Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will -- those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

The Illusion of Conscious Will

1 ? The Split Brain and the Integrated Mind.- 2 ? The Nature of Interhemispheric Communication.- 3 ? Cerebral Lateralization and Hemisphere Specialization: Facts and Theory.- 4 ? Brain and Language.- 5 ? Brain and Intelligence.- 6 ? Brain, Imagery, and Memory.- 7 ? On the Mechanisms of Mind.- Author Index.

The Integrated Mind

In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion—the problem of divine moral standing—and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: given how God would be (or, on some conceptions, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those very actions? In light of the recent literature on “moral standing,” I consider God’s moral standing to blame on two models of “divine providence”: open theism and theological determinism. I contend that God may have standing on open theism, and—perhaps surprisingly—may also have standing even on theological determinism, given the truth of compatibilism. The topic of this paper thus sheds considerable light on the traditional philosophical debate about the conditions of moral responsibility.

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Does God Have the Moral Standing to Blame

In this paper we assume the brain to be a physico-chemical system the states of which can be described, and the future states of which can be predicted, in detail. We then inquire into the consequences of this assumption for the concept of free will. Consider, then, a human agent A. The states of his brain are being studied by a scientist S who is attempting to evolve a scientific description of A's brain. This description, or model, it is hoped, will enable S to predict reasonably well future brain states from present ones. S has access to funds, research assistants, laboratories and computing facilities which are adequate for making sensible predictions. Each of A's distinguishable mental states including thoughts and emotions (i.e. his states of consciousness) will be supposed to correspond to a clearly defined set of physico-chemical states of his brain. We suppose further that A and S have agreed in a preliminary discussion on a language L in which any description of A's consciousness is to be written. Any prediction made by S to A will be of the form 'at time t2 your state of consciousness will be P', where P (with suffixes, etc. where needed) is a description in the language L, which A can check by introspection at t2. An actual brain state will be denoted by 'B'. The phrase 'brain state B" will denote a description, within S's theory, of a calculated or observed brain state. In a perfect theory there is a one-to-one correspondence between B and B'. For convenience the symbol 'P' will be used to denote the prediction communicated to A, as well as the predicted brain state. It would be possible to consider a more detailed language L' in which each B could be described uniquely. This would however raise the logical problem of whether a brain can hold a complete description of its own state. The coarser language L is probably adequate for elucidating the main logical points. Next a mechanistic universe is assumed. This means we have to argue within nineteenth-century science, or in terms of a possible future mechanistic science. In this context a question of special interest is whether free

Free Will in a Mechanistic Universe

Choice in a mechanistic universe: a reply to some critics

D. M. Mackay London: Cambridge University Press. 1967 Pp. 40. Price 5s. This Eddington Memorial Lecture of November 1967 is well argued and stimulating. It purports to establish that, even if the human brain turns out to be machine-like in all its functions, the reality of freedom of action and "the claims regarding our inner nature and significance and destiny" would remain unaffected.

P T Landsberg

Papers

Freedom of Action in Mechanistic Universe