Good article on free will

[sl . m]

From today's National Post

Scientists and philosophers have long pondered the problem of free will: Do we consciously choose our actions -- or is our behaviour dictated by our environment, our genes and myriad other factors that rarely spill over into our conscious minds? Such speculation is now giving way to hard data, with experimental psychology finally equipped to probe the differences between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner argues that free will "is a construction ... something the mind builds in order to keep track of what it's doing" -- an idea he explores in detail in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will. Consciousness, he says, frequently "isn't the engine on the train."

http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=D74C0BFF-5F70-4E01-9AAF-445EE6D2969B