BOOK REVIEW
Making ourselves at home in our machines
Daniel Wegner, 2002, The
Illusion of Conscious Will, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 405 pp, $34.95 ISBN 0-262-23222-7
Reviewed by
Daniel C. Dennett
Daniel Wegner is Professor of
Psychology at Harvard University. He received his PhD from Michigan State
University in 1974, and taught at Trinity University, San Antonio, and the
University of Virginia before moving to Harvard in 2000. He is the author of White
Bears and other Unwanted Thoughts (1989), and many articles on thought
suppression, “ironic processes” of mental control, and related topics. He has studied how people in groups and
relationships remember things transactively, and has examined how people identify
their actions. His research has been
funded by the National Science Foundation and is currently funded by the
National Institute of Mental Health. He has been a Fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and he has served as associate
editor of Psychological Review.
Daniel C. Dennett is University
Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the
Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He received his B.A. in
philosophy from Harvard in 1963 and the D.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford in
1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts. He is
the author of nine books, among them Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), and Freedom
Evolves (2003), as well as many articles on mind, evolution, consciousness
and artificial intelligence. Currently he is working on conceptual problems
confronting empirical theories of human consciousness, and the implications of
these problems for social issues.
Address correspondence and
reprint requests to Daniel C. Dennett, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts
University, Medford, MA 02155.
The onward march of science and technology makes many
thoughtful people uneasy, for good reason. As mysteries are turned into puzzles
and then solved, there is less and less room to hide from the dark suspicions
that have haunted us since Aristotle’s day: are we human beings kidding
ourselves when we think we act freely, and for reasons? Are we just “meat
machines” whose so-called acts have no more morality attached to them than the
destructive “fury” of a tornado, the “gift” of a tree bearing fruit? The title of Daniel Wegner’s book is ominous,
and the case he makes for his central claim–that conscious will is, in one
important sense, illusory–is unsettling, but his conclusion is not as dire as
it first may appear. Conscious will is not at all what we may have thought it
was, what tradition supposes it to be, but what it is–or what we have instead
of conscious will, if you prefer to let tradition anchor the definition of the
terms–is enough to ground our most important ethical convictions, to secure our
responsibility for at least many of the things we do. “Illusory or not,
conscious will is the person’s guide to his or her own moral responsibility for
action.” (p341)
We think we know “from the inside” what we are doing and
why, but we also know that there are many things going on in us that we don’t
have such privileged access to, so how do we know–how could we know–that we
are actually doing the deciding? Notice
how the introduction of the issue of privileged access automatically puts us
onto the slippery slope to the Cartesian Theater: the mythical place in the
brain “where it all comes together for consciousness” (Dennett, 1991). There
are things going on in me that I don’t know about, and then there
are things I know about “directly”–they are somehow delivered to me
wherever I am. Instead of fighting this
tempting but treacherous image, Wegner permits himself the full Cartesian
picture when it suits his purposes: “We
can’t possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of
mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily
complicated machine” (p27). These machines “we inhabit” simplify things for our
benefit: “The experience of will, then,
is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation.” (p96) In other
words, we get a useful but distorted glimpse of what is going on in our brains:
The
unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives
us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. In fact, unconscious and inscrutable
mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also
produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of
the action. So, while our thoughts may
have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the
experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these
connections, not from the connections themselves.(p98)
Who or what is this “we” that
inhabits the brain? It is a commentator and interpreter with limited access to
the actual machinery, more along the lines of a press secretary than a
president or boss.
In the 18th century, David Hume argued that we
never perceive causation directly. What we perceive is succession, first
the apparent cause and then the apparent effect, and it is the constant
conjunction of similar cause-effect pairs that drives into our minds the idea
that there is a necessary–not merely coincidental or contingent--connection
between events of the two types. This idea of necessary connection is in some
regards illusory: we think we can actually see or observe
A causing B, but we never do. Our minds supply the sense of oomph, not the
world. Hume’s analysis of causation is one of the few success stories in
philosophy. In most regards it has stood the test of time remarkably well, and
been retroactively supported, you might say, by a host of mundane phenomena.
