Précis of the illusion of conscious will.
The Behavioral and brain sciences October 1, 2004 Daniel M Wegner 247 citations
The feeling of conscious will—the sense that we are the authors of our own actions—may be an interpretation rather than a direct readout of mental or neural causation. Clinical disorders like alien hand syndrome and phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, and spirit possession show that will and action can come apart. A theory of apparent mental causation proposes that conscious will arises when a thought appears just before an action, is consistent with it, and has no salient alternative cause. In this view, the experience of will is a feeling that we think we caused an action, not a veridical report of how the action was produced.