Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Ken Armstrong <armstron AT ohiou.edu>]

It being so quiet on the list, I thought this Percy-like
item might not be inappropriate. There is a book out now, The Illusion of
Conscious Will, which is not about a vanishing Percy relation, but might
be just the kind of thing WP would have enjoyed skewering. The following
is excerpted from the review on Amazon.com:

"Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us?
Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers
have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this
book Daniel Wegner offers a novel
understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of
conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and
neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we
have conscious will? The
feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and
remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we
feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same
time, our actions happen to
us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to
understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and
morality. "

Well. One would think the reviewer would feel some obligation, conscious
will being an illusion and all, to explain how he thinks or how the
author thinks this book came into being?  If ever a theory displayed
all the characteristics WP delineates in The San Andreas Fault in the
Modern Mind, this must be it. Imagine the pathos of "developing a
sense of responsibility and morality" with no capacity for
will.  

TGIF and cheers to all,
Ken Armstrong