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Logical sleight of hand

Joachim Krueger has a posting in the PsychologyToday blog (here). Where he attempts to use a logical construction to disprove the conclusions of DM Wegner (2002) The illusion of conscious will.

He summarizes Wegner’s conclusion as follows:

According to this (Wegner’s) view, the brain prepares and executes both action and the conscious intention of acting at the same time. Conscious will is thereby correlated action without having any causal power. The correlation is due to the common cause of brain activity. If conscious will does not (ever) cause action, it is a dead end in the stream of causation. Conscious will is, as it were, an organism without offspring in the great genealogical tree of nature. Just as future generations are begotten by other organisms that mate, future actions are caused by other brain activities that are not causally dependent on conscious will.

Krueger attempts to prove that this is illogical. The language is a bit messy here but the argument can be made clear. If a particular brain activity, and only that brain activity, causes both the ‘conscious will’ and the ‘action’, than if either the ‘action’ or the ‘conscious will’ do not happen, it follows that the brain activity did not happen. So either ‘action and ‘conscious will’ both happen or neither happens. Therefore either ‘conscious will’ is part of the casual chain or is epiphenomenal.

What do we make of this? First, the experimental evidence is that the action and conscious will do not always happen together, they can be separately under unusual circumstances. This little logical argument does not take this into consideration and therefore does not accurately describe the situation. It can be experimentally arranged to have ‘conscious will’ without ‘action’ and to have ‘action’ without ‘conscious will’.

Second, just because ‘conscious will’ is not in this particular casual chain does not mean that it is not in some other causal chain. (I would agree that it is fairly certain that consciousness has functions because it is too biologically costly to be a frill. In other words, it is extremely improbable that consciousness is epiphenomenal.) There are other brain activities: for example, the ‘conscious will’ feeling in consciousness may mark memories as being memories of intended actions as opposed to unintended actions. Such a marking would be causal in learning outcomes of actions etc. To learn from our actions we need to remember whether there was either or both a feeling of agency and a feeling of intent. Just because consciousness is not essential in causing intended actions does not make it useless or epiphenomenal, if it records the nature of the action.

One of the problems of logical arguments such as this one is that once ‘brain activity’ becomes B, ‘conscious will’ becomes C and ‘action’ becomes A, it is difficult to notice when the meaning of these terms subtly change. When a particular brain activity becomes any/all brain activity the logic evaporates. It is suddenly not the same B. One has to be careful at every step of the logic that there is not a sleight-of-hand with the meaning of the elements.

Priming a hemisphere












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How can self-awareness be measured?












Here is the abstract:






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I notice your frustration

A occasional commenter, Quen_tin, has a very different way of seeing things to myself. His comments are appreciated, always serious and never rude. But I can feel his frustration in the beginning of his last comment. Sorry but What exactly are you talking about ??? Mental entities that are not conscious ? Thoughts we are not aware of ? I think your concepts are ill-defined.


So I feel that it is time to give an overview of my guesses as to how consciousness works. I have avoided taking my guesses too seriously because the science is so fluid. And this blog was started to follow the science rather than put forward a complete theory of my own. But on the other hand, there seems no piecemeal way to explain my problems with Quen_tin’s comments.


The philosophical ideas that I find most comfortable are Thomas Metzinger’s (pdf).

The present theory develops a detailed story about precisely what properties representations in a given information-processing system must possess in order to become phenomenal representations, ones the content of which is at the same time a content of consciousness. Let us start with what I call the “minimal concept of consciousness” and then proceed to enrich it. Phenomenologically, minimal consciousness is described as the presence of a world. This minimal notion involves what is called (1) the globality-constraint (a world-model that is available as a world model), (2) the presentationality-constraint (experience of presence in that world, now), and (3) the transparency-constraint (unavailability of earlier processing stages).  The presence of a world. The phenomenal presence of a world is the activation of a coherent, global model of reality (Constraint 1) within a virtual window of presence (Constraint 2), a model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system generating it within itself (Constraint 3). Please note how all that such a system would experience would be the presence of one unified world, homogeneous and frozen into an internal Now as it were.

Then the self is introduced. …one could say that you are the content of your PSM (phenomenal self-model ). A perhaps better way of making the central point intuitively accessible could be by saying that we are systems that constantly confuse themselves with the content of their PSM (phenomenal self-model ). And Mezinger carries on to elaborate a picture of consciousness that seems very reasonable to me.


It is not that I have accepted this theory as the only possibility. However it is a possibility  and therefore, the phenomenal should not be beyond scientific explanation.


So the way I look at it is that there is a brain and that brain does stuff like action, perception, cognition, memory and whatever else we associate with mind or thought or mental processing. Mind is a function of brain, mind is what brain does. A small but very important function of the brain, or a small part of the mind-function, is consciousness. It is a model of the world including a model of the self that is available to much of the brain. It is connected with attention, working memory and short-term prediction. It is important to the working of the brain but does not do action, perception, or cognition. It does not do thought; it does awareness. It has no direct (as opposed to modeled) knowledge of the world or the self. Therefore introspection has no direct privileged knowledge.


Because it is the route to working memory, any thought process that requires the storage facility of working memory will have its interim steps appear in consciousness (not the thought processes but the sub-conclusions on the way to a final conclusion). It will have some of the appearance of the thought being consciously done because the interim steps appear in order in the stream of consciousness. But we still have only one unified brain/mind doing the thinking. We are never aware through consciousness of the thinking process, the ‘cogs moving’.


