The Ordeal of Willlessness

The Ordeal of Willlessness

OOC: Special thanks to Mirra Zanzibar, who after more than a year of silence, we had a very long and very overdue chat. She described her month long unspeaking as 'living without free will until her grief had passed'. Mirra has a unique set of life experiences, leading her to profound and fundamental understandings on various subjectmatter. Even though I have known her since we were both kids, it is still like talking with someone from another planet. I mean that in a good way. Many of our conversations are like talking with a genuine alien entity, but it is very illuminating. Like so many of my conversations with Mirra, there was voluminous required reading. My friends are high maintenance that way, a small price to pay for having smart educated friends with unique perspectives. I will spare you the thousands of pages of near impossibly dense and dry academic philosophy and neurobiology journal articles, I will however include the bibliography to anyone that was truly serious to actually dare to read such extremely dry fare. You have been warned. A lot of the text herein is borrowed heavily from Susan Blackmore, but modified for use as part of explaining the Way of the Tau and Desertborn living. Susan Blackmore is a true genius, I hope she would be understanding.

Free will is an intellectual claim that relates to the myriad arguments that have raged over the centuries, verily ever since the concept of free will was first posited.

Many people claim to live one's life without free will, or as if one does not have free will is impossible. A frequent claim is that if everyone lived this way morality and the rule of law would collapse and all hell would break loose.

The kind of free will I am discussing is the sort most ordinary people claim – a contra-causal kind of free will, the idea that their thoughts or conscious decisions are the ultimate cause of their actions and that those thoughts and decisions are free from prior causes of their own.

Most people simply claim that 'I' decided to do it, or that 'my mind' or 'my thoughts' caused it to happen. Very compelling, maybe considered common sense.

This is the common intuition that underlies belief in free will, and there is plenty of research suggesting that it is both false and misleading.

One line of research stems from Libet's original work on the timing of voluntary actions (1985). This has been amply replicated and deeply debated ever since. Another is the rapidly developing neuroscience of volition which reveals the many areas in the prefrontal cortex, supplementary motor area and parietal lobe which manage decision making and impulse suppression (e.g. Haggard 2008). A third explores the mechanisms involved when people come to believe that they did or did not cause their own actions. This research, pioneered by Wegner (2002), shows that the feeling that I did, or did not, do something is not proof of causation but is a post-hoc attribution based on sequence, timing and other variables.

Despite all this knowledge, the powerful feeling that 'I' can freely cause 'my' actions persists. if free will is an illusion, it is one of the most successful and widespread illusions.

There is an inherent difficulty of writing about self, we all refer to two different things in the words, 'I' and 'my'. The first, 'I' is the fictional inner self who seems to be a persisting entity with consciousness and free will: the second, 'my', is the whole human being; a brain and body carrying out actions and being held, or not held, responsible for them. The feeling of having free will amounts to the idea that the inner self can freely cause the body to act.

Most people confidently claim that they have, or are, a self, and that this self is a continuing and powerful entity; it feels like a conscious agent who lives inside their body, experiences their 'stream of consciousness' and is the one who decides what to do. Without such an inner self, many people say, their life would have no meaning. No wonder they are reluctant to give it up.

What we know about the brain, even at the most basic level, appears incompatible with the existence of such an entity. The human brain is a massively parallel system with decisions being taken at multiple levels, at different rates, and in multiple parallel streams all at once. Even though we may feel as though we are a continuous mental entity who is the subject of our experiences and issues instructions from some central command headquarters, there is no central place where this self could live and no means by which it could interfere with all these different on-going processes. In other words, we humans are clever decision-making machines that are prone to a number of powerful illusions, in particular the illusion of a persisting inner self that has consciousness and free will. Free will, in this sense, is an illusion.

Proponents of many popular compatibilist arguments often agree in rejecting contra-causal or magical free will. Yet they seem to be trying, at all costs, to rescue some snippet of freedom from the obvious fact that everything that happens in this universe is either caused by something that went before or is a truly random event. Neither of these alternatives provides any room for what most people would call free will. Of course human beings make choices, there is no denying this. Nor am I denying that we can be more or less constrained in the choices available to us, nor that we can be held responsible for some choices and not others. But we should not confuse the decision making powers of a living creature with freedom of the will.

