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The Greatest Magic Trick Ever, Part II: The Great Selfini

By Matthew Hutson on April 30, 2008 in Brainstorm

In a recent post I argued that free will is an illusion. Even if I convinced you, why does the illusion still work?

First, I have to admit I'm not the only one to frame the illusion of free will as a magic trick. In working on my feature about magical thinking, I used a paper titled "Everyday Magical Powers: The Role of Apparent Mental Causation in the Overestimation of Personal Influence" [pdf] co-authored by Daniel Wegner, who is also the author of the 2002 book The Illusion of Conscious Will. The paper brings together research on three related areas: apparent mental causation, the illusion of control, and the introspection illusion. People believe A causes B if A happened before B, A is consistent with B, and there's no other obvious cause of B. Further, A is especially salient if A is one of your own thoughts or intentions. And people like believing A controls B if they themselves happen to be A, because we're happier when we're in control of things. So the experimenters convinced subjects that the subjects used their own thoughts to place voodoo hexes on people or affect the outcome of the Super Bowl. (Where A = prayer and B = TD!) Just another day in the lab.

With Wegner dabbling in the area of magical thinking, I saw where he was going, and sure enough, he followed through (though I take no responsibility.) In the just-published book Are We Free?, Wegner contributed a chapter titled "Self is Magic" [pdf], in which he writes:

Our actions are an astonishing realm of events that bend to our desires when so much of the world does not. Perhaps this is why each person views self with awe--The Great Selfini amazes and delights! We are enchanted by the operation of our minds and bodies into believing that we are "uncaused causes," the origins of our own behavior.

Aha, The Great Selfini. He's so great that we're still fooled by his tricks even after peeking behind the curtain. Usually explanations are deadly to perceptions of magic. Experiments show they can even drain some of the power out of perceptions of evil (to understand is to forgive) and feelings of love (let me count the ways... is that all there are?) But free will is different.

"I'm a case in point," Wegner writes. "I've devoted years of my life to the study of conscious will... If the illusion could be dispelled by explanation, I should be some kind of robot by now..." One potential reason for its persistence is that we place more weight on consistency between cause and effect (say, between intention and pursuant action) than on the exclusivity of the potential cause (something else may have caused the action but screw that.) There's also great personal and social value in assuming responsibility for our behavior.

In another article in the April issue of PT ("Giving Up the Ghost") I ask what would happen if we gave up on the ghost in the machine. "Would society fall apart? Would we lose motivation, abandon morality, and dance like robots?" (Wegner makes the same joke in his chapter: "Yes it’s true, when I'm on the dance floor I may look a bit robotic to some..." Great minds, or low-hanging fruit?) I cover the recent study [pdf] by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler showing that when people read an essay saying free will is an illusion they're more likely to cheat. But Wegner and I both temper our concern for the safety of society with the realization that the illusion is here to stay. For example, in my article I mention work by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols [pdf] on the emotional appeal of moral attribution. (Even in a deterministic universe, we want to hate the guy who torches his house and family to run off with the secretary.)

I don't mention the other reason I've been saying for years that belief in free will is necessary and unavoidable: Without it, we would go crazy. Try giving it up. I will decide not to believe in free will. Wait, how did I just decide that? Crap, how did I decide to ask that? Oh no, how did I just ask THAT? Etc. Short circuit, dance party over.

(But not for this guy:)


Comments

another explanation?...

Submitted by an interested observer on April 30, 2008 - 2:26pm.

The fact that free will doesn't exist, yet is necessary and unavoidable...perhaps we are looking at the problem through the wrong lens...

What if we don't assume the mind/body duality, or the subject/object duality itself? So what of the fact that the "proof" that free will is insufficient to dispel the "magic trick". What if this is more complex, and that the prefrontal activity, the conscious mind, that you have labeled the sum total of who we are, isn't, in fact, all of who we are? What if you can't separate the conscious and unconscious, mind and body? What if the reason that free will must exist even though "sceientifically" it doesn't is because the mind and body are inextricably bound, and can't be divided as "the ghost in the machine". What if Rene Descartes was wrong? After all, Reimann proved that his Cartesian plane was only a limited description of the world.


I don't get why you're confused

Submitted by Tamler Sommers, Ph.D. on May 1, 2008 - 2:40pm.

"I don't mention the other reason I've been saying for years that belief in free will is necessary and unavoidable: Without it, we would go crazy. Try giving it up. I will decide not to believe in free will. Wait, how did I just decide that? Crap, how did I decide to ask that? Oh no, how did I just ask THAT?"

You asked that because you read Wegner's book and others, which triggered a deliberative process in your head leading to the decision to give up free will.

Where's the problem?


confusion about confusion

Submitted by Matthew Hutson on May 1, 2008 - 3:11pm.

Tamler,

The problem is that deliberative processes and decisions keep happening, and I keep having the experience that I consciously made them happen. And the more I try to put a stop to that experience, the more I have the conscious experience of willfully trying to put a stop to it. And so on.

Through meditation one can experience "thoughts without a thinker," but transiently and to a limited extent. Try living your everyday life in this om state.

Am I making sense?


Yes but I think we might be

Submitted by Tamler Sommers, Ph.D. on May 1, 2008 - 3:46pm.

Yes but I think we might be talking about two different things. I agree that in the present moment it's hard (if not impossible) to think that a decision isn't up to me in a deep way. But afterwards, even one second afterwards, I have no problem recognizing that the decision was caused by all sorts of factors tracing back outside of my control.


