Will is a feeling. David Hume was sufficiently impressed by this idea that he proposed to define the will as “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”
the will is not some cause or force or motor in a person, but rather is the personal conscious feeling of such causing, forcing, or motoring.
Intentions, plans, and other thoughts can be experienced, and still the action is not willed if the person says it was not.
Each of us is quite comfortable with using these two very different ways of thinking about and explaining events – a physical, mechanical way and a psychological, mental way. In the mechanical explanatory system, people apply intuitive versions of physics to questions of causality, and so they think about causes and effects as events in the world. In the mental explanatory system, in turn, people apply implicit psychological theories to questions of causality, focusing on issues of conscious thoughts and the experience of will as they try to explain actions
The real causal sequence underlying human behavior involves a massively complicated set of mechanisms... Each of our actions is really the culmination of an intricate set of physical and mental processes, including psychological mechanisms that correspond to the traditional concept of will – in that they involve linkages between our thoughts and our actions. This is the empirical will. However, we do not see this. Instead, we readily accept the far easier explanation of our behavior that our Houdini-esque minds present to us: We think we did it.
The mind creates this continuous illusion because it really doesn’t know what causes its actions...The mind has a self-explanation mechanism that produces a roughly continuous sense that what is in consciousness is the cause of action – the phenomenal will – whereas in fact the mind actually cannot ever know itself well enough to be able to say what the causes of its actions are
To quote Spinoza in The Ethics: “Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions”
In the more contemporary phrasing of Minsky (1985, p. 306), “none of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control.... Perhaps it would be more honest to say, ‘My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand’”
The theory of apparent mental causation, then, is this: people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action
The real causes of human action are unconscious, so it is not surprising that behavior could often arise – as in automaticity experiments – without the person having conscious insight into its causation.... Such “controlled” processes may be less efficient than automatic processes and require more cognitive resources, but even if they occur along with an experience of control or conscious will, this experience is not a direct indication of their real causal influence. The experience of conscious will is just more likely to accompany inefficient processes than efficient ones because there is more time available prior to action for inefficient thoughts to become conscious, thus to prompt the formation of causal inferences linking thought and action.
Most of us think we understand the basic issue of free will and determinism. The question seems to be whether all our actions are determined by mechanisms beyond our control, or whether at least some of them are determined by our free choice
free will is a feeling, whereas determinism is a process. They are incommensurable.
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.
This deep intuitive feeling of conscious will is something that no amount of philosophical argument or research about psychological mechanisms can possibly dispel. Even though this experience is not an adequate theory of behavior causation, it needs to be acknowledged as an important characteristic of what it is like to be human.
Perhaps we have conscious will because it helps us to appreciate and remember what we are doing...Will, then, serves to accentuate and anchor an action in the body. This makes the action our own far more intensely than could a thought alone. Unlike simply saying “this act is mine,” the occurrence of conscious will brands the act deeply, associating the act with self through feeling, and so renders the act one’s own in a personal and memorable way. Will is a kind of authorship emotion
T. H. Huxley (1910) made the equation explicit: “Volition . . . is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. . . . " Will is a feeling, not unlike happiness or sadness or anger or anxiety or disgust.... Still, will has other characteristics of emotion, including an experiential component (how it feels), a cognitive component (what it means and the thoughts it brings to mind), and a physiological component (how the body responds). Although conscious will is not a classic emotion that people would immediately nominate when asked to think of an emotion, it has much in common with the emotions.
The experience of consciously willing an action belongs to the class of cognitive feelings described by Gerald Clore (1992). He points out that there is a set of experiences such as the feeling of knowing, the feeling of familiarity, or even the feeling of confusion, that serve as indicators of mental processes or states, and that thus inform us about the status of our own mental systems.
Conscious will is the emotion of authorship, a somatic marker (Damasio 1994) that authenticates the action’s owner as the self. With the feeling of doing an act, we get a conscious sensation of will attached to the action. Often, this marker is quite correct. In many cases, we have intentions that preview our action, and we draw causal inferences linking our thoughts and actions in ways that track quite well our own psychological processes.
But however we do calculate our complicity in moral actions, we then experience the emotional consequences and build up views of ourselves as certain kinds of moral individuals as a result. We come to think we are good or bad on the basis of our authorship emotion. Ultimately, our experience of conscious will may have more influence on our moral lives than does the actual truth of our behavior causation.
