Conscious Will
Ken Armstrong
armstron at ohiou.edu
Fri Apr 26 10:16:30 EDT 2002
It being so quiet on the list, I thought this Percy-like item might not be
inappropriate. There is a book out now, The Illusion of Conscious Will,
which is not about a vanishing Percy relation, but might be just the kind
of thing WP would have enjoyed skewering. The following is excerpted from
the review on Amazon.com:
"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. "
Well. One would think the reviewer would feel some obligation, conscious
will being an illusion and all, to explain how he thinks or how the author
thinks this book came into being? If ever a theory displayed all the
characteristics WP delineates in The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,
this must be it. Imagine the pathos of "developing a sense of
responsibility and morality" with no capacity for will.
TGIF and cheers to all,
Ken Armstrong
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