The Illusion of Conscious Will
By Daniel M. Wegner. The MIT Press, 2018
481 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. The first edition of this book proposed an innovative and provocative answer: the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain; it helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, the book says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion (“the most compelling illusion”), it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. This new edition includes a foreword and an introduction. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, the book examines cases both when people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing and when they are not willing an act that they in fact are doing in such phenomena as hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, and dissociative identity disorder. The author's argument was immediately controversial (called “unwarranted impertinence” by one scholar) but also compelling, and the book has been called the author's magnum opus.
Subfields: Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/987235acf45dc4f633f465698d35a0b9b8cccdc0
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In Philosophy
Citations in the corpus
- Understanding the Relationship Between Perceived Authenticity and Well-Being (2019, result): “In this way, studying perceived authenticity through the lens of true-self lay beliefs may be similar to the study of free will (Vohs & Schooler, 2008; Wegner, 2002) or religious beliefs (e.g., Emmons, 2005) in that it is the perception of reality that matters more than the actual reality.”
- Emotions in Tourism: Theoretical Designs, Measurements, Analytics, and Interpretations (2020, background): “Panksepp and Biven’s (2012) findings follow the proposition that most human thinking occurs unconsciously (Wegner 2002; Zaltman 2003).”