Movies and television wouldn’t “work,” for instance, if we could–or had to–see
causation; the absence of real causation between the image of Bugs Bunny’s fist
and the image of Elmer Fudd’s chin would dispel the illusion that Bugs’ hitting
Elmer was what caused Elmer to fall over backwards.
Wegner starts from, and expands on, Hume’s insights on
causation, extending the fundamental message to our knowledge of mental
causation–the apparent causation of our own deeds by our own decisions
or acts of will. We think we know “directly” by some sort of introspection when
we act on purpose or intentionally, and we may even suppose that this intimate
knowledge we have of our willed actions is somehow immune to error or
tampering. Wegner shows, in many fascinating and delightful ways, that this is
simply mistaken. Our access to our “conscious wills” causing our “intentional
actions” is fallible. We can be readily fooled because the normal
self-knowledge we have is Humean knowledge, just like our knowledge of what
causes windows to break when hit by baseballs. William F. Buckley tells the
tale in one of his books about friends who lived in an apartment in Paris with
a picture window providing a grand view of the Eiffel Tower, which is (or was
then) lit up every evening precisely at 6pm. This couple liked to amuse themselves with a
little prank when people came over for drinks and dinner. They kept several
precisely set clocks in view, and as 6 o’clock approached, one of them would
say “Honey, why don’t you turn on the lights,” and the other would say, “OK,
dear,” and walk casually over to the dummy light switch beside the picture
window. Five, four, three, two, one, click!
To the amazement of the guests, it appeared that these Americans in
Paris controlled the floodlights on the Eiffel Tower. Wegner has developed a
variety of similar pranks to play on his experimental subjects, testing and
refining hypotheses about how their self-knowledge can be manipulated by
changing the circumstances in which they act.
One of the phenomena that Wegner exposes for a better
view is ideomotor automaticity, the familiar–but always
unsettling–phenomenon in which thinking about something can bring about a
bodily action related to that thing without the action being an intentional
action. For instance, you might betray a secret sexual thought with a tell-tale
hand motion that you didn’t intend, and in fact would be embarrassed to
discover. In such a case, you are not conscious of the causal relation between
the thought and the act, but there it is, as good as the causal relation
between the aroma of good food and salivation. The main feature of ideomotor
actions is people’s obliviousness to them–their underprivileged access,
you might say. It is as if our usually transparent minds had curtains or
barriers installed, behind which these causal chains could get tugged without
our introspecting them, producing effects without our compliance. “This ghost
army of unconscious actions provides a serious challenge to the notion of an
ideal human agent. The greatest contradictions to our ideal of conscious agency
occur when we find ourselves behaving with no conscious thought of what we are
doing.” (p157)
For Descartes, the mind was perfectly transparent to
itself, with nothing happening out of view, and it has taken more than a
century of psychological theorizing and experimentation to erode this ideal of
perfect introspectability, which we can now see gets the situation almost
backwards. Consciousness of the springs of action is the exception, not the
rule, and it requires some rather remarkable circumstances to have evolved at
all. Ideomotor actions are the fossils, in effect, of an earlier age, when our
ancestors were not as clued in as we are about what they were doing. As Wegner
says, “Rather than needing a special
theory to explain ideomotor action, we may only need to explain why ideomotor
actions and automatism have eluded the mechanism that produces the experience
of will.” (p150)
This mechanism arose as part of the package that evolved
in our species along with language. “A voluntary action is something a person
can do when asked,” Wegner notes (p32), and this quite sharply distinguishes
human action from animal action. When
psychologists and neuroscientists devise a new experimental setup or paradigm
in which to test nonhuman subjects such as rats or cats or monkeys or dolphins,
they often have to devote dozens or even hundreds of hours to training each
subject on the new tasks. A monkey, for instance, can be trained to look to the
left if it sees a grating moving up and look to the right if it sees a grating
moving down. All this training takes
time and patience, on the part of both trainer and subject. Human subjects in such experiments, however,
can usually just be told what is desired of them. After a brief
question-and-answer session and a few minutes of practice, we human subjects
will typically be as competent in the new environment as any agent ever could
be. Of course, we do have to understand the representations presented to
us in these briefings, and what is asked of us has to be composed of
action-parts that fall within the range of things we can do. That is what Wegner means when he identifies
voluntary actions as things we can do when asked. If asked to lower your blood
pressure or adjust your heartbeat or wiggle your ears, you will not be so ready
to comply, though with training not unlike that given to laboratory animals,
you may eventually be able to add such feats to your repertoire of voluntary
actions.
