The Illusion of Conscious Will (45 page)

Such identity changes are often viewed as all-or-none, radical transitions between virtual agents. Miss Beauchamp changes to Sally, or Jane Roberts changes to Seth. But this impression is an oversimplification, just like our tendency to think that we are either happy or sad rather than to appreciate all the variations and blends of these feelings we truly experience. People may change virtual agents gradually, in a piecemeal fashion, because both consciousness and memory can vary in graduated segments. One can spend more or less time consciously in an agent, or ascribe more or less of the body’s actions to an agent. One can remember some actions and experiences of an agent at some times, and lose track of these things at others. Instead of a starkly qualitative property, then, identity becomes something we can slide into and out of moment by moment. Identity is a variable quantity that allows more than one virtual agent to share the resources of body and mind.

Consider how it is that we perceive the continuity of any object over time. To examine this, the Belgian psychologist Michotte (1962; see also Bower 1974) showed people items that changed over time in various ways. When, for example, a blue triangle was covered up, and the cover was then removed to show a blue circle, most people watching the demonstration felt that the same object was present. It had merely changed shape from triangle to circle. If, however, a blue triangle was covered up and a red circle appeared when the cover was removed, most viewers thought the object itself had changed identity. As long as some proportion of the features of the object remain the same, it is possible to maintain the perception that it is the same thing. When features change beyond that proportion, there comes a point when it suddenly is something new. If we view personal identity in this way, we can see that a variety of small changes in perceived authorship could add up to a sudden sense that a whole new virtual agent is in place. Transitions as radical as multiple personality switches or spirit possessions may happen little by little at first, in moments of failing to remember what identity we currently possess. With more instances of action that are attributed to the new virtual agent, these small changes can develop over time into noteworthy transformations.

In the overall ebb and flow of events and memories, it is a major achievement for our memory systems to keep track of who we are as well as they do. How, then, does memory for identity keep us in one virtual agent at a time? The process of remembering thoughts and actions must carry on by allocating the body’s acts to particular agents, in line with the perception of the source of thoughts. This process will seek a virtual agent to account for each thought-action unit, and will accumulate as an identity those thought-action units ascribed to the same source. One key function of this system, then, is to create a “home agent,” a virtual agent that is perceived as the source of present thoughts and actions. This is the place thoughts and actions are perceived to be coming from—the subjective self, the agent one inhabits. The feeling of conscious will for actions occurs to this agent, and perception of this agent’s thoughts is used to predict the body’s current actions. Actions that don’t follow from those thoughts will be collected as inconsistent and may eventually lead to the postulation of another agent to whom they can be ascribed.

How does one move from one agent to another? As long as one’s actions are consistent with one’s prior thoughts, the actions continue to feel consciously willed and the home agent remains in operation. However, acts may begin to appear that are inconsistent with the home agent’s thoughts (or memories of prior thoughts). One way to deal with such thoughts is to rationalize them somehow, making them consistent with the home agent’s point of view. This brings them back into the fold, in a sense, and allows one to continue inhabiting the home agent. The auditory hallucinations or voices heard by people with schizophrenia, for example, are understood by the person to be voices of other agents, not the self. This rationale makes sense of the voices, even though they are being created by one’s own mind, and also makes it understandable why no feeling of will is experienced for what those voices say.

Thoughts that are inconsistent with the home agent’s thoughts can also create a new agent. There is a breakdown in experience of will for the home agent and the creation of an experience of will for a new agent— what might be called an “away agent.” As more such experiences of will accrue for the away agent, a sense of subjective self and identity begins to form for that agent. The mechanisms of mind that give rise to behavior are now seen in a new light, from the perspective of a new self. All the activities that transport the person to this point—the rituals leading to spirit possession, the earnest attempts at pretending to channel, the events that precipitate multiple personality—pale in comparison to the intriguing event they produce: the home agent is lost and an away agent takes over. The change in virtual agency produces an experience of consciously willing actions from the perspective of a different self.

The Self as Operating System

It is probably time now to trot out the inevitable computer metaphor. Virtual agents seem a lot like software shells or operating systems on computers—different versions of Windows or Linux or Mac OS. On their face, virtual agents bear an important likeness to the interface of the operating system, the
look and feel
of the computer. An operating system or shell creates a virtual world, an array of what is possible with the machine and what is easily remembered that sits there on the screen and creates the way in which the world is experienced. The virtual agent we experience at any given time similarly produces our experience of the world for us.

Brains and nonconcious mental structures and processes, in turn, might be compared to the hardware of the computer. The operating system typically covers up this stuff, leaving all the wiring and machine languages under the surface. When we want to access a disk drive, we click on a nice little icon on the screen—we don’t have to worry about making the motor turn, finding the proper tracks on the drive, or running the underlying machinery of our search. The operating system can vary from one computer to another, of course, and can also be changed in one computer from day to day. Some machines can boot up in Windows and also boot up in Linux, for example. What seems to happen in people who experience possession, channeling, and DID is highly reminiscent of rebooting the machine and bringing up a changed operating system after the boot. All the different operating systems work the “body”—they each give access to disk drives and printer ports and the like—but they each provide different “front ends” for the machine.

This way of viewing virtual agency is a nice metaphor without much scientific implication. It is not clear how we would go about testing this metaphor, for example, or what it predicts beyond some of the basic resemblances between people and computers. The operating system/ self link does highlight, however, how the subjective self might be a construction—a replaceable set of ways in which things seem to the person—rather than an etched-in-stone feature of the structure of the mind. The point of this chapter has been establishing whether and under what conditions people might change the sense of self they experience as they act. We’ve seen any number of such transformations and have reached the point now of being able to step back and view the system as a whole. And, yes, it does look remarkably like a computer with interchangeable operating systems.