This has caused a lot of confusion. Dennett's book "Freedom Evolves" is a wonderful description of how humans and other animals have evolved the ability to make ever more complex choices in ever more complex environments. But these choices are not free in the sense that most people want them to be free. They are the result of the evolved complexity of the perceptual and motor systems that Dennett so ably describes. A more apt title would therefore be "Choice Evolves".

The complexities of philosophical discussion aside, the more challenging question is if there is no free will, how should we live our lives?

There are two possible responses: One is to go on living 'as if' we have free will – in other words, to accept that free will is an illusion and yet choose to remain deluded (not a free choice of course, but one caused by prior events and circumstances). The other is to reject the illusion and aspire to live entirely without free will.

The first of these is by far the more common.

Living "As if". Almost everybody who's happy and healthy tends to do that. However, our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.

Our minds produce a sense of virtual agency, the feeling that we are a self who does things. This ends up being a very useful accounting system and a useful way of keeping apprised of our actions as opposed to those of others, or of the world. The fact that the sense of agency is illusory doesn't mean that it's any less important since it still guides our subsequent behaviour. Humans evolved this way. In other words, we should carry on living 'as if' we have free will because the illusion has been useful for countless generations and we don't yet know how to be happy or healthy without it.

The brain has this user illusion – that your decisions are made according to, shall we say, the standard model – that you consciously identify the options, you consciously do an expected utility calculation, you consciously choose, and then at some point later in time, the action's executed. That's a useful user illusion.

It's very useful for people to have the illusion that these are really true.

Intellectually, I side with Susan Blackmore that the user illusion is malign and we might be better to try to throw it out and live without it.

There are some compelling arguments that the illusion might be positively dangerous to give it up with potentially terrible consequences. I think for most people most of the time, you have to assume that other individuals are acting of their own free will, and that you yourself are a cohesive entity.

But the arguments are faulty, "if no one has free will, it means that no one should be in prison… how can it provide a deterrent for people if they don't have free will; it's not up to them."

Because of the strong traditions of The Way of the Tau, most Desertborn technically do not ascribe free will to their behaviors. A mere few thousands of years of philosophical thinking is not enough to overcome millions of years of evolution.

One of the Desertborn’s blind spots in this regard is our notions related to the criminal justice system

The criminal justice system is stronger and fairer when not based on the notion of free will. When we disposed of the idea of retribution; of punishing people because they acted badly of their own free will and so deserve to suffer, our criminal justice system became more effective. People are sent to prison for other reasons: to keep them away from doing any more harm to others, for training or rehabilitation, or as a deterrent to them or others in the future. We know that appropriate rewards and punishments can change people's behaviour.

Mostly rehabilitation and redemption is only for Desertborn, certainly for serious crimes, all others only receive retribution based justice. This is patently unbalanced, although the Elder Council insists it is a necessary deterrent for people who do not identify themselves as part of our culture and brazenly act as parasites and predators. We still suffer the scars from the Spice Wars.

Rehabilitation has its own difficulties and challenges, which I shall discuss elsewhere. The Margrave makes a particularly compelling argument regarding retribution over rehabilitation. I found this surprising, because if he would convince the Desertborn to give up retributive justice, we would probably kill fewer offworlders.

The relevant question would not be 'does this person deserve to be punished?', but would this punishment do any good to them, to their victims, or to society in general.

Arguments of the 'my genes made me do it' type or whatever become irrelevant if we agreed that every action everyone carries out is caused by their genes, their memes, and the environments they have lived in. Arguments of the 'I didn't know what I was doing' type would not hinge on whether or not the person was really responsible of his own free will, but on whether any punishment would be effective. For those too young or mentally incapacitated the answer would often be 'no' and there would be no point in putting them in prison, or that they were incurable and had to be locked away forever. These are complex issues, but in principle there is no credible reason to believe that society and its criminal justice system would collapse and crime would run amok if we dropped the idea of free will.

All this assumes that it is possible to give up believing in free will, but some argue that it is not: we do not live "as if" we have free will because the illusion is useful or because giving it up would destroy society or make us mentally ill, but because we cannot give it up. Can we make the choice to live without free will? Is the illusion so ingrained into us, that we could not live without free will even if we supposedly wished to or wanted to or chose to? More than a few people are argued with me that we cannot get rid of the conviction that we are free even if we become philosophically convinced that the conviction is wrong.

