- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
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 illusory is trivial.
(Wegner, 2002, p. 342)
A similar conclusion is reached by British psychologist Guy Claxton, though from
the perspective of spiritual practice (see Chapter 18). He argues that much of the
trouble in our lives is caused by the false idea of self, and he explores some of
the bizarre things we end up thinking when we try to defend the theory that our
decisions cause our actions. ‘I meant to keep my cool but I just couldn’t. . . . I’d
decided on an early night but somehow here we are in Piccadilly Circus at four
a.m. with silly hats and a bottle of wine’ (1986a, p. 59). Then if all else fails we can
even reinterpret our failure as a success. ‘ “I changed my mind”, we say, temporar-
ily withdrawing our identification from the “mind” that has been “made up”, and
aligning ourselves instead with some higher decision-maker and controller who
can “choose” to override this mind’ (pp. 59–60). But there is no self who really has
this control, says Claxton. Rather like Haggard (see Concept 9.1), he concludes
that it makes better sense to see the relationship between thought and action as
a hit-and-miss attempt at prediction rather than control.
The idea that we predict rather than controlling what we do links to a suggestion
by Austrian-American psychologist George Mandler (2007) that instead of trying
to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary, we should think of a contin-
uum from expected to unexpected. Things seem voluntary merely because they
don’t surprise us.
Thought Action
Unconscious
cause of
thought
Unconscious
cause of
action
Experience of Conscious Will
Actu
al^ ca
usal p
ath
Actual
causal path
Apparent causal path
Unconscious
path?
Time
FIGURE 9.8 • According to Wegner, the experience of conscious will arises when a person infers a causal path from thought to
action. Both thought and action are caused by unconscious mental events, which may also be linked to each other.
The path from thought to action is apparent, not real (after Wegner, 2002, p. 68).
