Hypnosis and Will

This chapter explains how hypnosis involves a significant departure from the everyday experience and exercise of conscious will. The hypnotized person experiences the causation of his actions in an unusual way, as being generated less by the self and more by the hypnotist. This is not only a feeling but involves a kind of actual transfer of control from person to hypnotist. What is equally odd, though, is that the range of what can be controlled changes during hypnosis. In this sense, while hypnosis may undermine the experience of will, it seems paradoxically to expand and alter the force of will. This is why hypnosis has been implicated in many of the curiosities of will, including possession, multiple personality, and automatisms.

Action Projection

This chapter considers the inclination that people have in certain circumstances to project actions they have caused onto plausible agents outside themselves. These outside agents can be imaginary, as when people attribute their actions to spirits or other entities. The focus in this chapter is the more observable case of action projection to agents who are real—individual persons, groups of people, or sometimes animals. When people impute their actions to such agents, they engage in a curious charade in which they behave on behalf of others or groups without knowing that they are actually causing what they see the agents are doing. It is important to understand how this can happen—how things people have done can escape their accounting efforts and seem to them to be authored by others outside themselves.

The Mind’s Compass

This chapter analyzes why the conscious experience of will might exist at all. Conscious will can be seen as a feeling that organizes and informs one's understanding of their own agency. Conscious will is a signal with many of the qualities of an emotion, one that reverberates through the mind and body to indicate when a person senses having authored an action. The idea that conscious will is an emotion of authorship moves beyond the standard way in which people have been thinking about free will and determinism and presses toward a useful new perspective. The chapter explores how the emotion of authorship serves key functions in the domains of achievement and morality.

Virtual Agency

This chapter discusses the experience of losing the authorship of one's action to an imagined agent. This transformation is sufficiently bizarre that it has been something of an obsession in both the popular press and in scientific literature. Much of the liveliness of the field of anthropology, for instance, has to do with the documentation of intriguing practices of spirit possession in various cultures around the world. To confront the topic of virtual authorship, then, is to try to understand how the very seat of human agency can be transformed. The chapter examines action projection to imaginary agents of all kinds, beginning with ordinary forms of pretend play and role enactment, and proceeding to cases of channeling and mediumship, spirit possession, and dissociative identity disorder.

An Analysis of Automatism

This chapter illustrates how automatisms involve the lack of the feeling of doing an action but may even go beyond this to include a distinct feeling that the person is not doing. The loss of perceived voluntariness is so remarkable during an automatism that the person may vehemently resist describing the action as consciously or personally caused. It seems to come from somewhere else or at least not from oneself. This experience is so curious that automatisms often are noteworthy events in themselves rather than just unnoticed lapses in conscious willing. The chapter examines the key features of behavior settings that promote the occurrence of automatisms, and points to the ways in which the lack of perceptions of priority, consistency, and exclusivity underlie lapses in the experience of conscious will.

The Experience of Will

This chapter talks about how the experience of will could be a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally—this can be referred to as the theory of apparent mental causation. This means that people experience conscious will quite independently of any actual causal connection between their thoughts and their actions. Reductions in the impression that there is a link between thought and action may explain why people get a sense of involuntariness even for actions that are voluntary. Whereas inflated perceptions of the link between thought and action may, in turn, explain why people experience an illusion of conscious will at all.

Protecting the Illusion

This chapter looks at how people protect the illusion of conscious will. It seems that people do this because they have an ideal of conscious agency that guides their inferences about what they must have known and willed even when they perform actions that they did not intend. The chapter analyzes the basic features of agency and then looks at how people fill in these features based on their conception of the ideal. The expectancy that intention must be there, even when the action is wholly inscrutable, can lead people to infer that they intended even the most bizarre of actions. The chapter then turns to the circumstance that first prompts the protection of the idea of will: unconscious action. When people's actions are caused unconsciously, they depend on their ideal of agency to determine what they have done.

Brain and Body

This chapter explores the anatomical and temporal origins of the experience of will. It examines issues of where the will arises by considering first the anatomy of voluntary action—how it differs from involuntary action and where in the body it appears to arise. The chapter then moves on to the sensation of effort in the muscles and mind during action to learn how the perception of the body influences the experience of will, and then looks directly at the brain sources of voluntary action through studies of brain stimulation. These anatomical travels are supplemented by a temporal itinerary, an examination of the time course of events in mind and body as voluntary actions are produced.

The Illusion

This chapter discusses how the idea of conscious will and the idea of psychological mechanisms have an oil and water relationship, having never been properly reconciled. One way to put them together is to say that the mechanistic approach is the explanation preferred for scientific purposes, but that the person's experience of conscious will is utterly convincing and important to the person and so must be understood scientifically as well. The chapter states that conscious will is an illusion in the sense that the experience of consciously willing an action is not a direct indication that the conscious thought has caused the action. It also shows that the mechanisms underlying the experience of will are themselves a fundamental topic of scientific study.