Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 6: The Illusion of Conscious Will
20 Plays5 years ago
The psychologist Dan Wegner (1948-2013) had a lot of influential work. One of his most popular (and controversial) claims was that conscious will is an illusion. He wanted to sidestep the issue of whether or not "free will" in a metaphysical sense exists, and get to the more psychological issue of why human beings have such a strong feeling that their conscious intention is what causes their actions.
Can this be right? What exactly does Wegner mean, and does this mean we should abandon moral responsibility? Rolf and Joe get into the weeds sorting out how psychological insights can inform how we think about philosophical issues.
Recommended
Transcript
What is Cognation?
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Cognation, the podcast about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, technology, the future of the human experience, and other stuff we like. It's hosted by me, Joe Hardy. And by me, Rolf Nelson. Welcome to the show.
What is 'The Illusion of Conscious Will'?
00:00:24
Speaker
Today we are going to discuss a paper by Dan Wegner. It's called The Illusion of Conscious Will. So this is, I think, an important
00:00:36
Speaker
It's an important paper in psychology and it's relevant to philosophy too. The article that we're discussing today was an article that was in behavioral and brain sciences. I think we've mentioned before that's a good source for discussion of important topics because it includes rebuttals from a number of other important scientists and other people, and then the author gets a chance to explain themselves afterwards. So it's kind of a discussion forum.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, and it's an interesting topic to discuss and something that ties into a lot of the different pieces that we've talked about on other episodes. And so I think it's something that is worth spending some time on. You can dive right into it. All right, let's dive into it.
Is conscious will an illusion?
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so Wagner's point, his main point is that conscious will is an illusion. That's the big point.
00:01:37
Speaker
That's something that people have been debating forever. I don't think we're going to solve the debate, but it's worth understanding the arguments and weighing in on what we think is reasonable here as well. I think the starting point that he uses is one that psychology uses quite a bit, which is
00:01:59
Speaker
What needs to be explained is not necessarily the metaphysics or the physics of the situation, but the psychological aspects of it. So in the same way as there are psychologists of religions suggesting that the thing to be explained is not necessarily whether or not God exists, but why we believe in a God and maybe taking an evolutionary look at things. Why is it useful for us to believe in a God?
00:02:29
Speaker
the general approach that Wagner takes. He's not necessarily weighing in on does true free will exist, although that's a point of discussion. He says he's not weighing in on that. I think he actually is. But what he says he's weighing in on is why do we have this feeling of having free will or having a conscious will or feeling that our thoughts produce
00:02:59
Speaker
and action in the world.
Feeling vs. Entity: What is conscious will?
00:03:02
Speaker
Yes, and it might make sense to say a bit about what he means by conscious will and how he's defining it. So right off the bat at the beginning of the paper, he says the experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. So I think that's that's the key point. It's the feeling that we are doing things. Yeah, and he brings us throughout
00:03:28
Speaker
the book and in this paper too, he talks about free will as, or will, conscious will, I guess. He doesn't really use the word or the term free will as much as he uses conscious will. Talks about conscious will as really kind of an emotion or a feeling that we may attach to a particular action rather than a thing that we either have or don't have. Right, and this idea that will is a feeling
00:03:59
Speaker
An idea that's been around, since at least Hume, and he wrote about this concept. Yeah, there was a nifty quote that he had from David Hume in here. Yeah, nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind. That's what the will is in this way. It's just the impression that we feel that
00:04:29
Speaker
we are doing something or that we have some perception. One of the things that I think is important in the way that this is discussed is it doesn't deny that we're conscious or that we're aware of these feelings, it's just a misattribution of these feelings. So we're certainly conscious of motivations, we're conscious of what we want, we're conscious of actions that we make, but really what
00:05:00
Speaker
Wagner is suggesting here is that we just don't understand ourselves well enough to be, essentially, I guess, to be aware that what we're thinking isn't what causes something to happen in the world. Right, exactly. And he brings up a lot of different examples of how your feeling of
00:05:28
Speaker
causing some action is at odds with the actual facts of the matter. And he uses that as evidence to suggest that conscious will is an illusion.