When the waiter asks for the order 'I cannot say "I'm a determinist, I'll just wait and see what happens", because even that utterance is only intelligible to me as an exercise of my free will.' When I go to the restaurant and I look at the menu, I might decide "Well, I'll have the spaghetti", but I'm not forced to have the spaghetti; the other options are open to me; I could have done something else. So we can't think it away or pretend that we don't really have free will. …'

The temptation to compare ourselves with robots is strong, and yet can produce very different responses. Brains are non-linear dynamical systems whose behaviour is exquisitely sensitive to infinitesimally small differences and therefore unpredictable. So one mustn't fear the story science seems to tell, that we are just robots.

I remember a cold Sunday evening in December back when (over 500 years ago) when I visited Telestia with my parents as a young girl. If I'm going to go down to the village to see the holiday lights switched on I need to put on my boots and coat. It's warm by my wood fire. It's cold, windy and drizzling outside. Water, falling from the sky was still bizarre to me. Yet I like to support village events, perhaps especially when so many people will stay away because of the horrible weather. This simple dilemma is typical of the many small decisions each of us has to make every day. So how do I decide? Do I agonise over the right course of action? Do I exert the freedom of my will? No. I sit by the fire and the arguments, pro and con, come and go. I might even think "I wonder whether she'll go or not?”. Then suddenly I am up, reaching for my coat, and heading out of the door into the rain that forms puddles instead of evaporating instantly upon contact with the ground.

This sounds very easy. It is reminiscent of William James' brilliant analysis of how we get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire. We struggle and remonstrate with ourselves. We keep postponing the act. "Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances?" he asks. "If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up." William James suggests that what prevents us from getting up in the first place is all those 'contradictory or paralyzing suggestions'; the thought of the cold, the delicious warmth of the bed, the duties of the day ahead.

Who or what was responsible for the decision? James goes on to analyse 'that peculiar feeling of inward unrest known as indecision.'. As long as the competing ideas are attended to, we are said to deliberate but when finally the action happens, or else is quenched by its antagonists, '… we are said to decide, or to utter our voluntary fiat in favor of one or the other course. The reinforcing and inhibiting ideas meanwhile are termed the reasons or motives by which the decision is brought about.' James does not reject the possibility of free will, and his analysis of self is subtle. Yet, one hundred years before Wegner's research, he beautifully exposed the retrospective attributions we routinely give to an imagined self. 'We' are said to deliberate, 'we' decide, and those voluntary fiats, reasons and motives are ours. James' famous theory of the multiplicity of social selves continued to be controversial and fascinating over a hundred years since its publication.

It would be more honest to accept all these attributions for what they are, drop the notion of the self who decides, and simply let the competing ideas get on with it without interference. Life might even be easier, and making decisions less agonising, if we could.

Living without free will means letting all those 'contradictory or paralyzing suggestions' carry on their battles without thinking they have to be settled by an inner self who ultimately wants one course of action rather than the other. It means treating them as just lots and lots of thoughts about warmth and cold, effort and relaxation, obligation and consequences. Eventually they settle their battle and one action prevails. It merely means desisting from making those retrospective attributions of free will. As I walk along the road in the dark and the rain I do not claim that 'I' freely made the decision to go down to the village but simply that the decision was made. Of course that decision has consequences and this person has to accept those consequences and the responsibility that goes with them. But this is not because 'I' made the decision of my own free will. It is because this is the decision that the whole universe came up with for this person under those circumstances.

I have faint recollections of struggling with questions of causality and the impossibility of free will as a child, admittedly not well formed. One can still want, but in this way of non-striving, or wanting possession or clinging.

As many of us have learned neuroscience and philosophy, many students of the mind and existence concluded, intellectually, that free will must be illusory. "If I don't have free will why would I ever get up in the morning?" or more generally, "Why would I bother to do anything at all?"

See what happens. Here's an experiment you can try at home, lay in bed and avoid consciously making decisions, see what happens.

What happens is we lie there for some time, some get anxious, others enjoy the lie-in. Eventually some get bored, others become anxious for a cup of coffee or a proper cup of tea, or they need to go to the toilet, and so they get up. Once in the bathroom it seems tempting to have a hot shower, then they realise they'd like clean teeth. Early 20^th century Telestian Pithecines had no vaccines against tooth decay, so manually leaning their teeth was a frequent laborious chore. Then they are hungry and go and eat breakfast, maybe forced to prepare it themselves. And so the day goes on and somehow things get done.

