It happens
hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt
out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive
of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways.
But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience? In
a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, psychologists made a
revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they
suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our
thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal
role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made
a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we
actually did. But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, that we observe ourselves
(unconsciously) perform some action, like picking out a box of cereal in the
grocery store, and then only afterwards come to infer that we did this
intentionally. If this is the true sequence of events, how could we be deceived
into believing that we had intentionally made our choice before the
consequences of this action were observed?
This explanation
for how we think of our agency would seem to require supernatural backwards
causation, with our experience of conscious will being both a product and an
apparent cause of behavior. A recent study explored a radical solution to this
puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are
rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually
completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice
that we had made all along. Though the precise way in which the mind could do
this is still not fully understood, similar phenomena have been documented
elsewhere. For example, we see the apparent motion of a dot before seeing that
dot reach its destination, and we feel phantom touches moving up our arm before
feeling an actual touch further up our arm. Postdictive illusions of this sort
are typically explained by noting that there’s a delay in the time it takes
information out in the world to reach conscious awareness: Because it lags
slightly behind reality, consciousness can anticipate future events that
haven’t yet entered awareness, but have been encoded subconsciously, allowing
for an illusion in which the experienced future alters the experienced past.
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