The Illusion of Conscious Will

The text, The Illusion of Conscious Will, (MIT Press, 2002) by Daniel M. Wegner, the late Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, offers an excellent overview of what is going on in the brain that is causing the illusion of free will. The key point: When you were, say 3 years old, things just happened; there is no self-consciousness and thus no free will. Then the brain played a trick--which apparently does not happen to other species--it created a recording device which made you believe you are a separate person. From a neurological standpoint, it probably is the case that the hippocampus, which converts short-term events into long-term memory, has been activated.



Professor Wegner's key insight: The experience of events is activated by another part of the brain than the intention of causing the event to occur. Events happen, say I intend to go to the store to pick up some item and then I think the thought, "I need to go to the store," and then I go to the store. The commonplace understanding is "I" willed this action. In fact, these urges came from another part of the brain, got translated into subvocal speech and then the action took place. The conscious you had nothing to do with it; another part of the brain did it independently of your awareness.



While Wegner's insight is correct as far as it goes, we need to go a step further in our casual analysis: What causes the urges to occur in the first place? No one knows. At this point, all the brain researchers will start "hand-waving" and offering pseudo-explanations such as "emergence of brain processes" (see  Daniel Dennett - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). While Professor Dennett certainly has some creative insights into the neurological processes of the brain, he still misses the point: What caused this emergence?



The two "best answers": 1) Consciousness, the intelligence using energy to create forms on a moment by moment basis; this is a spiritualized definition from Quantum Mechanics. 2) Agnostic, the position "we don't know." When one does a William James introspection, one finds the box is empty: Things happen and then you offer an invented story to explain it.



Perhaps the reader can do a thought experiment: "How did I learn, grow, and do things when I was 4-years old and had no conscious awareness?"



Enlightenment is the seeing that the thoughts you have are fed to you by Consciousness. Until the transpersonal self, located outside the brain, is activated, you will be under the delusion that you created your thoughts (which obviously makes no sense). This understanding at an energetic level is necessary for further developments to happen. Otherwise, one will just keep repeating the same patterns which will keep you in a state of quiet desperation....


Addendum on May 10, 2016: Because the nomenclature of the term transpersonal self  has different meanings according to the model being used, I will just point out this term is embedded in a three-consciousness model:
1) Body Consciousness-- this is the primitive self, which at the physical level is what human being are. See Judith Blackstone's, The Enlightenment Process, for more information.


2) Self-Consciousness which generally arises in human beings at about the 4-years of age and is when the clock starts ticking. In Freudian terms, this is the activation of the frontal cortex and is labeled "Superego" and "Ego." While this level allows for a kind of interaction in the 'real-world' unavailable at the Body Consciousness level, it also leads to humankind's insanity (see Man Against Himself by Karl Menninger, 1938).


3) Transpersonal Self--This is the higher self which apparently was constructed simultaneously with the ego mind. This spiritual engineering was necessary because the ego mind needs to be aware of itself in order to function effectively. Along with various energy centers such as chakras, there is an energy center outside the physical brain which interacts with other life forms and see the destructiveness of the Ego brain. This third kind of consciousness is the first step to freedom from the tyranny of the two-consciousness system (body and ego). It can be activated by intention.