Motivation itself does not disappear, but the sense of wanting or being motivated begins to change. It becomes increasingly obvious that one's motivations do not all come from 'me', or from some unified inner person or agent; they spring up all over the place in a complex organism living in a complex world. Some of these motivations are available to introspection; they can be thought about, discussed and compared. Others cannot.

It may be tempted to say that the former 'come into consciousness' or that 'I am conscious of them', while the others are 'unconscious'. This is another temptation that better minds of mine have been systematically trying to root out and I suspect is false. 'Cartesian Materialism'; the view that nobody espouses but almost everybody tends to think in terms of … the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of presentation in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of.

There is another unstated assumption that permeates the neuroscience of consciousness, and on which the search for the neural correlates of consciousness is based. This is the idea that some brain processes or ideas or thoughts are 'conscious' while others are 'unconscious'. This assumption seems so natural and is so common throughout the neuroscience of consciousness that it is rarely questioned. It implies a 'magic difference'; that some of the things that go on in our heads give rise to, or create, or are, subjective experiences while others are not; that the hard problem of consciousness applies to some neural processes and not others.

This magic difference depends upon the fictional inner self who is supposed to experience some things going on in its body or brain and not experience others. It may seem bizarre to try to give up this very natural illusion, but it is intimately related to the task of giving up free will. Right now I can easily look out of my window at the field opposite, at the shadows on the desert floor and the stark outline of the rocks against the sky, and think 'right now I am conscious of those shapes and colours'; these are the contents of my consciousness.

What could be wrong with that? In the first of twenty weeks we were given the question 'Am I conscious now?' and told to ask themselves this question as many times as they could every day for a week and then report back. Many of them found this incredibly hard, but those who managed it reported that something very odd sometimes happened. It was as though asking the question made them become more conscious, as though they were not quite sure whether they were conscious a moment before or not. This led naturally onto the second week's exercise which was to ask "What was I conscious of a moment ago?”.

This personal inquiry led me to the following conclusions: first, 'I' am only conscious when I ask myself whether I am, and second, when I look back into what was happening a moment ago I can recall many things happening but I cannot say which I was conscious of and which not. If I cannot say, then who can?

The idea that I am conscious of some things and not others depends on the construction of an illusory conscious self. This self is fleetingly constructed when required but most of the time is absent. Part of the illusion is that this self is a persisting entity who is always conscious of something or other.

Most of the time for most of us, there is no answer to the question 'What was I conscious of at time t?'. There is no fact of the matter about whether a thought, action or brain process was conscious or unconscious. There is no Cartesian Theatre and no magic difference.

Whenever I find myself thinking 'I am now conscious of weapon fire pounding on the roof”, or "I've just realised I am hungry”, I don't imagine that the military assault or the hunger have just "entered consciousness” or "become conscious” but rather that the self and what it is supposed to be conscious of have both popped up together. Neither was there a moment ago. If the Cartesian temptation persists, I might repeat the exercise of looking back into the immediate past and seeing, once again, that I have no idea whether I was conscious of the clock ticking or the crackling of the fire, or not. There is no answer because a moment ago I was not thinking about what I was conscious of. So there was no one to be conscious. When I do this, the sense of a continuous conscious self loses some of its power. This is the same self who would, if it existed, have free will, and dismantling this self is part of the task of living without free will.

Letting go of the illusion of free will can be frightening. In addition to the fear of not doing anything at all, there is the fear that if I stop exerting my free will then I (or something else) will make the 'wrong' decisions. What counts as 'right' or 'wrong' may be deeply moral or may be purely selfish. For example, if I decided not to go to the village to see the holiday lights, I might later hear that it was great fun and so I missed a brilliant evening. In that case I might selfishly conclude that I made the 'wrong' decision, because I would have been happier if I had gone. I might even get cross with myself for being so stupid. Such thoughts often accompany the everyday decisions we all have to make. Should I accept this invitation, eat this or that for lunch, ring that friend back now or later, go on holiday here or there? If I make the wrong choice I will be unhappy, so I should have done otherwise.

It is perhaps obvious that the process of agonising over these decisions, the anger with oneself for getting it wrong, and the potential for regret, are all causes of distress. It is perhaps less obvious that these all stem from the illusion of having free will and that without it they would be lessened or would disappear altogether.

