Product Description

Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions. In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this. Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153406 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Scientific Evidence and Free Will
Mele`s shortish book Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will is essentially an examination of the works on consciousness and free will by the likes of Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner. Accordingly, I advise any potential readers to acquaint themselves with at least Wegner`s much discussed book Illusion of Conscious Will before picking this up. One reason for this is that Mele doesn`t give much credit to either of these scientists or their conclusions. And I think the way Wegner`s views are represented here doesn`t do full justice to them.

Besides being a review of the aforementioned scientific work, Effective Intentions is also about conceptual analysis. In this, Mele does important work: scientists and philosophers don`t always use the same concepts in the same way, and this certainly muddles the interdisciplinary discussion. As usual, Mele is very thorough and detailed with what he wants to say. He uses a lot of space to defend a thesis about the efficacy of intentions in overt intentional actions which to me seems almost self-evident and certainly not very controversial, given how he defines "intentions". We aren`t worried about whether there are intentions at work in our actions or not; we`re worried about whether we acquire those intentions freely or not.

Mele`s primary conclusion is that scientists have not proved we don`t have free will. That maybe so, but I think the evidence does support the view that consciousness doesn`t do the choosing. In defending "the power of conscious will", Mele doesn`t really say what, if any, work is done by consciousness. As far as I can tell, he himself acknowledges this. What Wegner and others are arguing against is indeed a folk conception of free will, residing in consciousness and relying on cartesian dualism, not free will per se. It seems to me that Mele`s views don`t in fact differ from Wegner`s as much as he thinks they are. The essential question is about what part consciousness plays, and Mele hasn`t proved it does anything.

Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will casts reasonable doubt towards Libet`s conclusions, though Mele has offered his best arguments on the subject already before this book (they are repeated here). The book`s most important contribution is in clarifying the concept of intention.