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 as well. 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. To 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
One key theme of the book is the analysis of automatisms – actions experienced as occurring without conscious will.
My body is causally responsible for whatever effects emanate from it, whether it is falling down a flight of stairs, or pulling the trigger of a gun, but I, the person “inhabiting” this body, am morally responsible only for my actions. Again, who is this person and what is he doing in my body?
"Brains – or functional subsystems of brains – don’t interpret anything, they don’t make any inferences, and they don’t exert control. Only whole persons can be directed at the meaning of certain sentences (or of sentences describing chains of internal events), thereby attempting to interpret them. Only whole persons could establish inferences between mentally represented propositions. And, only whole persons can be directed at the fulfillment conditions defining certain goal-states, that is, only whole persons can truly make an attempt at controlling a certain state of affairs." Thomas Metzinger
"Probably brains are even more than that, namely, complex dynamical systems exhibiting something like a “liquid” architecture." Thomas Metzinger
"The “feeling” of will could then be not an illusion, but, rather, a nonconceptual form of selfknowledge – that is, the introspective knowledge that one right now is a system undergoing the internal transformation just described." Thomas Metzinger
"We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are" Anais Nin
This is true because the experience of conscious will is involved
in the creation of the self. The feeling of doing establishes
a “doer,” not only authenticating the self but constructing the self from what was previously thin air (Wegner
2005).
As Jack & Robbins
note, “a genuine illusion remains compelling even
when the subject knows their experience is misleading.” (Anthony I. Jacka and Philip Robbins)..... each self must have been created sometime,
somewhere, somehow. Short of imagining eternal
souls, most of us recognize that there is a point in each human’s
development that marks the development of self. We
each undergo a transition from being an organism that behaves
to being a person who acts; and it is in this transition
that we begin to experience what our bodies do as flowing
from the prior thoughts of an entity we call “I.”
the products of mental processes may be knowable,
but the mental processes themselves are not “self-luminous,” .... The illusion of conscious will is the belief
that we are intrinsically informed of how our minds
cause our actions by the fact that we have an experience of
the causation that occurs in our minds.
If the experience
of conscious will is indeed connected in any but the most
capricious way to the causal sequence whereby actions occur,
it should not be mostly right but sometimes wrong. It
should be perfect. If the feeling of conscious will is intrinsically
right, informed somehow by the fact that it is the cause
of an action, it should lock on to that causal relationship and
always reflect it correctly....This logic requires that we draw an important inference.
From The feeling of conscious will can be mistaken,we must
conclude that the feeling of conscious will is never correct.
It is more parsimonious to assume that there is an action
production system and an authorship processing system –
one motor to make the actions, another to create the experience of willing them. The action production system does
the marvelous things of which humans are capable; it causes
behavior. The authorship processing system, meanwhile,
rumbles alongside the main machine, taking in all the information
that is relevant to determining which actions
should be ascribed to the self and which occur because of
outside events and other agents. Much of the time, the authorship
processing system gets it right: Feelings of conscious
will well up appropriately just as behaviors occur that
are causally traceable to the person’s brain and mind. Such
feelings ebb at other times when events happen that are
truly not authored by the person’s brain and mind. However,
this authorship processor is only loosely coupled to the
action production system, a kind of observer of the system
(cf. Gazzaniga 1988), so sometimes it can get things wrong.
This kind of cognitive mechanism seems likely to be something
that might reasonably have evolved to produce feelings
of conscious will in the human. Theorists who insist
that mistaken experiences of will and authentic experiences
of will can coexist in the same organism would have us believe
that instead of a self-knowing mechanism, the mind is
a monstrous hybrid of robot and soul.
Because having experiences of conscious will – whether they are correct or incorrect in any given instance – is a necessary step for assigning authorship to oneself, and so doing, fabricating the self, the experience is what creates the possibility of responsibility.... A person is constructed in the mind of the person, and, through a variety of communications and evidences, in the minds of others as well (cf. Dennett 1987).
We can argue all day about what caused a given action, but this is simply not the same argument as whether the person is responsible
"Prayer and Support" - a phrase that is intended to alleviate the pain and suffering of another person. It most effectively alleviates the pain and suffering of the one who is offering "prayer and support."(Mine)
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