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Can Conscious Agency Be Saved?

Topoi volume 33, pages 33–45 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the role of conscious agency in human action. On a folk-psychological view of the structure of agency, intentions, conceived as conscious mental states, are the causes of actions. In the last decades, the development of new psychological and neuroscientific methods has made conscious agency an object of empirical investigation and yielded results that challenge the received wisdom. Most famously, the results of Libet’s studies on the ‘readiness potential’ have been interpreted by many as evidence in favor of a skeptical attitude towards conscious agency. It is questionable, however, whether action initiation should be regarded as the touchstone of conscious agency. I shall argue that the traditional folk-psychological view, but also some of the objections leveled against it, rest in part on an over-simplified conception of the structure of agency, that neglects both the role of control processes after action initiation and the role of planning processes before action initiation. Taking these processes into account can lead to a reassessment of the relation between intentions and action and of the role of conscious agency in action production.

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Notes

  1. This possibility is discussed by Velleman (2007), who does not really endorse it but rather uses it as an antidote to the assumption that the raison d'être of intentions is to support pragmatic functions. Dennett (Dennett 1991, 2003) and Wegner (2002) seem closer to endorsing this view.

  2. Examples of free will skepticism that appeal to Libet’s work include Banks and Isham (2011), Hallett (2007), Pockett (2004), Roediger et al. (2008), Spence (2009) and Wegner (2002).

  3. Contemporary defenses of compatibilism include, among many others, Frankfurt (1988), McKenna (2005), Scanlon (2008) and Smith (2003).

  4. This is the interpretation of Libet's data Wegner appears to favor: ‘‘The position of conscious will in the time line suggests perhaps that the experience of will is a link in a causal chain leading to action, but in fact it might not even be that. It might just be a loose end—one of those things, like the action, that is caused by prior brain and mental events’’ (Wegner 2002: 55). On Wegner's account of how the experience of conscious will is generated, what he calls the theory of apparent mental causation, conscious will is experienced when we infer that our thought has caused our action and we draw such an inference when we have thoughts that occur just before the actions, when these thoughts are consistent with the actions, and when other potential causes of the actions are not present. However, according to Wegner, our actions spring from unconscious causal processes and the conscious ideas that we mistakenly experience as their causes are themselves caused by unconscious processes whose links to the unconscious processes causing the action, when they exist, are often at best indirect.

  5. This “local” epiphenomenalism should be distinguished from global epiphenomenalist claims stemming from the causal exclusion problem, where the argument is that the causal efficacy of mental properties is excluded by the causal efficacy of the physical properties on which they supervene (Kim 1993). This challenge applies to mental causation in general and is much broader than the challenge raised by Libet's data. The causal exclusion problem has given rise to a huge literature and there is no clear consensus as to how it can be solved. However, I won't engage with this debate here; rather my focus here will be on Libet's more specific challenge.

  6. In addition, even limiting ourselves to cases where RPs are followed by actions, RPs and W-judgments do not appear to be sufficiently coupled to warrant a causal claim. Haggard and Eimer (1999) found no correlation between the onset of the RP and W-judgments, but did find a positive correlation between the onset of a later phase of the readiness potential, the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), and W-judgments, suggesting that the RP does not reflect processes causal of W but that the LRP might. However, a recent study by Schlegel et al. (2013) failed to replicate their results and found no within-subject covariation between LRP onset and W judgment, leading them to conclude that neither RP onset nor LRP onset cause W.

  7. One can offer a similar deflationary interpretation of a more recent experiment (Soon et al. 2008) that found that while subjects who had to decide between two actions reported having made a conscious decision on average 1,000 ms before action onset, the outcome of their decision could be predicted from brain activity in prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it entered awareness. These results have been claimed to show that decisions about what to do and not just about when to act are made unconsciously. However, in view of the fact that the accuracy with which the conscious decisions could be predicted from prior unconscious brain activity in these areas was less than 60 % (50 % corresponding to chance), a more reasonable conclusion might be that the decision was causally influenced to some degree by these unconscious brain processes rather than determined by them (see, for instance, section 3 in Mele 2012 for further discussion of this point).

  8. While I am focusing here on Frankfurt's guidance theory of action, it is important to note that other philosophers also criticized the over-simplistic view of the relation between intention and action found in early causal theories of action. For instance, Brand (1984), Bishop (1989) and Mele (1992) all insist that a full-blown causal theory should incorporate the guiding and monitoring roles of intentions in the production of intentional action. The notion of an intention-in-action proposed by Searle (1983) was also aimed at capturing the close and continuous connection between intention and ongoing action (see, for instance, the discussion in Pacherie (2000)).

  9. Useful entry points into the literature on motor cognition are provided by Jeannerod (1997, 2006).

  10. Note that Libet actually made two claims about conscious vetoes. The first claim was that the interval between conscious intention and movement onset is sufficient to allow a process of conscious veto, which would inhibit an impending action before execution. The second, much more contentious claim, reflecting his dualist attitude was that these decisions to inhibit action involved a purely conscious form of “free won’t” and did not depend on unconscious brain processes. I am concerned here only with the first of these two claims. For empirical evidence against the second, see for instance Brass and Haggard (2007) or Filevich et al. (2013).

  11. For reasons of space, I decided to limit my discussion to action planning after the formation of an initial prospective intention. I am not assuming that the formation of prospective intentions always involves explicit conscious deliberation. When it does, however, deliberation could involve classical forms of practical reasoning, but also what I describe below as mental time travel processes. For instance, we may mentally simulate various potential future situations and use our emotional responses to these imagined scenarios as guides to our decisions (Boyer 2008).

  12. Indeed, several researchers have argued that mental time travel into the future is a crucial cognitive adaptation, enhancing planning and deliberation by allowing a subject to mentally simulate and evaluate contingencies, and thus enhancing fitness, and that mental time travel into the past is subsidiary to our ability to imagine future scenarios (Dudai and Carruthers 2005; Suddendorf and Corballis 2007).

  13. In addition, there appear to be important individual differences in the ability to project oneself into possible future events. A recent study (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden 2006) provides evidence that the individual differences in dimensions known to affect memory for past events similarly influence the experience of projecting oneself into the future. People less adept at recalling in vivid detail past episodes of their life, are also less able to simulate specific future events.

  14. Such implementation intentions may take advantage of the fact that externally-cued intentions are normally more strongly held, in the sense of being harder to overturn, than internally-generated intentions (Fleming et al. 2009).

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Acknowledgments

Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the Topoi Conference “Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues” in Rome in November 2012 and at the Colloquium series of the Department of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest in February 2013. I would like to thank both audiences for their questions and comments. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their insightful comments and suggestions. I completed this paper while a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University in Budapest and am grateful to this institution for its support.

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  1. Institut Jean Nicod, Institut d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), EHESS, CNRS, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Pacherie

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Pacherie, E. Can Conscious Agency Be Saved?. Topoi 33, 33–45 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9187-6

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Keywords

  • Conscious agency
  • Intentions
  • Action initiation
  • Action control
  • Action planning
  • Libet