How does misperception affect conscious will?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, and an illusion in the sense that we're just misperceiving the correct causes of actions, that these things are happening, but we're misrepresenting the cause as coming from ourselves. So we're not really understanding things in the same way that
00:05:59
Speaker
A visual illusion is just a misapprehension of what actually exists or what the actual nature of the world is. We're misperceiving size or misperceiving motion or something like that. We're not experiencing the true nature of it. When he says that consciousness well is the feeling that we are doing things that our intention is the cause of the action. I think that's the key right there.
00:06:29
Speaker
And so in some sense, the idea that both of these pieces need to be examined, right? One is the feeling that you are in fact doing something or something is happening that you are involved in, engaged with, and that your intention is somehow the cause of the action. And they break apart in different ways. And when I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about the first part, sometimes in dreams, for example, you will feel that you are doing something.
00:06:59
Speaker
you experience that you're doing something or something is happening to you or you're involved in some activity and that you're not, it's a dream. So you're moving around the world. It's an illusion as he's talking about it. Exactly. So in that sense, I don't think anyone would say that the fact of dreams negates the reality of will. So in other words, it can't be the case that
00:07:28
Speaker
there has to be a one-to-one relationship between the experience of doing something and it actually happening in order for us to believe in conscious will. Yeah, so in that sense, I think he's absolutely right. So there are plenty of examples of times where there isn't a one-to-one relationship between our intention and the cause of a thing.
00:07:55
Speaker
think that you're controlling something, but you're actually not. So he talks about two ways to disentangle intentions from causation. One of these is when you intend to do something, but you're not actually the controller of it. In other words, you can be fooled into thinking you're in control of something. Imagine gambling, for example.
00:08:20
Speaker
You're on a run in gambling. You think it's all good luck. You think it's all due to you. There's something great going on. All of a sudden something bad happens and you realize, oh, I guess I wasn't in control of that. It wasn't my conscious intent. All of my little good luck stuff didn't have anything to do with what was happening to me. That was all just completely random. And the other side of this is when we have actions that
00:08:49
Speaker
don't seem to be caused by any sort of conscious will. So in everyday life, we're constantly doing all kinds of automatic actions that aren't necessarily something that we'd consider consciously willed. We're doing all kinds of move your hand around when you talk, as I'm doing right now. I'm moving my hands around and talking, didn't even realize it. You make little motions that you don't think of. When you type on a keyboard, it's mostly automatic.
00:09:19
Speaker
action that's happening. An example that he uses is hypnosis. So people may act without considering it something that they're consciously willing. They may just go through the motions and follow the suggestions of another person.
What is Alien Hand Syndrome?
00:09:40
Speaker
Alien Hand Syndrome is this interesting neurological condition and this may be something that listeners are familiar with. Alien Hand Syndrome, when your hand doesn't feel like it's a part of your body and it seems to act on its own accord, this would be an instance where you don't have that sense that there's free will or there's a conscious will in control of your hand.
00:10:04
Speaker
it acts entirely differently. In all of those cases, there's not a one-to-one mapping of a conscious intent and that thing actually occurring. Right, and for the arguments of Wegener, it's probably worth diving into a couple of the examples that he uses, because I think that's a lot of what he's trying to accomplish here.
00:10:30
Speaker
with his paper and with his book is to explore some of the situations where it is quite clear that there is a distinction between your perception of your intention to do something and then what you in fact do. That disconnection or that lack of pure continuity is
00:10:54
Speaker
one of the areas that he most emphasizes in trying to suggest that the conscious will is an illusion. So if you think about the alien hand syndrome, which is a neurological disorder and it's caused by brain injury. So there is some sort of disconnection between the different hemispheres of the brain, the left and the right hemisphere. And some of you may be aware that when you move your right arm or your right hand,
00:11:23
Speaker
This is being controlled by the left side of the brain and vice versa. When you move your left hand, that's being controlled by the right side of your brain. When a person has an injury to a part of the brain that is in charge of connecting the two hemispheres. So, for example, the corpus callosum, then you might have a disconnection between your perception or your ability to articulate your perception of your intention and then what is in fact happening.
