Abstract
I discuss the suggestion that conscious will is an illusion. I take it to mean that there are no conscious decisions. I understand ‘conscious’ as accessible directly and ‘decision’ as the acquisition of an intention. I take the alternative of direct access to be access by interpreting behaviour. I start with a survey of the evidence in support of this suggestion. I argue that the evidence indicates that we are misled by external behaviour into making false positive and false negative judgements about our own decisions. Then I turn to a challenge to this suggestion. What could we interpret in cases when there is no external behaviour? I propose the response that we interpret internal behaviour. We can understand internal behaviour as mental simulation of external behaviour, which can proceed by way of conscious mental imagery. I argue that the proposal has the following advantages. It helps us explain more evidence than we could otherwise. It relies mostly on mechanisms that we already have reason to believe in. And it receives support from the available neurological evidence. I also suggest a way to test the proposal in future empirical research. I conclude by discussing the limitations of the proposal and its implications for the wider debates about the imagination and the will.
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Notes
An anonymous reviewer says that it is still worth asking why the answers should cluster around the midline. The reviewer also suggests that this might be because an assumption of shared control is made at the outset and left unchallenged by what happens later in the experiment. If we have direct access, why does it not present a challenge to that assumption? I think this goes some way towards defending the initial interpretation regarding the free condition. As for the forced condition, I think that the initial interpretation remains problematic, because it is still hard to rule out that the participants’ decisions often coincided with the confederate’s decisions (Walter’s fifth point).
An anonymous reviewer suggests that hypnosis could block direct access. I think this is possible. But this is an additional hypothesis, and I am not aware of any evidence in support of it. Moreover, the fact that the brain signals were alike in the two conditions seems to challenge it. Therefore, I think that the other interpretation is more plausible. In a similar vein, the authors of the study themselves note that we do not know how hypnosis changes brain functioning. And they stress that showing direct access is not present in this case does not yet show that it is not present in typical cases. I agree. But I think that the results do put some pressure on the direct access interpretation. This is because they are an anomaly in it’s light (but not in light of its rival) and so press it to make such additional assumptions.
An anonymous reviewer notes that one might worry that thinking of a specific number is not really an action (see also Mele 2009b). But here the task was not simply to think of a specific number, but to choose a number. The participants had to report not simply what came to their mind, but which of the things that came to their mind they eventually chose. It is easier to argue that the former is not an action than to argue that the latter is not an action. In this respect, the task in this experiment is also different from the task of thinking of seven animal names that start with a ‘g’ (Mele’s example).
It should be noted that there is an ongoing discussion on whether such conscious imagining, perhaps together with other closely related events, conscious or unconscious, can itself sometimes constitute a decision, perhaps in a revised sense (Mele 2009a; Carruthers 2011; Shepherd 2013; Vierkant 2015; Frankish 2016). I am afraid that I cannot do justice to this complex debate here. But roughly, I think that saying this event sometimes plays the role of a decision needs to be supported by an account of when it should do so; otherwise, the suggestion seems ad hoc. And saying it plays this role together with other events needs to be supported by an account of how we become aware of them, showing that they can be conscious. Finally, saying we need to revise the concept of decision (or of settling a question) requires support from an account that shows the new concept to be capable of playing the roles required of it. I believe that, on all three counts, much work remains to be done. And in absence of these developments, the account proposed above clearly remains a possibility. Moreover, given the similarities between imagining and overt action, it presently seems to me that this account is the more plausible one. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this.)
Here is, roughly, where the areas stimulated in this study stand in the sequence that ultimately produces movement, according to a model proposed by two of the study’s authors (Desmurget and Sirigu 2009). First is the posterior parietal cortex, which is associated with movement prediction and selection. Second is the supplementary motor cortex, which is associated with the release of motor inhibition. And third is the premotor cortex, which is associated with comparing predictions with actual feedback. As noted, in the stimulation experiment, reports of intending were related to the first area, and movements were related to the third area. The second area was related to either the one, or the other, depending on the strength of the stimulation.
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Acknowledgements
For comments on previous drafts of the paper, thanks to participants of the Second International Conference on Neuroscience and Free Will, Exploring the Mind’s Eye: An International Conference on Imagination, and the two anonymous reviewers for this journal. This paper draws on one of the chapters of the doctoral dissertation of the author.
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Rimkevičius, P. Mental imagery and the illusion of conscious will. Synthese 199, 4581–4600 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02992-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02992-7