The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner Page A

experience of voluntary movement. The experience of will seems to accrue from a flexible cognitive system that has not yet been isolated to one anatomical structure. The finding that people don’t lose the sense of voluntary action even when their movement is being caused by transcranial magnetic stimulation lends credence to this hypothesis as well.
    The brain stimulation studies offered the tempting possibility that we might finally find the will in some cranny of the brain. And indeed, some brain events yield action that occurs with an experience of will whereas others do not. However, the research supporting this idea takes the form of a few early clinical observations from different researchers, not a con-trolled comparison of any kind, and so leaves us with no satisfying indication that the experience of will has been localized in the brain or that it can be found if the right search is mounted. And ultimately, of course, even these studies fail to find the will per se. They indicate instead that the experience of willing is a variable attachment to action, and so refocus our attention on the circumstances and timing of the experience.
    The timing of will, finally, seems to seal the fate of that elusive light-bulb. The detailed analytical studies of the timing of action indicate that conscious will does not precede brain events leading to spontaneous voluntary action but rather follows them. And the studies focusing on the timing of motor responses, as compared to the timing of conscious responses, indicate further that consciousness of action occurs on a different time schedule than action itself. When actions are forced to be fast, consciousness is perpetually late—the Dagwood Bumstead of the mind, running out the door in the morning and knocking down the mailman. Consciousness of responses occurs following the responses themselves whenever the person is attempting to react quickly.
    The circuitous timing of consciousness combines with the difficult anatomy of the will to indicate that what we have here is no lightbulb. Rather, it appears that the experience of will occurs through a system that presents the idea of a voluntary action to consciousness and also produces the action. The idea can occur just in advance of the action, as when people are allowed to act ad lib (as in Libet’s research), or the idea may come to mind only just after the action, as when people are prompted to act rapidly (as in reaction time studies). People get the experience of will primarily when the idea of acting occurs to them before they act. In fact, this tendency to experience will when the appropriate idea precedes the act is the theme of the next chapter.

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    The Experience of Will
    The experience of conscious will arises when we infer that our conscious intention has caused our voluntary action, although both intention and action are themselves caused by mental processes that do not feel willed .
    While belief in the causality of the self is only an illusion, . . . there are nonetheless two phenomena which explain such a belief; the first is our ability to foresee the result before it actually takes place, the second the presence of a feeling of “activity.”
    Albert Michotte, The Perception of Causality (1954)
    Imagine for a moment that by some magical process you could always know when a particular tree branch would move in the wind. Just before it moved, you would know it was going to move, in which direction, and just how it would do it. Not only would you know this, but let’s assume that the same magic would guarantee that you would happen to be thinking about the branch just before each move. You’d look over, and then just as you realized it was going to move, it would do it. In this imaginary situation, you could eventually come to think that you were somehow causing the movement. You would seem to be the source of the distant branch’s action, the agent that wills it to move.
    If there really were such a thing