00:11:54
Speaker
It almost seems as though it's like there's two separate people in there sometimes with conflicting intentions or conflicting actions. Yes, exactly. I guess in this case, he's actually talking mostly about damage to the middle of the frontal lobe on the side of the brain opposite the affected hand. In this specific case, for this one patient, the left hand would tenaciously grow up for and grasp
00:12:24
Speaker
any nearby object, pick and pull at her clothes, and even grasp her throat during sleep. She slept with the arm tied to prevent nocturnal misbehavior. She never denied that her left arm and hand belonged to her, although she did refer to her limb as though it were an autonomous entity. Yeah, what a weird sensation that must be. So the idea there is that your own body is
00:12:50
Speaker
acting in ways that you can observe and perceive but you have no sensation that you have control over it. An interesting thing is most people probably would have experienced something like this at one time or another where maybe not just your hand but your whole entire body. You can kind of feel as though you're going on autopilot sometimes. It's not always the case that you feel as though you have perfect conscious control over everything that you're doing. It's really basically just a shift of mindset to
00:13:20
Speaker
to sort of experience just letting your body do whatever it's going to do. And it'll still go on. It'll still go on walking. It'll still go on talking. It'll still go on doing all these kinds of things. And you don't necessarily have to attribute conscious will. It doesn't feel like it has to be an animating force in your life. Right. I mean, if you think about situations where you've been under some extreme stress, for example. Yeah, like not sleeping for a night.
00:13:49
Speaker
or you're extremely angry or extremely scared, sometimes people will experience this idea that they're taking actions that they're not in control of, that they're out of control. A bit of a disconnect, just like a disembodied a little bit. Right. And so, I mean, in some sense, if you think about those situations where these are necessarily experiences where they seem out of the ordinary, the alien hand syndrome, the feeling of being out of control,
00:14:18
Speaker
are all cases where it seems distinct or different from your, what we would call normal experience. What I'm wondering is, does the existence of those experiences as exceptions, does that actually argue against conscious will, or does that actually argue for conscious will as being exceptions that make the rule? You know, when you hear this, when I thought about alien hand syndrome the first time, I mean,
00:14:46
Speaker
You wouldn't immediately think of it as discounting conscious will in general because you think about it. Well, I've got my conscious well and I've just got something. Part of my body all of a sudden is not attached to that conscious well. It's as though I'm pretty clear about. I know what the rest of my body is doing, but I don't know what my hand is doing. It's just separate from it. Right, I mean, if you think about walking, for example, as a trivial example, when you walk you have all kinds of.
00:15:14
Speaker
muscle movements, contractions, you know, extensions that you're in no way conscious of in order to stay balanced while you're walking down the street as you're stepping over small stones or, you know, tripping slightly on, on cracks in the, in the sidewalk, micro adjustments. And yeah, yeah. Constantly making motion motions with your, with your body that you're in no way consciously willing.
00:15:43
Speaker
in the sense of being thoughtful about in any way, right? They're definitely happening automatically, but you wouldn't say that they were outside of your will in that way, or that would somehow call the existence of your will into question. I just wonder, maybe we could go back to Wegener and see what he says about this. I mean, how does he use this as evidence?
00:16:12
Speaker
I mean, I think this is something that people have been primed to be more ready to believe, which is that we don't know why we do things that we do. Right. And I think that's the basic intuition that he's going on here. It's just the trend that cognitive psychology has been going in for a long time is that we really are not aware of why we
00:16:42
Speaker
do anything. There's just this incredible complexity in our minds from all kinds of different subconscious processes that are going on. And our awareness is such a limited part of the kinds of real motivations that animate any particular action. Yeah, exactly. And I think that
00:17:11
Speaker
This is the key distinction, again, going back to this duality here between the idea that you feel that you are doing something in the sense that you have a perception that your body is taking an action, whether that be your arm is moving to adjust your shirt or your legs are moving to avoid tripping.
00:17:37
Speaker
But you don't necessarily have the feeling that your intention is the cause of that action.
Can will be divided into parts?
00:17:43
Speaker
You experience that you're doing something. You're aware that you are doing something, but you don't feel that your intention is the cause of that action. And I guess Wagner would just say that's true of well. We feel we have this intention for other stuff, but in fact it's exactly the same that.
