Illusion" By Daniel Wegner

According to Daniel Wegner's analysis of the problem of free will, one of the reasons it 'feels' as though we do have free will is because we naturally contrast our own sense of agency with that of objects. In our framework of perceptions, we move silverware but it does not move of its own accord, so we think we have free will but silverware does not. Another concept inherent in the nature of free will is intentionality: a clock does not 'intend' to move to 1pm, but we can have the same action as someone else, yet be motivated by a different intention. The question of intentionality in morality is something 'learned,' however, given that children often do not fully comprehend that a good intention might clear them of an apparently 'bad' action or that nonliving creatures lack intentionality.

By adulthood, over the natural course of development, most people have developed two forms of understanding of intentionality: a mechanistic one for objects and one of mental causality for living agents. The mental causality lens blurs the mechanistic one when we are observing human beings. The perceived causal sequence for human behaviors may not be the actual causal sequence. Wegner compares this to a magician's illusion, even though the illusion of free will is not consciously staged. Our actions are all the result of a causal sequence of biology, past and current environmental influences, and other processes that we call 'the will,' but in actuality, they are beyond our control.

A good example of this might be seen in the autistic child Wegner describes who trod on people's feet and hands while walking across the beach. To an observer, the child might look 'bad' as if the boy consciously willed himself to harm others. But the cause of the behavior was not the will. Rather, the action was the result of the autistic child's biology, including his inability to empathize with others. No 'will' was involved. Causal, mechanistic agencies of human intentionality are so complex that we cannot keep track of all of them, so we call them 'the will,' just like we believe a conjurer's trick because we cannot see the real cause. Instead, our decisions are governed by internal forces we do not understand.