Experimental psychologists and neuroscientists
have done very much better with investigating the illusoriness of 'will-power',
'decision-making', and so on. Ingenious experiments strongly suggest, for example,
that our actions are
frequently under way before our awareness of having 'made a decision',
and that the reasons we give for what we do are frequently confabulated after
the event. Much of the more recent of this work is usefully and accessibly summarized
by Susan Blackmore (2001), Consciousness, The Psychologist, 14,
522-525.