The mind's self-portrait.

Abstract

Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind's self-portrait has as a central feature the idea that thoughts cause actions, and that the self is thus an origin of the body's actions. This self-portrait is reached through a process of inference of apparent mental causation, and it gives rise to the experience that we are consciously willing what we do. Evidence from several sources suggests that this self-portrait may often be a humble and misleading caricature of the mind's operation-but one that underlies the feeling of authorship and the acceptance of responsibility for action.