It was not until I was in my third year that Dan Wegner and I realized a keen mutual interest in agency. Dan was ready to do something new and I was an eager apprentice. We decided to test whether the feeling of agency could be evoked merely by mimicking its natural conditions. We reasoned that most intentional acts are preceded by a related thought. Given this, we wondered whether the feeling of will could be conjured in people simply by giving them a thought and then making them appear to act in kind—all without them actually thinking or doing either
Over his career, he generated five major scientific theories, each of which spawned its own thriving subdiscipline in psychology. The Illusion of Conscious Will was his most controversial.
Two weeks before he died, I asked Dan whether he ever settled on an answer as to why we have subjective experience. He smiled and told me that he didn’t know why in the deepest sense, but that he “very much liked having a window on the lovely machinery.” And what a window that was.