Living "as if” there is free will can seem to give a sense of peace. There are a whole lot of things that you don't have to worry about controlling because you know that you're really just a little window on a lovely machinery that's doing lots of things. It also gives, not so much a sense of inevitability, but perhaps a sense of correctness to the behaviours – that not all of them have to be chosen; You don't have to worry about every little thing; things will happen well, and have happened well throughout your life, as a result of simply allowing this machinery to do its operation.

That is the crux of willlessness – allowing that 'lovely machinery' to get on with its decisions and choices without interference from 'little inner me'.

A deeper and even more upsetting fear is that without free will we might become wicked creatures who would go around harming others, stealing, raping, pillaging or committing whatever other evils one can think of. It's as though people cannot trust themselves to act well unless they keep conscious control over everything they do; as though they think that if they stop believing that 'they' are in control of their body (or whatever part of their brain or body they think of as 'not me') its behaviour will somehow degenerate into evil.

This would surely a recipe for unhappiness. It means falsely dividing oneself into the controller and the controlled; siding with some impulses and not others. The conscious part that is 'me' has to control the unconscious part and so of course battles ensue., the 'contradictory or paralyzing suggestions' about getting out of bed were conscious ones (available to introspection) battling against each other, but here we are talking about the additional fear that if your conscious self does not adjudicate over such battles then the result will be something terribly bad. So to avoid this terrible outcome the 'I' must keep a firm control over all my evil impulses and choose good over evil. And for that I have to exert my free will.

This fear, that deep down we are all wicked, is completely unfounded, yet it is both understandable and widespread. It can be seen in many religions, especially in the Christian doctrine of original sin and the idea that God created us for a purpose and gave us the choice between good and evil. If one asks 'who' has this choice, or 'who' is good or evil, Christians will refer to the human soul or spirit; that non-material, thinking, acting, persisting being that ultimately takes responsibility and in time will be rewarded by going either to heaven or to hell. It is deeply ingrained.

One interesting retort was not asking why we are good, or argue about what good is, but instead simply ask "Why do we want to be good”.

Why do we want to be good? Perhaps not everyone does want to be good, but many of us do, and there are good evolutionary reasons why, including the fact that in a social species with reciprocal altruism, the way one person treats another determines how they are treated in return. If you are generous, you are likely to have favours returned. If you are helpful, you gain friends and allies, have a wider social circle, and gain status which translates into future genetic success. Some of our natural desire to be good, or to be thought to be good, is bred into us. Maybe we just want to live in a better world and being good is part of that.

The thing that doesn't happen, but of which people are quite reasonably scared, is that I get worse. A common elaboration of the belief that control is real … is that I can, and must control 'myself', and that unless I do, base urges will spill out and I will run amok. This is false because I never was split into controller and controlled, although the sense of strain and the self-recrimination were real enough. So the dreaded mayhem does not happen. I do not take up wholesale rape and pillage and knocking down old ladies just for fun. Instead guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, fear of failure, and much anxiety fall away, and contrary to expectation I become a better neighbor. I just don't have any interest in being a rapist or pillager or bounder who assaults old women for laughs.

If there is no inner self that exerts control through free will, there is still a whole living being that can take responsibility and can be held responsible by others. And that is sufficient.

When the Way of the Tau describes giving up control, its training in meditation and mindfulness, and its concepts of no-self and not-doing. The practice of mindfulness, now becoming increasingly popular in education, therapy and business, as well as in sitting meditation, is all about paying attention. In mindfulness one pays attention to everything happening now, but without discrimination, judgement or response. One simply stays with everything that is.  Done with single-minded determination this is a tough task. Our minds just do seem to slip off into speculations about the past or the future, into imagined conversations with other people, into regrets about past actions, into annoyance at things we cannot control, or into wishing to change things for the better. This is how minds are.

Letting go of all this can seem terribly scary. As we stop interfering and allow thoughts just to come and go as they will, we seem to become isolated in a present world which is just as it is, and not under our control. Indeed the sense of being a self who could control anything begins to slip away. With the steady practice of mindfulness, whether in everyday life or in sitting meditation, the mind becomes slower and gentler. It becomes less eager to grasp onto what it thinks is good, and push away what it thinks is bad; to identify with some thoughts or events and not others.

