Illusion Of Conscious Will: What It Is And How It Affects Us
To what extent is our conscious behavior consciously decided? That is to say, are we ourselves masters of how we behave or is there something that, although within us, decides for us?
Many would think that these questions are absurd, since when we want to do something we decide to do it. First we think about, for example, eating a hamburger and then we eat it, however, what if that decision was nothing more than a warning?
Next We will try to understand the illusion of conscious will a concept with origins in neuroscience but that touches on highly discussed aspects in the history of philosophy and modern psychology.
Human beings have discussed free will at length throughout the history of philosophy, a topic that has been inherited by psychology and neuroscience. There are those who consider that all our behavior is the result of a series of actions that, through cause-effect relationships, make us behave the way we do. Others believe just the opposite, that as rational and free beings that we are, we have the ability to change our behavior to our liking.
We could say that both those who defend extreme determinism and the defenders of more liberal free will are wrong. We are supposed to be able to influence our behavior, which would explain why we sometimes make mistakes about things that, in theory, we knew what to do, but there is also the fact that We are not isolated from our environment nor free from our genes and, through their influence, we behave in one way or another
It seems that, in reality, we do not have the ability to decide on our behavior consciously, although this does not mean that all of it is conditioned by factors outside our mind. In fact, it seems that it is it, our mind, that decides for us without us realizing it, but it has its own criteria to decide what to do. We get the feeling that our decisions are conscious, but this is nothing more than an illusion.
The illusion of conscious will is an idea presented by Dr. Daniel Wegner (1948-2013) in his book of the same name “The Illusion of Conscious Will” (2002), relating it to the Theory of Apparent Mental Causality. In essence, this theory argues that When we carry out a behavior, we get the feeling that we have consciously decided to do it beforehand but in reality the decision had already been made much earlier and in a less conscious way.
All people who have a healthy brain, without neurological damage or any mental disorder, are aware of their actions, actions that they believe that he or she has fully consciously decided to do or not to do. That is, he attributes a will to his behavior, a free decision; in short, he believes he has free will and decides rationally (or not) what to do and what not to do. We people believe we are in absolute control of our behavior
But it is one thing to be aware of what we do and another to consciously decide what we do. That is, knowing what we are doing does not mean that we have decided it ourselves or, at least, that we have thought rationally about it. It may be that the decision has been made for us, but not consciously: there is something hidden in the depths of our mind that has decided for us.
According to Wegner and relating it to apparent mental causality, the illusion of conscious will occurs because Human beings attribute the cause of subsequent behavior to our thinking, although this does not mean that both phenomena really have a cause and effect relationship. That is, when we first consciously think about doing something and then do that behavior, we think that such behavior is the result of that thought, but it really doesn’t have to be that way.
For example, if I start thinking about smoking a cigarette and then I smoke one, it is logical to think that the act of smoking has been decided at the moment I thought about smoking a cigarette. However, that decision may have already been made previously unconsciously by my mind. At some point, that idea that was originally in my unconscious has passed into my consciousness and I have interpreted it as that I was making a decision at that moment, but really it was nothing more than a warning of what I was going to do next, smoke.
Actually, both the conscious idea of wanting to smoke (B) and the act of smoking itself (C) are a consequence of an unconscious decision to want to smoke (A), that is, it is not that B causes C, but that A causes B and C, but since A is quite mysterious and it happens that B occurs before C and they are thematically related (smoking), we think that there is a causal relationship between them, which is actually fictitious.
In short, What would happen according to the idea of the illusion of conscious will is that our decisions are made through unconscious processes of which we cannot know how exactly they work The idea that we think about the behavior we are going to do before doing it would not be the decision itself, since it would have already been taken, but rather a kind of warning of what is going to happen. For example, since I have unconsciously decided to smoke, my mind tells me before smoking that I am going to do it and that is why I start thinking about wanting a cigarette.
Unconscious mind, hypnotists and neuroscience
Although it could not be said that he had spoken explicitly about the illusion of conscious will, Sigmund Freud’s work on hypnosis is not at all ignorable and can well be related to Wegner’s research. Hypnosis encouraged Freud to intuit that there were unconscious processes driving people’s behavior, behaviors that our species thinks are consciously controlled.
This “will”, as we have indicated, would be nothing more than an illusion, and post-hypnotic rationalization is a clear example of this We understand rationalization as the defense mechanism in which the individual gives convincing, but false, reasons for the action he has taken. Applied to the field of hypnosis, post-hypnotic rationalization is the explanation given by the suggested individual after having done a behavior during the hypnotic trance, a behavior that the hypnotist has ordered him to do after giving him a signal.
Let’s think about a prototypical hypnotism session where the hypnotist tells the volunteer, who is in a trance, that when he counts to three (signal) he will have to scratch his chin (action). The hypnotist counts to three and the subject scratches his chin as instructed. When asked why he did it, the subject says that he did it because his chin itched, an explanation that makes sense, but is false. It was not he who voluntarily decided to scratch there, but the hypnotist decided for him, and made him behave that way by giving him the signal.
Although most of our behavior is decided by our mind, although unconsciously, the example of the hypnotist and post-hypnotic rationalization come to exemplify very well what our relationship is between our unconscious, our conscious thought and our behavior. The hypnotist could well be a metaphor for our unconscious processes and the explanation of why his chin itched well serves to explain those warnings that something is going to be done.
To finish, You cannot talk about decisions made before we believe we have made them without talking about who has found neurophysiological evidence for it Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) found that the nervous impulse to carry out an action arises 300 milliseconds before a conscious registration of such a decision occurs, that is, our brain decides how it is going to act before we ourselves know what we are going to do. to do.
summarizing
It seems that our behavior is decided by us, but not consciously. Whatever we do, our unconscious mind seems to be the one who has made the decision. The fact that just before doing something we think about that something is nothing more than a warning, a warning that we are going to perform a certain behavior. It’s not that we think about having a cigarette and we smoke, or we want to eat a hamburger and then we eat it, but that our mind has decided beforehand.
Our belief that we are totally free and rational beings, owners of our own behavior, together with the need to find causal relationships to our thinking and behavior, makes us fall into the illusion of conscious will. It makes sense since, after all, That first the idea comes and then the act is done is something that makes it almost impossible for us to attribute a cause and effect relationship to them What we are going to do has already been decided, we only justify it “rationally.”