When language came into existence, it brought into
existence the kind of mind that can
transform itself on a moment’s notice into a somewhat different virtual
machine, taking on new projects, following new rules, adopting new policies. We
are transformers. That's what a mind is, as contrasted with a mere brain: the
control system of a chameleonic transformer. A virtual machine for making more
virtual machines. Non-human animals can engage in voluntary action of sorts.
The bird that flies wherever it wants is voluntarily wheeling this way and
that, voluntarily moving its wings, and it does this without benefit of
language. The distinction embodied in anatomy between what it can do
voluntarily (by moving its striated muscles) and what happens autonomically,
moved by smooth muscle and controlled by the autonomic nervous system, is not
at issue. We have added a layer on top of the bird’s (and the ape’s and the
dolphin’s) capacity to decide what to do next. It is not an anatomical layer in
the brain, but a functional layer, a virtual layer composed somehow in the
micro-details of the brain’s anatomy: We
can ask each other to do things, and we can ask ourselves to do things. And at least sometimes we readily comply with
these requests. Yes, your dog can be
“asked” to do a variety of voluntary things, but it can’t ask why you make
these requests. A male baboon can “ask” a nearby female for some grooming, but
neither of them can discuss the likely outcome of compliance with this request,
which might have serious consequences for both of them, especially if the male
is not the alpha male of the troop. We
human beings not only can do things when requested to do them; we can answer
inquiries about what we are doing and why. We can engage in the practice of asking,
and giving, reasons.
It is this kind of asking, which we can also direct to
ourselves, that creates the special category of voluntary actions that sets us
apart. Other, simpler intentional systems act in ways that are crisply
predictable on the basis of beliefs and desires we attribute to them on the
basis of our surveys of their needs and their history, their perceptual and
behavioral talents, but with us, it is different. We need to have something to
say when asked what the heck we think we’re doing. And when we answer, our
authority is problematic. The evolutionary biologist William Hamilton,
reflecting on his own uneasiness with his recognition of this fact, put the
issue particularly well:
In
life, what was it I really wanted? My own conscious and seemingly indivisible
self was turning out far from what I had imagined and I need not be so ashamed
of my self-pity! I was an ambassador ordered abroad by some fragile coalition,
a bearer of conflicting orders, from the uneasy masters of a divided empire. .
. . As I write these words, even so as to be able to write them, I am pretended
to a unity that, deep inside myself, I now know does not exist.” (1996, p134)
Once language evolved, people could do things
with words that they could never do before, and the beauty of the whole
development was that it tended to make those features of their complicated
neighbors that they were most interested in adjusting readily accessible to
adjustment from outside–even by somebody who knew nothing about the internal
control system, the brain. These ancestors of ours discovered whole generative
classes of behaviors for adjusting the behavior of others, and for monitoring
and modulating (and if need be resisting) the reciprocal adjustment of their
own behavioral controls by those others.
