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The Illusion of Conscious Will
Book

The Illusion of Conscious Will

MIT Press, 2003 more...

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Daniel M. Wegner’s book is a lucid, entertaining exploration of one of the most important issues in philosophy and psychology: the existence of will. Extreme determinists contend that people are mechanisms programmed to do what they do and that any notion of freedom or choice is merely illusory. Their antagonists, the proponents of free will, say that people consciously freely choose to act (at least some of the time). Wegner falls into the former camp. Conscious will, he says, is an illusion. But in a wide-ranging ramble that touches on law and the courts, spirit possession, hypnotism, neuroscience, phantom limbs and Ouija boards among other things, he builds a strong anecdotal case that this illusion is essential to being human. The book is curiously desultory, now citing some experiment on the brain in deadly earnest academic language, and then tossing off a flip remark about a popular stage magician or an apparently very clever horse. getAbstract.com finds it both entertaining and elucidating, although it may not always rise to the most demanding standards of philosophical evidence and argument.

Take-Aways

  • Conscious will is an illusion, but an important and necessary illusion.
  • Do you carry out what you will yourself to do? People often fail to do what they will.
  • People often do things that they say they did not will to do.

About the Author

Daniel M. Wegner is a professor of psychology at Harvard University.


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