Wegner/The Illusion of Conscious Will: BBS Multiple Book Review

Tue Aug 19 10:51:42 EDT 2003

Below is a link to the forthcoming precis of a book accepted for Multiple
Book Review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS).

 PRECIS OF: The Illusion of Conscious Will

 by Daniel M. Wegner

 PRECIS: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Wegner-05012003/Referees/

Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the precis, that is to be reviewed.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), is an international, interdisciplinary
journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial
current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be
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reviewers, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please
reply by EMAIL within four (4) weeks to:

                     calls at bbsonline.org

The Calls are sent to over 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no need to
reply except if you wish to review this book, or to nominate someone to
review.

If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors,
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http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html

If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum
Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether
they would be prepared to nominate you. 

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate reviewer for this
book, an electronic draft of the precis is retrievable at the URL included
in this email.

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                         *** IMPORTANT ***

Please do not prepare a review unless you are formally invited. To help us
put together a balanced list of reviewers, it would be most helpful if you
would send us as specific as possible an indication of the relevant
expertise you would bring to bear on the subject, and what aspect of the
book you would anticipate commenting upon. We will then let you know whether
it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees.

NOTE: Please indicate whether you already have the book or would require a
review copy to be sent to you if invited.

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 PRECIS OF: The Illusion of Conscious Will

 Daniel M. Wegner
 Department of Psychology
 Harvard University

ABSTRACT: The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we're doing
things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again
and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling
may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and
bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be
fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome,
dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenic auditory hallucinations.
And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic
writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication,
speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also
illustrate anomalies of will-cases when actions occur without will, or
will occurs without action. This book brings these cases together with
research evidence from laboratories in psychology and neuroscience to
explore a theory of apparent mental causation. According to this theory,
when a thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action, is
consistent with the action, and appears exclusive of salient alternative
causes of the action, we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship
to ourselves for the action. Experiences of conscious will thus arise from
processes whereby the mind interprets itself-not from processes whereby
mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that
we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence
by which the action was produced.

KEYWORDS: conscious will; free will; determinism; apparent mental
causation; automatism; perceived control

PRECIS: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Wegner-05012003/Referees/ 

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                *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***

(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
    to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
    limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
    it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
    year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).

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Thanks,

Ralph
BBS

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Ralph DeMarco
Editorial Coordinator
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Journals Department
Cambridge University Press
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