The centerpiece metaphor of this co-evolved human
user-illusion is the Self, which appears to reside in a place in the
brain, the Cartesian Theater, providing
a limited, metaphorical outlook on what’s going on in our brains. It provides
this outlook to others, and to ourselves. In fact, we wouldn’t exist, as Selves
“inhabiting complicated machinery” as Wegner so vividly puts it, if it weren’t
for the evolution of social interactions requiring each human animal to create
within itself a subsystem designed for interacting with others. Once created, it could also interact with
itself at different times. Until we human beings came along, no agent on the
planet enjoyed the curious non-obliviousness
we have to the causal links that emerged as salient once we human beings began
to talk about what we were up to. As
Wegner puts it, “People become what they
think they are, or what they find that others think they are, in a process of
negotiation that snowballs constantly.” (p314)
Wegner is right, then, to identify the Self that emerges
in his and others’ experiments as a sort of public-relations agent, a
spokesperson instead of a boss, but these are extreme cases set up to isolate
factors that are normally integrated, and we need not identify ourselves
so closely with such a temporarily isolated self. Wegner draws our attention to the times–not
infrequent among those of us who are “absent-minded”–when we find ourselves
with a perfectly conscious thought that just baffles us; it is, as he wonderfully
puts it, conscious but not accessible (p163). (Now why am I standing in
the kitchen in front of the cupboard? I
know I’m in the place I meant to be, but what did I come in here to get?) At
such a moment, I have lost track of the context, and hence the raison
d’être, of this very thought, this conscious experience, and so its meaning
(and that’s what is most important) is temporarily no more accessible to me–the
larger me that does the policy-making–than it would be to any third party, any
“outside” observer who came upon it. In fact some onlooker might well be able
to remind me of what it was I was up to. My capacity to be reminded (re-minded)
is crucial, since it is only this that could convince me that this onlooker was
right, that this was something I was doing. If the thought or project is
anyone’s, it is mine–it belongs to the me who set it in motion and provided the
context in which this thought makes sense; it is just that the part of me that
is baffled is temporarily unable to gain access to the other part of me that is
the author of this thought.
I might say, in apology, that I was not myself
when I made that mistake, or forgot what I was about, but this is not the
severe disruption of self-control that is observed in schizophrenia, in which
the patients own thoughts are interpreted as alien voices. This is just the
fleeting loss of contact that can disrupt a perfectly good plan. A lot of what you
are, a lot of what you are doing and know about, springs from
structures down there in the engine room, causing the action to happen. If a
thought of yours is only conscious, but not also accessible to that
machinery (to some of it, to the machinery that needs it), then you
can’t do anything with it, and are left just silently mouthing the damn phrase
to yourself, your isolated self, over
and over. Isolated consciousness can indeed do nothing much on its own. Nor can
it be responsible.
As Wegner notes,
“If people will often forget tasks for the simple reason that the tasks
have been completed, this signals a loss of contact [emphasis added]
with their initial intentions once actions are over–and thus a susceptibility
to revised intentions.” (p167) A loss of contact between what and what? Between
a Cartesian Self that “does nothing” and a brain that makes all the decisions?
No. A loss of contact between the you that was in charge then and the you that
is in charge now. A person has to be able to keep in contact with past
and anticipated intentions, and one of the main roles of the brain’s
user-illusion of itself, which I call the self as a center of narrative
gravity, is to provide me with a means of interfacing with myself at
other times. As Wegner puts it, “Conscious will is particularly useful, then,
as a guide to ourselves.”(p328) The perspectival trick we need in order to
escape the clutches of the Cartesian Theater is coming to see that I, the
larger, temporally and spatially extended self, can control, to some degree,
what goes on inside of the simplification barrier, where the decision-making
happens, and that is why, as Wegner says, “Illusory or not, conscious will is
the person’s guide to his or her own moral responsibility for action.”
(p341)
This book is what books are often called and seldom
are: required reading for anybody who
wants to think about free will, a classic in the making. Aren’t we lucky, then,
that it is also a joy to read, with many amusing touches and vivid
formulations.[1]
REFERENCES
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness
Explained, Boston: Little, Brown.
Dennett, D. C. (2003). Freedom
Evolves, New York: Viking Penguin.
Hamilton, W. (1996). Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Vol 1: Evolution of Social Behaviour, Oxford: Freeman.