Abstract

I discuss the suggestion that conscious will is an illusion. I take it to mean that there are no conscious decisions. I understand ‘conscious’ as accessible directly and ‘decision’ as the acquisition of an intention. I take the alternative of direct access to be access by interpreting behaviour. I start with a survey of the evidence in support of this suggestion. I argue that the evidence indicates that we are misled by external behaviour into making false positive and false negative judgements about our own decisions. Then I turn to a challenge to this suggestion. What could we interpret in cases when there is no external behaviour? I propose the response that we interpret internal behaviour. We can understand internal behaviour as mental simulation of external behaviour, which can proceed by way of conscious mental imagery. I argue that the proposal has the following advantages. It helps us explain more evidence than we could otherwise. It relies mostly on mechanisms that we already have reason to believe in. And it receives support from the available neurological evidence. I also suggest a way to test the proposal in future empirical research. I conclude by discussing the limitations of the proposal and its implications for the wider debates about the imagination and the will.