Abstract
The role of consciousness in the production of actions has received much attention from philosophy and neuroscience. Wegner (2002) 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 (RP) 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.
Highlights
EThere is a lively debate in philosophy and neuroscience about the Drole of the so called conscious will in the production of action
Conscious will is separate from the one that causes behavior: “Most of the evidence discussed in the book is used by Wegner to demonstrate that the experience of will and the empirical will ‘come apart often enough to make one wonder whether they may be produced by separate systems in the mind’ (p. 11)” (NAHMIAS, 2002, p. 530)
Wegner argues the claim that our Experience of Source of Action, what he calls the experience of conscious will, is mistaken, and contributes to an illusion
Summary
EThere is a lively debate in philosophy and neuroscience about the Drole of the so called conscious will in the production of action. According to Wegner, this is an illusion; unconscious mechanisms causally produce human action, and the experience of. Wegner’s theory focuses on showing that the experience of conscious will is not the experience of the production of the action, and that it is not a reason to believe that we consciously will our actions. Conscious will is separate from the one that causes behavior: “Most of the evidence discussed in the book is used by Wegner to demonstrate that the experience of will and the empirical will ‘come apart often enough to make one wonder whether they may be produced by separate systems in the mind’ Conscious will is separate from the one that causes behavior: “Most of the evidence discussed in the book is used by Wegner to demonstrate that the experience of will and the empirical will ‘come apart often enough to make one wonder whether they may be produced by separate systems in the mind’ (p. 11)” (NAHMIAS, 2002, p. 530)
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