Bodily awareness and action - effect anticipations in voluntary action

In his article “On the Necessity of Bodily Awareness for Bodily Action” in this volume of Psyche Hong Yu Wong challenges the claim that bodily awareness is a necessary precondition for being able to voluntarily act with one’s body parts (the necessity thesis). Wong discusses empirical findings from studies of (i) deafferented patients, (ii) brain-computer interfaces and (iii) the automaticity of skilled movements, which constitute prima facie counterexamples against a strong version of the necessity thesis. While I consider Wong’s arguments as generally convincing, in this commentary I put them in the wider context of psychological theories stressing the role of distal action effects in the control of voluntary action and the experience of agency. Moreover, I point to an ambiguity between firstand third-person readings of the necessity thesis. Thomas Goschke Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden 1 Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany Email: [email protected]