Daniel Wegner, "The Illusion Of Conscious Will" 에서

 

 

 

 

Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, New Edition (2018)

 

 

 

Will is a feeling. David Hume was sufficiently impressed by this idea so that he proposed to define will in this way, as "nothing but the internal impression we feel and conscious of ...." (A Treatise of Human Nature, p399) (p 3)

 

The experience of will comes from having our actions follow our wishes, not from being able to do things that do not follow from anything. And, of course, we do not cause our wishes. The things we want to do come into our heads (p 307)

 

It seems we cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusory is trivial. on the contrary, the illusions piled atop apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology and social life. It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we can begin to solve the problem of knowing who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do, and of judging ourselves morally right or wrong for what we have done. (p 324)

 

 

Review of the book by Susan Blackmore (for the Times Literary Supplement) 에서:

 

[T]he false idea that our conscious thoughts cause our actions, ... he says, is caused by the simple mistake of confusing correlation with causality.... When we decide to do something, we are first aware of our conscious thoughts about the action, then we observe the action happening, and finally we conclude that our thoughts caused the action. In fact, says Wegner, unconscious processes caused both the conscious thoughts and the action.