00:18:04
Speaker
It's pretty much all like these automatic behaviors. It's pretty much it's all outside of our ability to comprehend. It's just for some reason we make this mental attribution to some things, but not others. So we don't know, we can, we're perfectly fine in saying, Oh, I wasn't aware of that thing that was happening to me.
00:18:28
Speaker
It was just outside of consciousness, but things that are in consciousness and that we have an intention for, we tend to attribute us as being the people responsible for undertaking a particular thing. So the question that I think becomes not, is it possible that sometimes we experience actions that we do not feel that we are intending? That's true. We believe that, right? We believe that sometimes
00:18:57
Speaker
our bodies move in ways that we do not necessarily feel that we are consciously controlling or intending. That's true. The question is, is there ever a situation where our intention is in fact the cause of an action? Yeah, I suspect that he's saying that a will cannot be the cause of an action because
00:19:26
Speaker
I don't know how much he spells this out here, but I think it's just kind of a tenet of cognitive psychology that things are divisible or can be explained in terms of other smaller mechanisms. And he talks about will as being sort of a unitary single mechanism. So in other words, it's something that you can't go further back on and describe in terms of something else. It's almost as though attributing something to a will
00:19:54
Speaker
means that you can't analyze it any further. That's right. His explanation is he calls will an explanatory entity of the first order. And by that he just means you can use it to explain things, but there's nothing that you can use to explain it. So in other words, it's kind of like a stopping point, like saying, you know, why did that happen? Well, it's because of God.
00:20:21
Speaker
Well, then you don't ask any further questions. That's just the end of discussion. And it's just sort of as far as you can go. In physics, for example, there's certain fundamental forces in physics beyond which there isn't any real explanation. They're just taken as fundamental. So for us to call something conscious will in Wagner's terminology would be to take it as something fundamental.
00:20:50
Speaker
that can't be broken down any further. And he says, no, probably can be broken down further. And it's probably part of an accumulation of lots of other subconscious mechanisms that are going on. And psychology's natural tendency is to explore these kinds of sub-mechanisms. So using the term will is a little bit misleading.
00:21:12
Speaker
Like calling something a soul, for example, and just sort of stopping there that we have this singular essence that from which our intentions emanate or from which we make decisions that's so singular that you can't break it down into its parts. And psychologists have a real problem with that because we think of everything as having a cause and everything having components to it.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah, let's take a break and come back.
00:22:11
Speaker
Let's see. So where where can we pick get up again? I think one thing that struck me as I was reading this is. We tend to feel as though we have control over some things. You know that shows up as feeling like conscious will. We will something to happen. Think about this developmentally. We both have kids. When do they feel as though they caused something to happen? They often
00:22:41
Speaker
feel like they caused something to happen when they did not. Yeah, and from that point of view, this paper makes perfect sense to me. I'm already almost all in because when you see this stuff develop in kids where it's clear that some things kids should not take credit for,
00:23:06
Speaker
because it had nothing to do with something that they initiated, you get a lot of misattributions there. It's similar to the idea of when you're watching a football game and you're like, oh, I need to sit on the couch because the last time the Patriots were in the Super Bowl and I was sitting on the couch, they came from behind and won the game, and I sit in my chair, they're losing. Superstition, right? Superstition.
00:23:34
Speaker
I guess you could think of a lot of superstitions as just being a causal misattribution. So then the question is, what's the purpose of thinking that you caused some action? Why would that be a good thing? Forget for a second whether it's true or not, that you yourself have somehow the ability to cause something to happen, apart from other mechanisms.
Why do humans perceive themselves as causing actions?
00:24:03
Speaker
I think it can only make sense in a social environment where you're trying to remember who of your friends is responsible for doing what event and what they caused. It seems like a good shorthand
00:24:24
Speaker
Even if it's not strictly true, because you don't understand everything that every single thing that's going on in the mind of someone. OK, maybe in some deeper sense there was another cause to it, but it's certainly good shorthand to say that somebody else is the cause of a certain action. And you know, even if there's something more complex going on, you don't need to know all of that. It's a good shortcut. It's a good heuristic, I guess. That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about it that way. Maybe it's not about
00:24:54
Speaker
as much even that I need to believe that I am causing my own actions, but I need to believe that people cause actions because they want them to happen. They do things because they want to do them. They will them to happen and that gives me a way of understanding. It informs the way that you would interact with them. It helps me think, well, Rolf is the kind of person who would do this because he's a good guy.
