Th Illusion of Conscious Will

Daniel Wegner: "How do people come to understand their actions as their own? Common sense tells us we know when actions are ours because we have caused them; we are intrinsically informed of what we do by our conscious will. But it turns out people can be mistaken about their own authorship....people will feel they are the source of action when they think about that action in advance of its occurrence, and alternative sources of the action are not known. This theory calls into question the common sense view that conscious will is the cause of action."



Wegner,
D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.