Illusion of conscious volition: what it is and how it affects us

The illusion of conscious will: a concept associated with the philosophical idea of free will.

To what extent is our conscious behavior consciously decided? That is, are we ourselves masters of how we behave or does something, albeit within us, decide for us?

Many would think 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, but what if that decision was nothing more than a warning?

In the following, we will try to understand the illusion we will try to understand the illusion of conscious will, a concept with origins in neurobiology.The concept has its origins in neuroscience but touches on aspects that have been much discussed in the history of philosophy and modern psychology.

What is the illusion of conscious will?

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 we have the ability to change our behavior to our liking.

We could say that both those who defend extreme determinism and the more liberal free will advocates are wrong. We are supposed to be able to influence our behavior, which would explain why we are sometimes wrong about things that, in theory, we knew what we had to do, but there is also the fact that we are able to influence our own behavior. we are neither 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 capacity to consciously decide on our behavior, although not all of it is conditioned by factors outside our mind. In fact, it seems that it is our mind that decides for us without us realizing it, but it has its own criteria for deciding what to do. We are given the feeling that our decisions are conscious, but this is nothing more than an illusion.

The illusion of conscious will is an idea put forward by Dr. Daniel Wegner (1948-2013) in his book of the same title "The Illusion of Conscious Will" (2002), relating it to the Theory of Apparent Mental Causality. In essence, this theory defends that when we carry out a behavior, it gives us the feeling that we have consciously decided to do it beforehand, but in reality the decision had already been made much earlier and less consciously.but in reality the decision had already been made much earlier and less consciously.

Illusion and apparent mental causality

All people who have a healthy brain, without neurological lesion or any mental disorder, are conscious of their acts, acts of which he or she believes that he or she has fully consciously decided to do them or not. That is to say, he or she attributes to his or her behavior a will, a free decision, in short, he or she believes he or she has free will and decides rationally (or not) what to do and what not to do. People believe they are in absolute control of their behavior..

But one thing is to be aware of what we do and another is the fact of consciously deciding what we do. That is, just because we know 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 to our thinking the cause of subsequent behavior, although this does not mean that we really do.However, this does not mean that both phenomena actually 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 need not be so.

For example, if I start thinking about Smoking a cigarette and then 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 been made unconsciously in my mind beforehand. At some point, that idea that was originally in my unconscious has passed into my consciousness and I have interpreted it as me making a decision at that moment, but it was really nothing more than a warning of what I was going to do next, smoking.

Actually, both the conscious idea of wanting to smoke (B) and the act of smoking itself (C) are the 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 so 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 by means of unconscious processes of which we cannot know how they work exactly..... The idea that we think about the behavior we are going to do before we do it would not be the decision itself, since it would already have been made, but rather a kind of forewarning of what is going to happen. For example, as I have unconsciously decided to smoke, my mind warns me before I smoke that I am going to do so and so I start thinking that I feel like having a cigarette.

Unconscious mind, hypnotists and neuroscience.

While it could not be said that he would have explicitly talked about the illusion of conscious will, Sigmund Freud's work on hypnosis that can well be related to Wegner's research is not at all ignorable. Hypnosis encouraged Freud to intuit that there were unconscious processes mobilizing 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 by rationalization the defense mechanism in which the individual gives convincing, but false, reasons for the action he has done. Applied to the field of hypnosis, post-hypnotic rationalization is the explanation given by the hypnotized individual after having performed a behavior during the hypnotic trance, a behavior that the hypnotist has ordered him to perform after giving him a signal.

Let us think of a prototypical hypnotic 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 this, 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, albeit unconsciously, the example of the hypnotist and the post-hypnotic rationalization exemplifies very well the relationship between our unconscious, our conscious thought and our behavior. The hypnotist could well be a metaphor of our unconscious processes and the explanation of why his chin itched may well serve to explain those warnings that something is going to be done.

To conclude, we cannot talk about decisions made before we believe we have made them without talking about who has found neurophysiological evidence for them.. 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.

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 we do something we think about that something is nothing more than a warning, a warning that we are going to perform a certain behavior. It is not that we think about smoking a cigarette and then smoke, or want to eat a hamburger and then eat it, but that our mind has decided beforehand.

Our belief that we are totally free and rational beings, masters of our own behavior, coupled 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 is already decided, we only justify it "rationally".

Bibliographical references:

• Carruthers, P. (2007). The illusion of conscious will. Synthese 159, 197-213 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9204-7
• Wegner, D.M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press.