00:25:22
Speaker
And even though I'm just infinitely more complex than that, for your purposes, you've got a lot of other people to think about. You've got a lot of others, you know, got a complex social network. For your purposes, it's good enough to have a quick way of categorizing people and their intentions. So in that way, my own free will is really just my self perception of my own body as an agent, just like every other agent out there.
00:25:53
Speaker
Right, this is and this is so Dan Dennett. He makes a mention of Dan Dennett. I think there's a lot that's relevant to it. So Dennett talks about essentially different ways of perceiving causality in different kinds of things. So Dennett suggests that with people. We adopt the stance that as though they had minds, he calls that the intentional stance.
00:26:22
Speaker
whether or not people have minds, it's useful to treat them as if they do. So it's sort of immaterial what the actual status is. It's useful to treat people as though they had feelings, intentions, all of these shorthand kinds of things. Instead of getting to a really complicated story that involves fundamental physics and understanding the state of the universe, we can treat people as though they have these emotions and intentions and things like that.
00:26:52
Speaker
Alternately, we can take a physical stance and we can describe causation physically like billiard balls hitting each other or a rock falling down the hill. It's useful to think of a rock in terms of physical properties and physical interactions. It's useful to think of a person in terms of all these mental characteristics. It's an easy way to get around socially, I guess, even though if it's not
00:27:18
Speaker
strictly 100% correct in every situation. It's good enough and it's an efficient shortcut. That's right, and it doesn't answer the question of who is perceiving this apparent will, but it at least gives us a framework for thinking about why it's there. You still have the problem of why would you have an experience at all?
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, well, that that gets into lots and lots of bigger questions about consciousness. And I think Wagner at least accepts the basic idea that we're conscious and we're aware of these kinds of things. You know, you can't deny that somebody has an experience. They do. He would just say we're mistaken about the nature of that experience. Yeah, that's interesting.
00:28:17
Speaker
Why would it be important whether or not we have conscious will? I mean, if we don't have conscious will, if in some sense, our intentions are not the cause of our actions, then I think it seems like the most obvious way that it's important is just from a moral philosophy perspective. If there's no relationship between my intention and my action,
00:28:46
Speaker
or that my intention actually comes after my action. It's not that there's no relationship of the two. It's just that there isn't a one-way direction or causality. It's that the intention doesn't cause the act, I guess is what Wagner would say, that there would be a correlation between them, just that it's not a causal. It's not a strict causal factor. That's right.
What are the moral implications of illusory conscious will?
00:29:15
Speaker
the key being that we tend to think about people being responsible for actions that they intended to cause as being a different class of action and responsibility than one where it was an accident. If it's the case that our will does not cause our actions,
00:29:45
Speaker
then everything that we do is, in a sense, an accident. Well, and I mean, this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, is what relation does this argument have to free will versus determinist argument? I think that Wegener essentially, he would not admit it, and he says that he's talking about something different. He says that we're getting away from this free will versus determinism argument. But I think that essentially, you'd have to say that
00:30:15
Speaker
This is an entirely deterministic argument that all of this stuff is happening deterministically and consciousness and free will are something that go along for the ride that they're what we would call epiphenomenal. They don't have a causative relation to what actually happens. That's right. You wouldn't deny consciousness. Consciousness happens, but it doesn't cause the things that we think we're doing to happen.
00:30:45
Speaker
So in terms of responsibility, yeah, I think this has a direct implication. If we can't be aware of all of the factors that are causing us to do something, and in fact our intentions don't cause our actions, the direct implication is that we shouldn't be praiseworthy or blameworthy for things that we do that seem to be of our free will, but in fact are not. And we also shouldn't worry about whether we're doing the right thing or not.
00:31:15
Speaker
Well, it's not up to us to decide whether to worry about it. That's right. So why are we worrying about all this stuff? Why would we worry about stuff? What's the purpose of that? What problem is that solving for the organism? If we're not in control, why would I have the experience of being
00:31:42
Speaker
concerned or anxious that I'm not doing the right thing. Yeah, I think that's a Buddhist way of putting things. Honestly, I think that's. I think that's a Buddhist approach, right? And I think you're. More familiar with. Well, that's what I had that I had the same thought that you know it's sort of related to the Zen concept of not judging.
