Free Will Definition

Question 1
“The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we wilfully cause what we do. In fact, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and create the action as well, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as the cause of action… Believing that our conscious thoughts cause our actions is an error based on the illusory experience of will ...” (italics added; pp. 490)

Reference: Wegner, D. M. & Wheatley, T. (1999). Apparent Mental Causation: Sources of the Experience of Will. American Psychologist, 54, 480-492.

Read this paper, and briefly discuss whether the phenomena of consciousness discussed
in Chapter 6 of Cacioppo & Freberg, Discovering Psychology, support their view, and why or why not.

In the paper, Wegner and Wheatley (1999) argued that the experience of free will is a result of causal theories derived by logic to account for one’s mental processes.
This view is supported by Gazzaniga’s (2011) study on split-brain patients. The patient will usually stand up when the relatively nonverbal right hemisphere is shown the word “stand”. However, due to the limitations of the right hemisphere in processing language, the patient will be consciously unaware of having read the word, and provides having felt the need to stretch as the reason for standing up. The source of experienced will as shown by this example is the intention formed by the mind – feeling the need to stretch, after the awareness of the commitment to a choice of action – to stand up, while the actual and unconscious cause of action is actually having read the word with the right hemisphere. This supports the idea that conscious will may arise from a theory designed to account for the regular relationship between thought and action and it also fits the Model of Conscious Will (Figure 1) proposed by Wegner and Wheatley
(1999).

Wegner and Wheatley (1999) also asserted that the sense of will is a variable quantity that is not tied inevitably to voluntary action. This view is supported by the phenomenon of blindsight, demonstrated by Larry Weiskrantz and his colleagues in 1974. Weiskrantz’s patients were exposed to flashes of light directed the areas of their scotomas and several of them were able to point out the light’s origin better than chance rate, but remained convinced that they were just guessing (Cacioppo and Freberg, 2013). This is an example illustrating how people can perform voluntary actions with no feeling of intention because they were processing information without being consciously aware of it. This is because there was no thought about the action and therefore the patients perceived that they did not consciously cause the action. The phenomenon of blindsight opens up the possibility that people with no visual impairment point to the light’s origin because there is an unconscious cause of action, and not due to the thought that ‘wills’ the action. The ability to process visual stimulus in people with no visual impairment gives the experience of conscious will when the thought of the light’s origin occurs before the action, is consistent with the action and seems to be the only cause of action. In actual fact however, it is the unconscious mental processes that gave rise to the action. That explains the presence of voluntary action in the absence of thought that is perceived to cause it. Hence, the presence of voluntary action does not directly imply a presence of a sense of will.
In one case of prosopagnosia, a patient was completely unable to identify familiar faces but was still able to show changes in autonomic activities when seeing familiar compared to unfamiliar faces (Bauer, 1984). This suggests there is an unconscious mental process that gives rise to some kind of recognition at the unconscious level and in this case, it never reaches the consciousness of the patient. This supports the proposition that there is an unconscious mental process that gives rise to our thoughts. Wegner and Wheatley (1999) suggest that the experience of will can proceed independent of actual causal forces influencing a behaviour.
Ammon and Gandevia’s (1990) research shows that the brain can be manipulated to make an unusual choice without disrupting the individual’s sense of free will. Right-handed people normally use their right hands 60% of the time or more when forced to use one hand over the other, but when researchers exposed right-handed subjects’ right hemispheres to transcranial magnetic stimulation, they chose to use their left hands 80% of the time and reported feeling completely in control of their hand movements. This research shows that although the brain has already committed to a movement due to external stimulation, the participants can still feel a conscious sense of deciding to move. Hence it shows that our conscious thought does not need to cause our actions for it to result in an experience of
will.

References

Ammon, K., & Gandevia, S. C. (1990). Transcranial magnetic stimulation can influence the selection of motor programmes. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 53(8), .

Bauer, R. M. (1984). Autonomic recognition of names and faces in prosopagnosia: A neuropsychological application of the Guilty Knowledge Test. Neuropsychologia, 22, .

Cacioppo, J. T., & Freberg. L. (2013). Discovering psychology: The science of mind. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Who 's in charge? Free will and the science of the brain. New York, NY: Ecco.
Wegner, D. M. & Wheatley, T. (1999). Apparent Mental Causation: Sources of the Experience of Will. American Psychologist, 54, 480-492.