Even more unnerving is that the imagined continuity of self begins to fail. As sounds come and go; as thoughts arise and fall away, a terrible fear can arise – that unless 'I' keep on watching them and connecting one to the next in an ongoing stream of consciousness, then I will disappear. 'I' will fall into the gaps. But then comes the discovery that the continuity was always in the world, and never in that mythical inner self that seemed so strong before. In this, and in many other ways, the simple practice of attending to the present moment can wreak havoc. The self who would have had free will begins to lose its grip.

Although this can be frightening, it is a fear worth facing. When intensively practicing mindfulness, I began to notice that more and more decisions simply made themselves. I did not have to interfere with them or tell myself that 'I' was making them. I could let go of the sense of personal control and trust the body I once thought I inhabited to get on with its work unhindered. These decisions included difficult choices that took days to resolve, as well as quick and trivial ones. But one that sticks in my mind was both simple and potentially dangerous.

The feeling of having free has never completely gone away, sometimes the feeling comes back, usually in the form of "Oh, I can't decide whether to accept that invitation, to work a little longer, to tell that person I ….” and so on. So when the feeling of free will comes along, so do those words, along with an acknowledgement that this feeling of having free will is both natural and understandable.

Could it go away completely? Christianist mystics describe a final "unselfing” in surrender to the divine will. Surrender to God is said to be the essence of Islam. But the clearest exposition is found in the "sudden and revolutionary change” described in Zen Buddhism, in which the self, with all its fear, clinging, choosing, and deciding, ends.

In his classic book The Way of Zen, Alan Watts says that "We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it. In fact it is neither voluntary nor involuntary. … a decision – the freest of my actions – just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me”

In the way of Zen one simply walks on, wholeheartedly engaged in every action. Yet "we cannot realize this kind of action until it is clear beyond any shadow of doubt that it is actually impossible to do anything else.”

This is 'unmotivated non-volitional functioning'. It is 'non-action' or 'not-doing'. It is how things are because really there is no entity to act; no entity to be either bound or free

Could I be completely free of the illusion? Wei Wu Wei suggests "asking yourself whether you are not still looking as from a phenomenal centre that has only an imaginary existence. If so, you will be misled; if not – you will understand at once. (p 163). Clearly, as long as I wish to be free of the illusion, I am not.

Astute readers might recall that I used the word 'Ordeal' in the title. Like many of the other ordeals, the ordeal of timelessness for instance, giving up the illusion of free will increases our survivability with our faculties intact. The mindfulness that comes with learning how to properly drink coffee, tea, or cocoa prepares us for exploring will-lessness in greater depth. The massive trek we take to claim adulthood, requires us to travel alone and unaided, armed only with a knife, crossing thousands of kilometers. Months of isolation, the illusion of free-will can lead to madness. Illusions are dangerous, even if they can seem minor and benign.

Bibliography

 Blackmore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press

 Blackmore, Susan (2000) Memes and the malign user illusion (abstract), Consciousness and Cognition, 9, S49

 Blackmore,S. (2002) There is no stream of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, 17-28

 Blackmore, Susan (2005) Conversations on Consciousness, Oxford, Oxford University Press

 Blackmore, Susan (2010) Consciousness: An Introduction, 2nd Ed, London, Hodder Education

 Blackmore, Susan (2011) Zen and the Art of Consciousness, Oxford, Oneworld Publications

 Claxton, G. (1986) The light's on but there's nobody home: The psychology of no–self. In G. Claxton (Ed) Beyond Therapy: The Impact of Eastern Religions on Psychological Theory and Practice. Dorset, Prism Press, 49–70

 Dennett, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA, and London, Little, Brown and Co.

 Dennett, D.C. (2001) The fantasy of first person science. Debate with D. Chalmers, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, Feb 2001, http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmersdeb3dft.htm

 Dennett, D.C. (2003) Freedom Evolves, London, Allen Lane

 Haggard, P. (2008) Human volition: towards a neuroscience of will. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 934–46

 Hood, B. (2012) The self illusion. New York, Oxford University Press

 James, W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology, 2 volumes. London; MacMillan

 Libet, B. (1985) Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8 529-539

 Metzinger, T. (2009) The Ego Tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self, New York, Basic Books.

 Searle, J. (2004) Mind: A Brief Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press

 Wegner, D. (2002) The Illusion of Conscious Will, Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press

 Wei Wu Wei (2004) Open Secret, Hong Kong University Press