Synthese (2007) 159:197–213
DOI 10.1007/s11229-007-9204-7
The illusion of conscious will
Peter Carruthers
Published online: 28 July 2007
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Wegner (Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press)
argues that conscious will is an illusion, citing a wide range of empirical evidence. I
shall begin by surveying some of his arguments. Many are unsuccessful. But one—an
argument from the ubiquity of self-interpretation—is more promising. Yet is suffers
from an obvious lacuna, offered by so-called ‘dual process’ theories of reasoning and
decision making (Evans, J., & Over, D. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. Psychol-
ogy Press; Stanovich, K. (1999). Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in
reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum; Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge
University Press). I shall argue that this lacuna can be filled by a plausible a priori
claim about the causal role of anything deserving to be called ‘a will.’ The result is
that there is no such thing as conscious willing: conscious will is, indeed, an illusion.
Keywords Confabulation · Conscious thought · Conscious will · Dual systems ·
Self interpretation · Wegner
1 Wegner on conscious will
Wegner (2002) argues for the illusoriness of conscious will across a broad front, and
presents a wide array of evidence. But he has a number of different illusions in mind at
different points in his discussion, not all of which, arguably, really constitute an attack
on conscious willing. One is the traditional idea of a metaphysically free will, as an
uncaused cause of action. But on this he has nothing to add to traditional philosophical
critiques, I think (e.g. Dennett 1984). And it is very doubtful whether our ordinary
P. Carruthers (
B
)
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland,
1125 Skinner Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA
e-mail: pcarruth@umd.edu
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idea of a conscious will requires that it should be metaphysically free in the intended
sense. On the contrary, all that is required is that our conscious decisions should cause
our actions, not that those decisions should themselves be uncaused causes.
Another of Wegner’s targets is the idea that we have direct awareness of the cau-
sality of conscious will. The claim under attack here is that we have non-inferential
and immediate awareness of the causal relationship between our conscious acts of
deciding or intending and the actions that result. So even if our conscious decisions
do cause our actions, on this account conscious will would still be an illusion if we
weren’t immediately aware of the causing-relation.
Wegner makes out a plausible case that there is no such immediate awareness. In
part he tries to do this by drawing on Hume’s (1739) claim that we never perceive
causal relations themselves, not even when one billiard ball bounces into another,
causing it to move. But this claim is eminently deniable for anyone who thinks that
perception can be to some degree theory-laden. Given suitable background theories of
the causal processes involved (some of which are, very likely, innate—see Baillargeon
et al. 1995; Spelke et al. 1995), we surely can perceive the causal efficacy of some
physical events. And if physical, why not mental too? Wegner is on stronger ground
when he points out that the causal connections between our conscious thoughts and
our actions are too complex in nature, and too variable from case to case, to count as
perceivable.
Even if Wegner’s argument on this point were made out, however, it is doubtful
that the idea of conscious will would thereby be undermined. Granted, there would
be no such thing as conscious will if our conscious thoughts were never, or only very
rarely, the causes of our actions. For causal efficacy seems built into the very idea of
what a will is. But provided that these conscious thoughts are often enough amongst
the causes of our actions, then I think that the reality of conscious will needn’t be
undermined by our lack of awareness of the causing-relation. For these events would,
by virtue of their frequently-causal status, constitute the operations of a will. And, by
hypothesis, they are conscious. So there would be such a thing as conscious willing,
even if we aren’t conscious of the causal efficacy of our acts of willing.
Yet another idea that Wegner defends is that, very often, the conscious events that
we take to be the operations of our conscious will, causing our actions, aren’t really
doing so. Rather, both those conscious events and the actions that we subsequently
perform have a common cause in some set of unconscious mental events. These events
cause both our conscious ‘willings’ and our actions. In which case that which we are
aware of isn’t what causes our actions. For example, an intention activated in our
practical reasoning system might cause both the action intended and an appropriate
verbalization of the intention (‘I shall go that way’). The latter is mentally rehearsed
and globally broadcast (in the sense of Baars 1988, 1997), thereby becoming con-
scious. Although it is easy for us to mistake this conscious event for the act of willing
itself, in reality it doesn’t play any causal role in the production of the action (or at
least, not always—I shall return to this qualification at length in Sect. 4). Rather, there
is a common underlying cause—the activated intention—which causes both the action
and the conscious verbalization of the intention to act.