00:32:07
Speaker
every thought as being a good thought or a bad thought, but rather just observing that you are having the thought. Yeah. That would be sort of a natural implication of, I think, of Wegner's. Yeah, of taking that perspective. I think the natural first impulse that people have is kind of this panic that, well,
00:32:30
Speaker
I mean, I have to I have to believe that I'm responsible for what it is that I'm doing. I can't. Otherwise, I just sit there and do nothing. You know, I would just sit in the corner and and I wouldn't move because I wouldn't feel that anything that I did had an effect. But I don't think that's necessarily true. Of course. I mean, that's we get back to this question of this is are we really saying this is deterministic? And it feels like it has to be because if my.
00:32:58
Speaker
intention does not cause my action. And I mean, in this sense, you have to think about the question of what is an action? Is a thought an action? It's curious that Wegner didn't dive into that part of it too much. If our intention is not the cause of our thought, then we cannot choose to think about it a certain way. We cannot choose to judge or not judge.
00:33:28
Speaker
Our thoughts as being right or correct. Well, I'm just going to. I don't I can't choose to do anything after. I'm just going to sit here and chill because like now what?
00:33:46
Speaker
I mean, I get the point that sometimes you do stuff and you don't feel like you're in control. I get that 100%. But it certainly feels very much so like I am in some sense making a choice to think about things a certain way. Or have a certain set of beliefs. Maybe I'm not. Well, it's impossible to get away. I think it's interesting that you you still do say I feel.
00:34:13
Speaker
I feel like that. Maybe it's just impossible to get away from that as a human with the evolutionary baggage that you have. It just comes along with our psychological profile that we feel that way, that we feel as though we have some sort of control. And you just can't. As much as you might wish to turn it off sometimes, you can't necessarily turn it off. It can be a relieving framework in some ways.
00:34:44
Speaker
it can release some responsibility that you might carry for negative consequences. If our intention is not causing all of these terrible things to happen, we can just sort of release our responsibility for that. But likewise, we can't, you know, we can't take credit for any of the good stuff that we do too. Makes me think about moral philosophy of punishment and whether or not there might be an
00:35:12
Speaker
evolutionary component to assigning intentionality and will to others. Back to your idea of maybe this is all about, we perceive this phenomenon in ourselves because we need to feel that other people are acting intentionally. Yeah, exactly. It's a social thing. Maybe it all ties back to the fact of we need to hold others responsible
00:35:40
Speaker
because if they've done something wrong that we don't like, or that is not adaptive for us, that they may be more likely to do that same kind of thing again in the future, and we need to stop them doing that in order for us to carry our genes forward. Well, it's such a legal, I mean, it is such a legalistic framework in a way, because think of,
00:36:08
Speaker
how much intention has to do with how the law is constructed and how we feel people have the right to suffer for doing a particular thing. Think of the worst serial killer or mass shooter. It's part of the legal framework that they did it with full intention to cause as much damage as they could versus
00:36:37
Speaker
If someone appears to have done an action while they were sleepwalking or under the control of someone else, we don't hold them responsible. So it is clearly a way that we meet out punishment. It's essential to that. And what I'm trying to understand is, is that necessary in any way from a biological or evolutionary standpoint?
How important is intention in legal systems?
00:37:02
Speaker
It's certainly the way that all societies that I'm aware of treat
00:37:07
Speaker
this issue. Are there places where people don't think about that? If the goal of, say, for example, incarceration, the goal of putting someone in jail is to prevent them doing something again, which would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If we're concerned that this person is going to kill us because they killed somebody else, it makes sense to prevent them doing that by incarcerating them.
00:37:35
Speaker
We don't need to assign any intentionality to them, but merely to observe that they've done this action in the past, and that people who kill once are more likely to kill again, for example. And it would be a sufficient reason to put them in jail. But that's not the way we think about it at all. You can see the use of something like this too, because if I firmly believe that
00:38:04
Speaker
another person deserves jail time for whatever action that they did, then I'm probably less likely to do it myself. Right. Is it necessary though? I mean, if you merely observed that when people do those things, they're punished for them and you don't want to be punished, you would still be less likely to do so. You mean, does the intention?
