected by internal factors. The cultural phenomenon of demon possession is a popular example. People can evidently lose enough feeling of conscious will through a chain reaction of psychological suggestion that they can allow themselves to exhibit symptoms of the clinically insane.
In this and other cases of imaginary agency attribution (i.e. spirits, curses, angels), other causal factors that are fabricated by the person’s mind encroach on the scene of an action and reduce the sense of conscious will (Wegner 223).
Wegner’s evidence suggests that an experience of conscious will is vulnerable to error, and is not the invincible authorship indicator some take it as. In fact, conscious will can be pretty easily tricked. Wegner’s cases of automatisms effectively illustrate this. Ouija boards and their associated phenomena are notorious cases of automatic behavior resulting from reduced sense of conscious will. When two or more people place their hands on the Ouija planchette, exclusivity is compromised. The scene of the action becomes crowded by a group of complex human intentional systems, all anticipating each other’s thoughts and paying much less attention to their own.
Sorry, Satan...
Ideomotor theory, originally developed by William Carpenter (1888), offers a non-superstitious explanation for the surprises that can result from Ouija board games. According to this theory, the idea of an action can cause us to perform the action without necessarily being influenced by a sensation of intention (Wegner 121). Furthermore, without any significant counter suggestion from our sense of will, these actions are usually carried out unconsciously. Distracted minds are prone to ideomotor movements and people likely experience many throughout their day.
There are plenty of examples of people engaging in behavior that is induced by a prior thought without reporting any significant feeling of conscious will. In the case of Ouija boards, ideomotor theory often comes into play through the desire to believe in the occult or to have a “supernatural” experience by communicating with dead relatives or mischievous spirits.
This enthusiasm can distract the conscious mind away from sensing one’s own intention, which reduces the feeling of conscious will and leads people to claim they had a paranormal encounter. With attention distracted and little counter-resistance due to excitation, a person becomes vulnerable to suggestion. The same processes can occur in automatic writing.
Automatic writing usually involves some kind of distraction or turning attention away from the intentional process of writing, so a person is surprised by what they write at the end of a session. In this case, they experience less consistency between thought and action and may even discover patterns later on that confirm some preexisting belief or fear they had going into the exercise.
Whether it is hypnotism, Ouija boards, automatic writing, or even ventriloquism, the automatisms Wegner discusses are meant to illustrate the essential vulnerability of the experience of conscious will. This implies that automatic behavior is what lies beneath all experiences of controlled conscious willing. So, most of the “iceberg” of the human mind really is underwater. We are dominated by mechanisms, and conscious will intervenes when and where it can. As Wegner says, “automatisms are the rule, not the exception” (Wegner 143).
There are a number of ways, however, that we help perpetuate and amplify the feeling of conscious will. Memories of intending an action are often fabricated after the fact to preserve a smooth sense of agency. Rather than face the sometimes unsettling and counter-intuitive idea of not meaning to do something, or to take credit for a potentially praiseworthy act, people can hoodwink themselves into remembering a conscious will experience even if there was none. This revision of intention shows that conscious will experiences are not firmly set within the mind. They can be manipulated to fill in gaps of experience, and preserve a person’s sense of a responsible self. This can lead to inconsistencies over time, obscuring the genuine reasons people do what they do (Wegner 160). Self-perception is fallible indeed.
The identities we ascribe to actions also change over time. Our interpretations of actions almost always change depending on the time of life we speculate on them. (Just ask a kid what he was thinking when he got rowdy at his Harvard coke party and put the captain of the wrestling team in a coma. Then ask the same kid about the event after he grows up.)
BEFORE
Therefore, intentions can be very hard to track over time. The experience of intention is subject to the wear and tear of recollection and confabulation, and actions are very distinct from the meanings we ascribe to them. More so, perhaps, than many people are used to thinking they are.
If this is the case then, as Wegner puts it, identity is a “variable quantity”, and the self is a virtual agent constantly involved in inventing its own identity (Wegner 266).
(Dennett has criticized Wegner’s claim that “the experience of conscious will happens in a virtual agent, not a brain or mind” as a slippery slope to the Cartesian Theater. If brain states are mental states, then conscious willing does happen in a brain or mind.)