Unless the present argument collapses into the previous one, however, it would
have to be claimed that our conscious ‘willings’ and our actions are always the effects
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of a common underlying cause, and not just that they sometimes are. For otherwise, in
those cases where our conscious thoughts do cause our actions, there would be such a
thing as conscious willing. But Wegner doesn’t really do anything to defend this stron-
ger claim, I think, unless via the idea that I shall discuss next. And that strong claim
is surely inconsistent with the reality of ‘System 2’ reasoning and decision-making,
defended by a number of authors (Evans and Over 1996; Frankish 2004), in which
conscious verbalizations of intention do play a causal role. I shall return to this point
in due course (in Sect. 4).
The final claim that Wegner makes—which I propose to spend a fair bit time in
Sect. 3 elaborating and defending—is that our access to our own will (that is, our
own acts of deciding or intending, which cause our actions) is always interpretative
in character. Our awareness of our own will results from turning our mind-reading
capacities upon ourselves, and coming up with the best interpretation of the informa-
tion that is available to it—where this information doesn’t include our acts of deciding
themselves, but only the causes and effects of those events. On this account, then, the
events in question don’t count as conscious, or at least not by the intuitive criterion
that requires us to have non-inferential, non-interpretative, access to a mental event
if the latter is to qualify as a conscious one. In the next section I shall present a brief
defense of this latter claim, before turning to discuss the main point in Sect. 3.
2 The immediacy of consciousness
There is, of course, a great deal of dispute about the nature of consciousness. By far the
major part of this concerns the nature and best explanation of phenomenal, or expe-
riential, consciousness. This is a topic on which I have well-developed views of my
own (Carruthers 2000, 2005). But it isn’t one that concerns us here. For our topic isn’t
conscious experience, but rather conscious thought: and in particular, conscious acts
of deciding or intending. And here it is arguable that our common-sense understanding
of what it is for a thought to be a conscious one is that it is a mental event of which
we are immediately and non-interpretationally aware (Carruthers 2005, chapters 7
and 8).
1
It is this that gives us the contrast between our conscious thoughts and our
unconscious ones. For the latter, if they are known to us, are only known via a process
of self-interpretation, such as might occur during counseling or on the psychoanalyst’s
couch. And it is also what gives us the asymmetry between our own conscious thoughts
and those of other people. The latter, too, are only known to us through a process of
interpretation, whereas our own thoughts, when conscious, aren’t, we believe.
This conclusion can be reached from a variety of different perspectives on the nature
of consciousthought. Many philosophers—especially those influenced directly or indi-
rectly by Wittgenstein—are apt to emphasize that we are authoritative about our own
conscious thoughts, in a way that we cannot be authoritative about the thoughts of oth-
ers (Malcolm 1984; Shoemaker 1990; Heal 1994; Moran 2001; see also Burge 1996).
If I sincerely claim to be entertaining a particular thought then this provides sufficient
1
Strictly speaking, all that the argument of this paper requires is that non-interpretational access is a
necessary condition on conscious thoughts and intentions.
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grounds for others to say of me—and to say with justification—that I am entertaining
that thought, in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary. Put otherwise, a sincere
avowal of what I am currently thinking is self-licensing—perhaps because such claims
are thought to be somehow constitutive of the thoughts thereby ascribed—in a way
that sincere claims about the thought processes of others aren’t.
It is very hard indeed to see how we could possess this kind of epistemic authority
in respect of our own occurrent thoughts, if those thoughts were only known to us
on the basis of some sort of self-interpretation. For there is nothing privileged about
my standpoint as an interpreter of myself. Others, arguably, have essentially the same
kind of interpretative access to my mental states as I do. (Of course I shall normally
have available a good deal more data to interpret in my own case, and I can also gen-
erate further data at will, in a way that I can’t in connection with others—but this is
a mere quantitative, rather than a qualitative difference.) So believers in first-person
authority should also accept the immediacy of conscious thought, and maintain that
our access to our own occurrent thoughts, when conscious, is of a non-inferential,
non-interpretative, sort.