00:38:34
Speaker
attribution of intention. Yeah. Does that play any helpful in any way? Does it do anything for us? I don't know. I don't know either. Yeah, it's it's not clear. It's not clear. It's just it's not clear why it's useful. Wouldn't it be plenty fine to just think about it sort of in behaviorist?
00:39:00
Speaker
You observe someone being punished for a particular action. You don't have to make any sort of attribution about whether or not they did it on purpose, just a strict kind of consequentialist framework. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, in some ways that might be, I don't want to go too far in kind of societal implications, this stuff, but in some ways then you, it seems more
00:39:28
Speaker
useful because then you don't think that there's any way you're going to get out of it by claiming that it wasn't your responsibility, that the rules are the rules and it just sort of always, you know, not going to try and get out of it in some way. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, okay, so what do you what do you think of the idea of just accepting that conscious will is is an illusion? What is it? How does it change the way that you would
00:39:54
Speaker
operate in life. I mean, you kind of mentioned this already, but sort of subjectively. Right. No, I was thinking about that this week, because I know that this is something that that you mentioned before, that you sort of might ascribe, you might believe in this kind of framework. And I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around it, honestly, because of the conundrum of it that I mentioned before, just just a minute ago, which is, all right,
00:40:20
Speaker
I would love to simply say, I am not responsible for things that I think and do because I would like to relax and not worry about all the things. I've spent so much time worrying about if I'm doing the exact right thing and if I'm living up to my full potential and I'm spending my time on earth as optimally as I possibly could. And I spent an inordinate amount of time.
00:40:49
Speaker
worried about this topic. And that are you making the right choices? Am I making the right choices? Exactly. And if I could just simply say, well, I have no control over the choices that I make, or my, my intention does not cause the choices that I make. So there's some sense in which me as an entity is the cause of those choices. But my, my will is not causing that choice. Then
00:41:18
Speaker
I could release myself from it, but then if I could release myself from it, I would be making a conscious choice. If I could choose to believe that there is no such thing as free will, then I am by definition making a willful choice and it just basically kills the whole argument. Maybe it's just a meme that's spreading to you without your
00:41:48
Speaker
without your necessary participation. Well, in that case, then I would, I would be, let me put it this way then. I would be pleased if that were to happen to me. That your responsibility is removed. If it were to occur to me, or if such a, an event took place in my consciousness that I came to believe somehow,
00:42:18
Speaker
that I do not have conscious free will. My consciousness right now is experiencing that I feel that I would be happy about that. That would be a good thing for me. It kind of takes away motivation. In what way? Why do you say that? Well, I think people that are anxious about the future or anxious about ambitions and
00:42:47
Speaker
I guess a lot of anxiety around using your time well. If that anxiety goes away, then. It certainly could be that motivation to do extraordinary things is kind of removed too. It seems that it's a complaint. It may be a complacency, I guess is what I'm saying. It seems that the notion of will and conscious well is related to the notion of
00:43:18
Speaker
good and bad, right? The idea that wanting to do something that is good necessitates that there is an actor. An agent that is choosing to do something that's faced with the choice of. Right. Doing nothing, doing something bad or doing something good. That you take away the agency, then the notion of good and bad also kind of. Become challenged.
00:43:48
Speaker
How does this work with you if you could see a reasonable causal chain that leads you up to any kind of decision that you make? So imagine something that you're, I don't know, what's a choice that you might make that would have some kind of moral consequence to it? Well, I mean, there's deeper things, but I mean, an easy thing to think about is, you know, what you choose to do for your job.
00:44:19
Speaker
or how you choose to spend your time with work, I think is an easy one to think about because it has moral consequence potentially, but it's also so contingent. It has both sides. You have the feeling that you're making choices about what you're doing. We feel that we have made the choice to go to graduate school, for example. But in order to even have that choice via possibilities, so many things had to be the case. You could trace back
00:44:50
Speaker
that chain of events that led you to go to graduate school and you could say, well, if this hadn't happened in this way, if I hadn't been born in this location at this time, then none of these things would have been possible. And in some ways you could say that it's a very reasonable, logical outcome of my circumstances that I ended up doing that. All of which you didn't have control over in the first place. You didn't have any control
00:45:17
Speaker
over the circumstances under which you were born. You didn't have any control about who your parents were, about all of the things that happened on early in life to you. There's always a plausible causal chain that you could give for any particular decision that you make that would include things that you never had control over in the first place.