Yup, I agree.

Submitted by Matthew Hutson on May 1, 2008 - 3:58pm.

Thanks for the clarification.


I believe in fairies, I do, I do

Submitted by Beta on May 1, 2008 - 5:38pm.

I was getting ready to post just that following suit of your example on part I of this post. My excuse; the string of your recent articles that you have written about magic. I reconsidered though, read the posts and...isn't Godspeed out already? No, I am getting confused with Godsend. Great post, however, yes free will exists. Think about it; you would not have pressed the button if you didn't want to do that-the confusion comes from the time it takes for you to realize that you have made that decision and to act on it, but of course you already knew that even taking the outside factors into consideration (it is a vicious cycle).So, what about the magic? Free will isn't there if one has Toxoplasmosis and happens to be a mouse, the parasites are responsible for their actions and thoughts and will lead them straight to the felines' mouth.


free will

Submitted by rachel on May 14, 2008 - 1:13am.

What do people mean by free will? I'm not convinced it's a useful idea. If I have to choose between two options, then I choose, and i've chosen. choice is what we call deliberation over the course of action i take. I think choice makes a good deal more sense than free will. I choose between multiple options. I'm definitely thinking about multiple options when i choose, and after i've chosen, i've picked one. So choice makes seems to refer to something sensible. I can point at my foot and say "that's a foot", but i cant really point at a free or predetermined will. And if it's that my brain effects the choice and/or course of action physically, well of course it does. Who else will do it, the little woman sitting inside my head going "blue? no, yellow i think." Most things break down when you look at them closely enough and will is no different.


Choice vs free will

Submitted by Matthew Hutson on May 14, 2008 - 9:24am.

Rachel, certainly restricting the discussion to "choice" dodges the issue of free will because one isn't stuck thinking about whether a choice was conscious. But even if free will is an illusion, it's a useful (albeit dangerous) idea. How are we to hold people responsible for their actions if we don't attribute agency to them in some deep sense? Much of our moral and legal systems are built upon questions of how freely people acted in certain cases, and how guided they were by, say, biological determinism, social forces, or impulse. That's why, for example, we have first, second, and third degree murder. Now, why is free will a dangerous idea? It allows us to call people evil rather than misguided. And when someone is "evil," all manner of harmful acts against him can be justified.


Free Will and The Self

Submitted by Brady Bellis on June 12, 2008 - 6:20pm.

I don't have a particularly hard time dropping the notion of free will. After all, doing things autonomically is something we experience every day. Our heart beats without being told to do so. In situations where time is involved (avoiding a car accident, hitting a baseball) we realize that the decisions were made before we were fully conscious. It's not a great leap to understand that even basic decision making and perhaps all decisions that direct the course of our actions happen unconsciously.

Here's a different way to think about free will though. While mind doesn't appear to affect matter in the moment, it does seem to affect future actions. As an example, basketball players who spend one half hour each night visualizing making free throws improve their free throw shooting regardless of whether or not they spend a single minute actually practicing with a ball on a court. What we choose to think about clearly affects the shape of our brain, so to speak, and impacts what we might do next and how we might do it.

What's relevant to free will here is that, as Socrates said, to paraphrase: if you think ethical thoughts, you'll likely be an ethical person, even if you can't define what ethics are. Libet's research, in addition to the time delay studies on consciousness also revealed that there seems to be something that he called "veto power." That is once a decision has been made, there’s still time for some other part of the brain to override the decision, also pre-consciously. If one has trained one's brain through thought to behave ethically then this veto or override function would kick in to prevent unethical behaviors. In a sense, this is free will operating way up steam from the actual events.

If you're alone in a quiet place, chances are when you first sit down there will be a number of different thoughts that compete for attention. There is no action to perform, just thoughts. It is here where, for me, the illusion of self is most difficult to shake. There seems to be some sort of master or guiding presence. A self. A ghost in the machine. A voice in the head that determines which thoughts and threads and images receive attention. So what or who is directing the course of our thoughts? Do we live in a deterministic universe where even the content of our thoughts is predetermined and we are only a witness? Or is it a randomly determined, quantum universe where thoughts arise according to laws of chance? Or is it really some sort of soul? I like Bernard Baars global workspace theory, though I’m not sure it actually answers these questions or if it is simply a neat explanation of how mind functions.


reply to Brady Bellis

Submitted by Matthew Hutson on June 12, 2008 - 7:02pm.

You're right about the power of automatic action. If we can keep a car on the road without the intervention of consciousness, think of what else we can do. And you're right that, to all appearances, over the long term conscious thoughts can affect behavior. But don't let appearances fool you. Here's another way of looking at it. There's some sort of process in the brain that as a side effect causes the conscious experience of planning something. Later when the brain executes a motor plan it also as a side effect causes the conscious experience of performing the action. And the brain, being an associative machine, links the previous reaction with the current activity and causes the conscious experience of feeling responsible. In other words, the brain is doing everything, and conscious experience, even the feeling of personal agency, comes about as a side effect of all of that. It's epiphenomenal. This model fits best with all the data that are out there.

As for Libet's veto theory, it's a cop out. He refused to accept all of the implications of his own experiments. (Also, I think you mean "consciously," not "pre-consciously." If the veto were preconscious along with all the other run-up to the action, it would just be part of that process rather than a veto.)


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