Against the Illusory Will Hypothesis

Abstract

Since Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments in 1979, the study of the will has become a focal point in the cognitive sciences. Just like Libet, the scientists Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley came to doubt that the will is causally efficacious. In their influential study I Spy from 1999, they created an experimental setup to show that agents erroneously experience their actions as caused by their thoughts. Instead, these actions are caused by unconscious neural processes; the agent’s ‘causal experience of will’ is just an illusion. Both the scientific method and the conclusion drawn from the empirical results have already been criticized by philosophers. In this paper, I will analyze the action performed in the I Spy experiment and criticize more fundamentally the assumption of a ‘causal experience of will’. I will argue that the experiment does not show that the agent’s causal experience of will is illusory, because it does not show that there is a causal experience of will. Against Wegner & Wheatley’s assumption, I will show that it is unlikely that the participants in the I Spy experiment experienced their conscious thoughts as causally efficacious for an action, that they did not perform at all. It is more likely, that they experienced their own bodily movement as causally efficacious for a cooperative action, that they did not perform solely by themselves.