Free will is an illusion. But it’s a useful illusion.

As noted in my previous post about a book by Daniel Wegner that persuasively describes the illusion of free will, appropriately titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, in this post I'll share some of what Wegner says in a concluding chapter about why a belief in free will, though wrong, can be useful.

That chapter is called "The Mind's Compass." Conscious will is the mind's compass.

Like an actual compass, which does no actual steering of a ship, free will indicates what is happening with a person, even though it also doesn't do any actual "steering." Wegner writes, "Just as compass readings do not steer the boat, conscious experiences of will do not cause human actions."

Instead, conscious will is "a feeling that organizes and informs our understanding of our own agency." It indicates when we sense having authored an action. Here's a passage that describes why a sense of free will can be a good thing. Wegner also mentions spiritual traditions such as Zen that view it as an undesirable thing.

All in all, then, it might be better to err on the side of too much perceived control. And indeed, this seems to be what most people do. Shelley Taylor (1983; Taylor and Brown 1988; Taylor, Wayment, and Collins 1993) has explored the role of such a positive illusion in psychological and mental health, and has catalogued many instances in which it seems to be better to think you have control than not.

This sometimes seems to be true even if no real control exists at all. The belief that one has control can be beneficial even in the case of dire circumstances — among people who have terminal illnesses that make their future uncontrollable, for example, or who have suffered serious trauma and so are left with memories of uncontrollable events in the past.

It could be unpleasant and potentially disheartening to be brought down from this cloud of fantasy to the reality of lack of actual control, but an inflated perception of control seems generally to be better even than an accurate view of control.

But there might be benefits, too, to losing one's illusions. Albert Einstein, the epitome of the good scientist, remarked on the mental peace that can come from relaxing the striving for control and accepting a philosophy of resignation to determinism: "The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction" (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172).

Religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism teach a philosophy of relinquishing the pretense of control and view a break with the illusion of conscious will as the ultimate form of enlightenment (Breer 1989). One wonders, however, whether it is possible purposefully to renounce the illusion of purpose or whether one must only sit back and wait for the loss of the illusion to happen. 

And here's how Wegner concludes his book.

Sometimes how things seem is more important than what they are. This is true in theater, in art, in used car sales, in economics and — it now turns out — in the scientific analysis of conscious will. The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do.

Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusion is trivial.

On the contrary, the illusions piled atop apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology and social life. It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we can begin to solve the problems of knowing who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do, and of judging ourselves morally right or wrong for what we have done.

The illusion is sometimes fragile. There are days when we wonder whether we're willing anything at all. In The Reader (1995), Bernard Schlink captures this feeling: "Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something — whatever that may be — goes into action; 'it' goes to the woman I don't want to see anymore; 'it' makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head; 'it' keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I've accepted that I'm a smoker and always will be. I don't mean to say that the thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources…" (20)

But usually we assume that how things seem is how they are. We experience willing a walk in the park, winding a clock, or smiling at someone, and the feeling keeps our notion of ourselves as persons intact. Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.

The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is — but that is as it should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human. Albert Einstein (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172) had a few words on this that make a good conclusion:

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord… So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.