Causation and the Awareness of Agency

I criticize the tendency to address the causal role of awareness in agency in terms of the awareness of agency, and argue that this distorts the causal import of experimental results in significant ways. I illustrate, using the work of Shaun Gallagher, how the tendency to focus on the awareness of agency obscures the role of extrospective awareness by considering it only in terms of what it contributes to the awareness of agency. Focus on awareness of agency separates awareness from agency itself, and then turns it inwards to introspect distinct agentive processes. If we then assume that the causal influence of awareness is directed at the same object as awareness itself, then the only avenue for conscious causal involvement in action is to somehow interfere with the separate, even neuronal, processes leading to action. I label this the Micromanagement Model of conscious agency, because it forces awareness to micromanage other, nonconscious, processes in order to be causally efficacious. Implicit adherence to the Micromanagement Model prejudices us towards the mistaken conclusion that awareness has limited to no causal role in action. Introduction Based on new research in cognitive science in the last decade, a number of philosophers have concluded that we have little to no conscious causal influence on our own actions, and that our strong impressions to the contrary are simply persistent illusions. These strong conclusions are symptoms of a problematic view of conscious action, and it is this problematic view of how awareness might figure in action that is the target of this paper. My focus here is on the model of agency that underlies a fairly widespread tendency to take awareness of agency (alternatively, an experience, sense, or phenomenology of agency) as the paradigm for understanding conscious contributions to agency. Regardless of whether or not we endorse the problematic symptoms of this view (such as concluding that conscious awareness has no causal role in action), this model is agency is, I’ll show, dubious.