00:45:44
Speaker
I mean, you can certainly see circumstances under which people seem to take credit for things that are not their responsibility. You know, people feel as though they deserve certain kinds of things in life. I guess I can't help but think of sort of like an Anne Randian philosophy. I don't know. Do you know Anne Rand? Ein Rand, I guess? Ein Rand, sure, sure.
00:46:11
Speaker
Yeah, I've read a couple of her books. I just accidentally, it was, I don't know why, but I felt compelled to watch the, because it was on Amazon Prime, I think, Atlas Shrugged, which was, it was a movie made a couple of years ago, and it was so awful, but I couldn't stop watching it. I mean, it's directly relevant to this because it's a big force in what
00:46:41
Speaker
drives people politically in America is the idea that there is a huge amount of individual freedom and responsibility for actions. I don't necessarily have a problem with that as a societal thing, that people have the sense of responsibility, and that is something that causes them to take responsibility for their actions and try to do the right thing. And Rand takes it way too far, though.
00:47:11
Speaker
It's just such a cardboard cutout of what freedom of will might look like because you've got these wealthy industrialists who have billions of dollars and who feel like they're so entitled to it. And that's the that's the basis of the entire ideas that individuals form individuals are entitled to the products of everything that they produce.
00:47:35
Speaker
And anyone else is just some sort of greedy socialist who's trying to steal from their creativity or their productivity. So that sort of thing, I think, is part of an American belief in individualism that we are responsible for everything that we do and that we have choices that are consequential. We deserve exactly what we have because we earned it.
00:48:05
Speaker
It's certainly the case that we don't have as much control as we think we do often. So you're buying that. I'm taking from this. You buy this part way, right? Yes, absolutely absolutely no for sure. I mean, there's no question that you're sometimes you do things that you don't have any intention of doing. And sometimes. You think that you had you tried to do something and in fact.
00:48:33
Speaker
The cause of the thing happening had nothing to do with your intentions. I believe that that's the case, but just because that can happen or it does happen doesn't mean that it's never possible for you to willfully take an action or your action is caused by your intention. So how do you know the difference between these two things?
Does understanding will-based intentions disprove will?
00:48:56
Speaker
How do you know if you're wrong? I mean, I don't know.
00:49:02
Speaker
How do you know that when you're seeing something that it's an illusion versus that it's not an illusion? That's a good question. I don't know that I would necessarily even argue that I could
00:49:23
Speaker
that you or I could say definitively whether or not a specific action was intentional and that our intention caused the action in a specific instance. All I'm suggesting is that knowing that sometimes that breaks down does not disprove the existence of the will in the first place. And now proving that it exists is a harder thing.
00:49:53
Speaker
I think every decision that you make has some sort of antecedent and there's some sort of causal chain that goes into it. So I do agree with Wagner in some of these points about there is no will at which everything else stops and that just begins the causal chain as though there's some sort of soul inside of you where your actions just emanate from purely and there's nothing that causes
00:50:22
Speaker
There's nothing that influences that pure sense of will. I think that, I mean, he makes a good point, I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. But I also, I do sympathize with your point that in some sense, there's probably some room for real conscious choices that fall outside of, I mean, that yes, they may have antecedents, there may be something that
00:50:50
Speaker
ultimately causes them. Whether it's from the instant of the Big Bang, everything was determined, or whether they're non-deterministic in some kind of way, that everything has some sort of antecedent cause. But some things are more, some things it's more clear that there was an outside cause. And sometimes it really would be a useful way of describing it to say that your
00:51:20
Speaker
Intention was the sort of the best way to explain why something happened.
What are the final thoughts on conscious will?
00:51:26
Speaker
That makes sense. I think you've you've captured as I think as far as we're going to be able to get to. Yeah, we're not going to say anything. I feel like I learned something at least. Yeah. Yeah.