However, even if identity is fluid and the experience of conscious will is illusory, it still deserves credit. It enables us to become aware of our actions in a way that cannot be achieved otherwise. Conscious willing is an experience, and a characteristic of experiences is that they tend to be simplifications. For example, we are able to experience something like a sunny day as a kind of consolidated unit of sensation/perception and memory associations. The individual elements involved in our sunny day experience are obviously vast in number, complexity, and vagueness, but our minds simplify them into conceptual unity. It is for this reason that we do not get bogged down in the sophisticated, cog-turning underpinnings of the world we inhabit. In this sense, conscious will could be a global mechanism for simplifying all neurological processes involved in action and decision-making. If this is the case, consciousness is everywhere within us. It is a function of the whole, so we experience it as a complete thing, and thus often attribute (somewhat inaccurately) a single source location.
It is hard to pin down any experience and say it “resides” in any single location of a human being. For instance, where does fear come from? The location of the fear emotion is distributed throughout all causal forces and relationships responsible for the feeling (i.e. environmental stimulus, nerve impulses, endocrine etc.). But this does not stop us from making useful simplifications and attributing fear, in a folk sense at least, to a sort of “gut” reaction. Much of the grinding gears of the universe are hidden behind a veneer of simplification. So, in terms of conscious will, we may be mistaken about the actual root mechanistic cause of actions, but at least we are able to become conscious of them at all. That alone is an achievement of knowledge worth wanting.
We'll take it!
Circling Back
So why do we experience the illusion? What is the purpose of perceiving actions differently than the way they physically work? One reason is that it serves a functional purpose for our cultural understanding of agency. It fits with our normal conception of the world as filled with doers (Dennett 26). In light of this, the illusion makes sense and is clearly there for a reason.
There are good reasons for humans to be able to swap between psychological and mechanistic explanatory systems. Different explanations fit different actions in the world. Let’s go back to Dennett’s determinism for a second. Even if determinism implies happenings, we live our lives determined to be doers. As Dennett claims, evolution works just fine “in the dark”. The mechanisms of any system, be it a thermostat or a human mind, do not need to be aware of themselves in order to do their job. Consciousness is something additional; a bonus ability to perceive and associate the relevant thoughts and feelings we have about an action for the purpose of explanation. This distinction is also essential to the idea of the illusion of conscious will. It is not our awareness of the thoughts we have about an action that directly causes the action, and the tendency to assume otherwise is a product of an evolved explanatory system that amounts to a very useful illusion. Humans perceive agency and apply it generously, even where it is not present, as a way of ordering our perception of the world. It is a proven heuristic that leads us to make fairly innocuous assumptions about intentionality.
“And it uses its own pigment molecule, chlorophyll, to carry out the action.
This does not make the ribosomes happy.”
Over-assigning agency to ourselves does not have to be seen as some Freudian superego process meant to tether the untamed devils of our unconscious minds. More than likely, it is just our way of making sense of the world by pursuing our cultural ideal of human freedom (Wegner 108). As Dennett comments, it is better to be disposed to perceive agent minds even where there are none just in case they happen to be present. There are evolutionary explanations for misattributions of conscious will, whether the misattributions are directed at external things or our very own selves.
What Are We?
So what is the “self” in this context? What is the nature of the consciousness that gives us our freedom worth having? Both Dennett and Wegner like to use the operating system analogy. If the human body and its entire evolved infrastructure are nothing short of the hardware of a marvelously sophisticated computer, then the self is the operating system.
The essential task of an operating system is to provide a simplified control center for a complex network of interconnected hardware. Consciousness is an adaptive self-surveillance program, and like computer operating systems, is gradually improving and extending its influence over the human “hardware”. Consciousness, and in turn the known powers of freedom, evolve as a continuing consequence of our survival as a species. The project has been underway for millennia, and it will still receive tweaking. The user-illusion of the self is a helpful shortcut that smoothens the flow of experience and paints a fluid picture over the daunting underbelly of our biological wiring. This is how, in Dennett’s words, something can become more than its parts (Wegner 106). It’s why a Ferrari is more than metal and rubber, why the Taj Mahal is more than building materials, why an ecosystem is more than the life of any single species. They are more by virtue of their cooperative function, which shapes their identity. Simplifications and distinctions help us organize our noisy environments. They make cognitive awareness manageable, and enable us to notice and track our own footprints as well as others’. In short, consciousness is evolution coming out of the dark.
