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Times Book Review Letter, May 1, 2011:
…Wallace’s novel and essay and McCarthy’s review are excellent demonstrations that the issues of will and choice and agency are, in our era of neurobiological investigations, not sterile and abstract. They are descending from the lofty and, yes, sometimes ridiculous heights of philosophy into the real world of human moral, social, jurisprudential and political actions. (See Daniel Wegner’s wonderful book “The Illusion of Conscious Will,” published a few years ago.) Did you know that if I hold a gun to your head — no, no, a pie to your face — the motor command to mush it there precedes my consciousness of the decision to do so?
Did you know that if you decide not to pull that trigger–or mush that pie–that the motor command goes off all the same? That impulse control actually gets accounted for in some esoteric philosophies?