The conclusion we reach is that virtual agents can vary within each person, and perhaps more broadly, that
there is generally a virtual agent for each person
. The sense of having a conscious mind that experiences and chooses and acts is a basic feature of being human. But the fact that this perspective can change with vagaries of memory and experience suggests that this is a basic component that must be added onto the hardware of our brains and mental mechanisms for us to exist in anything like the way we now know ourselves. The development of an agent self in human beings is a process that overlays the experience of being human on an undercarriage of brain and nerve connections. We achieve the fact of having a perspective and being a conscious agent by appreciating the general idea of agents overall and then by constructing a virtual agent in which we can reside (see Attneave 1959).

The human being without a virtual agent is, by this logic, something of a zombie. Someone who is in this no-agent position might be like a person who is moving between multiple personality alters, for example, or like someone who is no longer feeling like himself or herself but has not yet achieved the state of spirit possession. Perhaps sleepwalkers or people in fugue states with subsequent amnesia could be envisioned this way. The inner state of such a person is mysterious. It is not clear what it is like to be without a virtual agent, as we have no reports of this state to go on. No one who can talk about these things intelligently quite knows what it is like to fail to be someone. Perhaps this state is like a dream in which we have no sense of will, or perhaps it is like nothing at all. We are conscious only from the perspective of a virtual agent, and so, with no such agent available, we may simply be not conscious. To be sure, it is only through the construction of a first virtual agent—the self—that a person becomes capable of experiencing conscious will at all.

8

Hypnosis and Will

In hypnosis the person experiences a loss of conscious will. This loss accompanies an apparent transfer of control to someone else, along with the creation of some exceptional forms of control over the self.

The principal condition for the induction of the hypnotic state is a vivid idea of a passive surrender of the will to that of some other person, who is able to influence his subject by words, acts, or gestures.

Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology
(1912)

You’re at someone’s house for dinner, and you have absolutely stuffed yourself. You lean back, basking in the glow of serious overfeeding. But the host is not quite done with you and offers you a bit more stuffing. This you decline with a smile and wave of the hand. I’ve had quite sufficient, you think to yourself. But the host says “Are you sure? Not just a little more? Otherwise it will go to waste.” You wag your head no and look searchingly in another direction, but the host goes on, “Really, just one tiny spoonful more—you already ate yours up so fast! You must like it. Have a little more, just for me. C’mon, just a little.” Feeling now that you’re on the verge of making a scene, you relent, accept the stuffing, and the incident is over. You’ve succumbed to social influence.

If you’re like me, you leave this event feeling coerced. You didn’t want the stuffing and then you got it anyway. Some proportion of social influence creates this feeling of defeat, occasioning an inner monologue on what you wanted, what the other person wanted, and on how they got what they wanted and you didn’t get what you wanted. Hypnosis is a form of social influence that occasions a much reduced level of this kind of reflective grumbling. Instead, feelings of cooperation and of involuntariness prevail—a giving over of control to the hypnotist. When this happens, people can end up performing actions they might not have predicted in advance that they would do, or actions that spectators may find unusual and embarrassing. Instead of taking a bite of stuffing, the hypnotized person barks like a dog or acts as though she can’t get up from a chair.

A common trick of the stage hypnotist (e.g., McGill 1947), for example, might be to tell someone who is hypnotized that “until I tell you otherwise, you will be stuck to your chair, unable to get up from your seat. . . . In all other respects, you will feel fine and perfectly normal, except it will be as though you are glued to your chair . . . and the harder you try, the more you will be stuck to the seat. . . . No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to get up out of your chair.” Now, if someone said this to you at a party, you would probably get up smartly from your chair, deliver a defiant hip swivel, and then sit back down. Yet people who are hypnotized have no such reaction and instead wriggle uselessly and look nonplussed as they find themselves indeed stuck in their chairs until the hypnotist suggests otherwise. This is not a trick in the sense that the stage hypnotist has paid people off to help in the performance; it is one of the genuine phenomena of hypnosis.

Clearly, hypnosis involves a significant departure from the everyday experience and exercise of conscious will. The hypnotized person experiences the causation of his actions in an unusual way, as being generated less by the self and more by the hypnotist. This is not only a feeling but involves a kind of actual transfer of control from person to hypnotist. What is equally odd, though, is that the range of what can be controlled changes during hypnosis. People find that they are able to control the experience of pain or the recall of memory, for example, in ways that are not readily available to them when they are not hypnotized. In this sense, while hypnosis may undermine the experience of will, it seems paradoxically to expand and alter the force of will. This is why hypnosis has been implicated in many of the curiosities of will we have discussed, including possession, multiple personality, and automatisms. One way to explain what is happening when people experience departures from normal conscious will is to say that they’ve been subjected to some special process or state. Perhaps they are hypnotized.

But what, then, is hypnosis? This chapter examines what is known about hypnosis in current scientific psychology. The first focus is on induction—how people get to be hypnotized and who is most susceptible. Second, we take up the major phenomena of hypnosis, the features that distinguish the psychology of the hypnotized person from that of the person in a standard waking state. The third concern is figuring out what causes hypnosis. The chapter reviews the major theories and examines how some of the effects of hypnosis might be explained in terms of the theory of apparent mental causation. It concludes that hypnosis really only makes sense when we recognize that the experience of conscious will can be influenced by factors that are independent of the factors that cause human action.