Taking Responsibility
The moral implications of all this are not difficult to see. If conscious will is no more than an emotion of authorship, then it is the single most important piece of moral equipment human beings possess. The feeling of being a doer and not merely a happening is necessary for taking responsibility and being worthy of praise or blame. As an objection to this, one could ask: how can just the feeling of being a doer suffice for responsibility if it isn’t a genuine, objective moral status? This objection operates on an assumption that Wegner shows is not worth holding. This objection assumes that there is some kind of opposite and equal relationship between free will and determinism, so that only one can be true. This is a falsely construed dichotomy (Wegner 322). If free will is an emotion or feeling then it does not conflict with determinism, and they can both exist in the same philosophically consistent world.
If free will was a causal process like determinism then there would be a serious problem. What would a world like that look like? Imagine if our actions emanated from some inexplicable construct within us that no CT scan, autopsy, or X-ray could find. This “free will machine” would have to hover somewhere in between realms, affording us the gift of an ethereal freedom. And human beings, with their infinite privilege, would be the only creatures fortunate enough to receive this honor. This doesn’t sound like a world that evolved. Asking someone to believe that free will is a causal source of action is like asking someone to believe in magic (or, perhaps even worse, to slide backwards 400 years in metaphysics). It is a strange extra piece forced onto the jigsaw puzzle of the universe that just doesn’t fit. There are better explanations when we decide to officially close The Cartesian Theater for demolition.
Since determinism is a process, free will as a feeling fits right into an evolutionary picture of the human being. It is the feeling that guides our behavior, lends us a sense of identity, and helps us keep track of our actions and the actions of others in order to mete out the proper praises and blames, punishments and rewards. Furthermore, determinism is the process by which all of this occurs and continues to occur. All the tied strings of memory and stored experience are the deterministic bindings that make us who we are. This is the source of moral agency and the feeling of authorship. Otherwise, our actions would spring right out of thin air. We experience moral emotions as an estimate of the involvement our own thoughts have in our actions. Sometimes we are wrong, and we feel guilt for something we did not cause, or cause things we feel no guilt for. Sometimes we get it right, and our experience of authorship lines up well with what we do. Either way, these experiences carry moral weight because we do them.
So, at this point I’ve said that conscious will is not the cause of human action and that deterministic processes are ultimately causally responsible for what we do. This statement can feel ominous without a deeper understanding of the argument. It is important to make it clear that this does not mean slow-planned conscious deliberation cannot yield significant influence over our actions. In fact, the level of influence our non-reflexive thoughts have on our actions is significant enough to lead to the misattribution of ultimate causation in the first place. Eddy Nahmias has some things to say about this in his critique of Wegner, focusing on a very important distinction between genuine authorship and the feeling of agency.
Objection!
Eddy Nahmias defines an illusory experience as something that represents an event in such a way that conflicts with the actual nature of that event. He then claims that Wegner’s cases of experienced conscious will do not qualify for this definition. He argues that the only way conscious will could be considered illusory is if people experience a dualistic causal agent-self or a reportedly flawless “self-knowing” during their actions, however he dismisses this possibility by claiming no one experiences these things (Nahmias 777). This is where he goes wrong. It is hard to believe, not just based on the work of agent-causation theorists and philosophers (i.e. Chisholm, Clarke, O’Connor) but also common reports from people about many of their actions, that no one ever feels like an infallible causal agent. Nahmias is right by saying our experience does not “commit” us to believing such things, but that does not mean we do not often hold these beliefs, and for specific reasons, be they evolutionary or firmly based in our everyday folk psychology. If Nahmias is willing to assume people no longer buy into “self-luminous” experiences or cases of infallible agent causation, he gives the majority of people too much credit.
“Ever get luminous, brah?”
These qualms aside, the illusion Wegner actually identifies exists in the inability of our experiences to provide us direct information regarding the deep causal mechanisms of our actions. Acknowledging this, Nahmias still eschews the word illusion, preferring “incomplete” as a more apt description.