It is true that one of the reasons that I find this a comfortable way of looking at consciousness is a metaphysical choice, taken so long ago that it is lost in the fog of childhood. I believe in a ‘reality’ that is physical and material in nature, with a very concrete sort of belief. I find it impossible to believe in non-physical/non-material things. The disembodied, spiritual and such like are not entertained. I shy away from words that sit on the fence like ’emergent’; they seem to want to be both physical and spiritual at the same time. So my only way of understanding consciousness is scientific.


At this point, I hear in my ear that some readers are saying to themselves, but why is red the way it is?. Where do the qualia come from? I don’t know how the brain does qualia. But I see it as a scientific question all the same. I do not buy that it is so mysterious that it cannot be understood. Why is red the way it is? Why not. How is red the way it is? Who knows. But I trust we will know someday.



Sleeping in a dish








Just because Chomsky said it does not make it true













Correlates of volition

















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The famous hard question

Elusiveself in a critical look at Raymond Tallis’ ideas (here) gives this quote of Tallis’ straw man: Consciousness is, at the basic level, appearances or appearings-to, but neither nerve impulses nor the material world have appearances.


There have been many other similar statements about the hard problem and how it is that by definition consciousness cannot have a scientific explanation.


By this logic nothing can have a scientific explanation. Suppose we try something else, say a bicycle. I can give a drawing of a bicycle and accompany it with a wordy explanation of how and why it works the way it does. It can include the physics with some equations, even the history of how it came to be. This is, I could say, an explanation, an understanding and a model of a bicycle, therefore there is no mystery left about what a bicycle is. Would you say, but this is not an explanation of a bicycle because I cannot get on it and ride down the street.


But some would say that my bicycle story missed the point. Consciousness is not like riding. Consciousness is not physical and therefore cannot have a physical explanation. But this is a semantic thing, an arbitrary definition, a word play. Why is consciousness not physical? Because someone says so. What is the proof? None that I can think of. I could say that riding is not physical. What is my proof? It is about as non-physical as consciousness so if consciousness is non-physical so is riding.


Anyone that wants to talk about magic non-physical mind stuff, has nothing useful or valid to tell science. Mind is not a place, not an object, not a container  it is an activity, it is what brains do. And someday science will explain the brain’s activity. The hard question is a lot harder for dualist philosophers than it will be for scientists.

Intentional binding

Intentional binding is an interesting effect. The perceived interval between an voluntary action and its effect is shorter if there is a sense of agency involved. Berberian, Sarrazin, Blaye and Haggard (see citation) have investigated this effect.


They used an aircraft mockup with stages: conflict detection, command decision (how much to change heading), command implementation (set the heading), command engagement (go button  action), command result (confirmation of success/failure  effect), followed by interval estimation (between action and effect)and rating of feeling of agency. The decision, implementation and engagement can be automated or not, giving four situations: from all three under control to all three automated. The interval between action and effect was fixed at three different times. What was measured was how the interval estimation was affected by the level of automation, the length of the interval and the feeling of agency.

First, we observed a strong relation between measures of IB (intentional binding) and different levels of system automation. Second, our data revealed a gradual increase in temporal estimation with the increasing level of automation. The more the system was automated, the longer the action-effect interval was perceived. Third, the effect of automation level on intentional binding was dependent on the actual action-effect delays…Our findings confirm the interest of the intentional binding as implicit measure of agency. First, we provide evidence that quantitative changes in binding are strongly associated with progressive changes in actual level of control, and also with quantitative changes in explicit ratings of agency. Second, we replicate the basic binding effect in a situation with high face-validity, in which action-event sequences paralleled those that participants might meet in their everyday lives….Our results reveal a gradual increase of interval estimates with the increasing level of automation. In contrast, many previous studies of agency have relied on binary agency-attribution judgments…. our result suggests action selection, planning and intention realisation may all contribute to sense of agency. In this way, our results are consistent with recent arguments that sense of agency is based on cue integration….We propose that temporal contiguity is task dependent and that intentional binding occurs in a specific window of opportunity which may vary across tasks, and may also depend on the range of action-effect delays experienced in a given setting. Operant learning is similarly sensitive to the natural time delays of the system linking actions to effects, even for systems as familiar as ones own body.


Measures of intentional binding are a useful addition to reports of a feeling of agency for future experimentation.


But what does this study say about the consciousness of agency? Agency is not an all or nothing feeling  it can be graduated. One way to look at this would be that knowledge of agency is important to learning. We have to be able to accurately assess cause and effect in order to learn to get the outcomes we want. Therefore our understanding and memory must connect those things that are causally connected and avoid connecting those that are not. One way to do this is to store the memories of the cause and the effect (temporarily at least) in the same ‘time slot’. This in itself may shorten the interval between action and effect in memory when we recall it to estimate the interval. If there is a need to bias memory with probability of agency, that is a very good reason for the need for a conscious feeling of agency when this is appropriate. Some unconscious process must calculate how appropriate it is, because this calculation is not part of the conscious feeling of agency.



Berberian B, Sarrazin J-C, Le Blaye P, & Haggard P (2012). Automation Technology and Sense of Control: A window on Human Agency PLoS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034075

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