The immediacy of consciousness can also be motivated from a variety of more
cognitivist perspectives. On the sort of approach that I favor, a mental state becomes
conscious when it is made available to a ‘mind-reading’ faculty that has the power,
not only to entertain thoughts about the content of that state (e.g. about an item in the
world, perceptually or conceptually represented), but also to entertain thoughts about
the occurrence of that state itself (Carruthers 2000, 2005). When I perceive a ripe
tomato, for example, my perceptual state occurs in such a way as to make its content
available to conceptual thought about the tomato, where some of those concepts may
be deployed recognitionally (e.g. red or tomato). That state is then a conscious one,
if it also occurs in such a way as to be available to thoughts about itself (e.g. ‘It looks
to me like there is a tomato there,’ or ‘I am now experiencing red’)—where here, too,
some of the concepts may be deployed recognitionally, so that I can judge, straight
off, that I am experiencing red, say. On this sort of account, then, a conscious thought
will be one that is available to thoughts about the occurrence of that thought (e.g.
‘Why did I think that?’), where the sense of availability in question is supposed to be
non-interpretative, but rather recognitional, or at least quasi-recognitional.
It is worth noting that this account is fully consistent with so-called ‘theory-theory’
approaches to our understanding of mental states and events (a version of which I
endorse). On such a view, our various mental concepts (perceive, judge, fear, feel,
intend, and so on) get their life and significance from their embedding in a substan-
tive, more-or-less explicit, theory of the causal structure of the mind (Lewis 1966;
Churchland 1981; Stich 1983; Fodor 1987). So to grasp the concept percept of red,
for example, one has to know enough about the role of the corresponding state in our
overall mental economy, such as that it tends to be caused by the presence of some-
thing red in one’s line of vision, and tends to cause one to believe, in turn, that one is
confronted with something red, and so on. It is perfectly consistent with such a view,
that these theoretical concepts should also admit of recognitional applications, in cer-
tain circumstances. And then one way of endorsing the immediacy of consciousness
is to say that a mental state counts as conscious only if it is available to a recognitional
application of some corresponding mental concept.
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The immediacy of consciousness can likewise be endorsed by those who believe
that consciousness results from the operations of an internal self-scanning mechanism,
or ‘inner sense’ (Armstrong 1968, 1984; Lycan 1987, 1996), provided that the mech-
anism in question is encapsulated from our beliefs about ourselves and our present
circumstances. All perception is to some degree inferential in character, of course
(Pylyshyn 2003), and presumably inner perception is no different. But this wouldn’t
show that our access to our own mental states isn’t immediate, in the sense that matters
for our purposes. For the inferences in question can depend only on information that is
general, not accessing our beliefs about our other beliefs and goals, about our recent
movements and physical actions, or about events taking place in our current environ-
ment. And provided that this is so, then we still have a principled distinction between
the sort of access that we have to our own mental states, and the sort of interpretative
access that we have to the mental states of others. For the latter does require us to
access beliefs about the other person’s actions, as well as beliefs about that person’s
other beliefs, goals, and so forth.
What really is inconsistent with the immediacy of consciousness is a view of our
relation to our own mental states that makes the latter dependent upon our particular
beliefs about our current environment or circumstances, or about our recently prior
thoughts or other mental states. If my awareness that I am in some particular mental
state depends, not just on recognitional deployment of theoretically-embedded con-
cepts, but also on inferences that draw upon my beliefs about the current physical or
cognitive environment, then introspection really will be inferential and interpretative
in a manner that conflicts with the relevant sort of immediacy. But it is, I claim, a
presupposition of our common-sense conception of consciousness that our access to
our conscious mental states is not interpretative in this sense. For that would mean
that there was no principled difference between our access to our own thoughts and
our access to the thoughts of other people.
There is a strong case for saying that our access to our own acts of will must be
immediate and non-interpretative, then, if those acts are to qualify as conscious ones.
At any rate this is what I propose to assume in what follows. I shall take for granted
that if it can be shown that the only form of access that we have to our own intentions
and decisions to act is interpretative—in this respect like the access that we have to
the intentions and decisions of other people—then there is no such thing as conscious
willing or conscious deciding. Conscious will would have been shown to be illusory.
3 Is our access to our own acts of will interpretative?
Wegner (2002) argues on empirical grounds that our access to our own intentions and
acts of intention-formation is, indeed, interpretative, drawing on the extensive ‘cog-
nitive dissonance’ and ‘self-perception’ literatures that have been built up in social
psychology over the last 50 years (Festinger 1957; Bem 1967, 1972; Wicklund and
Brehm 1976; Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Wilson 2002). In a
wide range of circumstances people can be induced to confabulate explanations of their
own behavior, attributing to themselves attitudes and intentions that they don’t actually
have (and they do so in all honesty, without awareness that they are confabulating).
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