“Semantics, shemantics.”
Nahmias’ main point is that the evidence Wegner provides is not enough to show that our conscious will experiences are always illusory. This leads to the further point that a lack of causally responsible agency does not imply a lack of genuine authorship. Taking a physicalist’s point of view, Wegner claims that the brain processes responsible for intentions are not directly causally joined with the brain processes responsible for action. However, the most considerable problem of Wegner’s body of evidence is that he offers no neurobiological facts that could prove these systems to be entirely separate. Instead he uses his psychological research and experimentation to infer this based on the finding that in some cases our experience of conscious will goes wrong. Admittedly, there may be no clear scientific discoveries that can provide this evidence, and the experiment-based inference may be the most reliable, but this deficiency of hard scientific information does not lend an overwhelming sense of authority to Wegner’s models of the neurological structure of conscious will. Furthermore, just by proving that the experience of will goes wrong in some cases does nothing to recommend the idea that it is always wrong. As Nahmias says, more is needed.
Nahmias’ strongest case is the authorship/agency distinction. He voices a good argument for the causal influence of deliberated and planned (distal) intentions in future actions that Wegner would probably agree with. Wegner does discuss the significance of the timeframe in which intentions and thoughts about an action are formulated (priority). However, Nahmias is right to sharpen the distinction between authorship and agency. Even if conscious intentions are not directly involved in the immediate (proximal) cause of an action, they can be significant distal causes (Nahmias 782). For example, a person undergoing rigorous military and survival training is in the process of generating hundreds of contingent distal intentions in the event that they experience them in the field of combat. When they find themselves performing these actions in the heat of battle or in the stress of a war scenario, it is no accident. The distal intentions are extremely causal. Furthermore, even if proximal actions are performed without much conscious awareness at the time, they can still result in a tangible sense of authorship. After all, it is still the soldier performing them. Our reflexive actions still feel importantly like ours. So even if a detailed feeling of direct causal agency is missing, a sense of authorship can still prevail within a person. Moreover, this sense of authorship is an extremely significant moral indicator. A person wouldn’t deny themselves the Medal of Honor claiming that their heroic act in rescuing injured comrades was only an unplanned result of proximal intentions.
“DON’T BLAME ME. IT WAS THE TRAINING.”
Nahmias’ objections can serve an important role in refining the theory of mental causation. The only significant challenge they present is the claim regarding insufficiency of thorough scientific evidence. But, this body of evidence is growing. The future of brain science will likely open opportunities for the further testing of theories like Wegner’s. Nahmias’ objections apply the right kind of pressure on an area of research that continues to develop. In fact, properly worked into the existing theory, they help draw out vital distinctions and identify areas for improvement.
What It All Means
Regardless of where the real physical cause of human actions is, the fact remains that we feel like we are doing things. This feeling governs the way we live our lives as self-proclaimed authors and agents. This functionality, even if it is illusory and hides something in its apparent presentation in consciousness, is enormously significant and should not be dismissed. In other words, we should not throw out a vital part of our folk psychology just because it happens to be somewhat illusory. The fact is that the illusion of consciousness is useful. And useful illusions are worth keeping.
The experience of causing our actions is essential to the way we navigate the natural and social world. It’s how we keep track of our achievements, our failures, our anecdotes, and our entire body of work. There’s comfort in the fact that both the apparent and actual causation still occurs bodily within us. The feeling of agency and authorship (even when they are distinct) is still significant, especially in a moral sense. Ultimately, we still do what we do. We experience what happens in us either as our own (for specific functional purposes), or not (for knowable environmental reasons). The inference of mental causation is there for a reason, as part of the deterministic processes of evolution. An evolution that is ultimately responsible for both the hardware and the software of the living, thinking, doing human being.
References
Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. New York: Penguin Books,
2003.
Nahmias, Eddy. “Agency, authorship, and illusion.”
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005): 771-185. 14 March 2009
<http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlean/papers/Agency_Authorship_Illusion.pdf>
Wegner, Daniel. The Illusion of Conscious Will.
Massachusetts: Bradford Books The MIT Press, 2002.
