Religion

Before getting to the design features, it is useful to first define what I mean by conscious control as we will revisit this idea throughout. Conscious control processes are effortful, they focus attention in the face of interference, they experience information in a serial format (one thing at a time), they can generate solutions that are not hard-wired, and they operate over a constrained cognitive workspace—working memory—to which ‘we’ have access and can later report on as a component of conscious awareness [16–20]. When additional tasks are added to consciously effortful tasks performance suffers. Effortful processes sit in contrast to automatic processes, which are fast and parallel, and do not require conscious awareness. Effortful tasks can be made automatic through repetition (like reading and driving [21]) and when they become automatic they suffer less from the addition of a secondary task. Effortful and automatic processes are typically thought to sit at opposite ends of a continuum and the evidence provided below shows that they can influence one another.

The relationship between effortful processing (sometimes called executive processing) and conscious control is well documented (e.g. [16,18,22]). If we identify effortful consciousness with the self and this effortful self plays a role in satisfying the design features of free will discussed in further detail below, then what people mean by and want from free will are satisfied by our neurocognitive capacities.

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What matters more for free will is where the decision to modulate variability comes from. If conscious control in any way influences unpredictability, then consciousness is in the loop that governs future behaviour. One way to examine this is to investigate the ability to generate unpredictable behaviour when conscious control is impaired. Consider random number sequence generation tasks, where people are asked to produce unpredictable sequences (e.g. [63]). If individuals in a random sequence generation task are simultaneously exposed to another task that competes for effortful attention—such as n-back tasks requiring memory for an ever-changing sequence of letters—their random sequences become increasingly predictable (e.g. [64,65]). People under time pressure or who suffer from unwanted thoughts also produce more predictable sequences [66], as do individuals with impairment in areas of the brain associated with executive control [63,67,68]. This evidence strongly implicates effortful conscious control in the mediation of unpredictability, whatever its source.1 The question we now face is how this unpredictability is used in the service of the will.

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According to Wolf [73] ‘One wants to be able to choose in light of the knowledge of one's options and in light of the comparative reasons for and against these options' (p. 92). Wolf [73] claimed that these reasons are acquired through rational deliberation. This involves investigating alternatives to satisfying a goal and accessing cognitive information about those alternatives. Evidence for this was provided above in relation to memory retrieval from distributed representations. But the evidence goes much further.

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