The Illusion of Conscious Will (57 page)

How Things Seem

Sometimes how things seem is more important than what they are. This is true in theater, in art, in used car sales, in economics, and—it now turns out—in the scientific analysis of conscious will. The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. 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 problems 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.

The illusion is sometimes fragile. There are days when we wonder whether we’re willing anything at all. In
The Reader
(1995), Bernard Schlink captures this feeling: “Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something—whatever that may be—goes into action; ‘it’ goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore; ‘it’ makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head; ‘it’ keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be. I don’t mean to say that the thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources . . .” (20).

But usually we assume that how things seem is how they are. We experience willing a walk in the park, winding a clock, or smiling at someone, and the feeling keeps our notion of ourselves as persons intact. Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time. The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is—but that is as it should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human. Albert Einstein (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172) had a few words on this that make a good conclusion:

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord. . . . So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

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