The illusion of conscious will

Carruthers, Peter (2007) The illusion of conscious will. synthese, 96.

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Abstract

Wegner (2002) argues that conscious will is an illusion, citing a wide range of empirical evidence. I shall begin by surveying some of his arguments. Many are unsuccessful. But one an argument from the ubiquity of self-interpretation is more promising. Yet is suffers from an obvious lacuna, offered by so-called ‘dual process’ theories of reasoning and decision making (Evans and Over, 1996; Stanovich, 1999; Frankish, 2004). I shall argue that this lacuna can be filled by a plausible a priori claim about the causal role of anything deserving to be called ‘a will’. The result is that there is no such thing as conscious willing: conscious will is, indeed, an illusion.

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