Consciousness and ActionConsciousness and Action
my tea, this is not literally a waking up from a non-conscious state. I’ve already done that earlier
in the morning, and I’ve been conscious of something or other throughout the various actions
with which I have been engaged since. Second, my awareness of something is a motivating fac-
tor in moving me into the action of preparing my tea. It’s not simply that I am aware of the fact
that I have not yet made my tea. It’s rather a more positive feeling that I should have some tea.
I notice that I am thirsty or in need of some sustenance. This is a bodily feeling; quite literally,
a gut feeling rather than a consciousness of an objective fact. The phenomenology, prior to my
action of preparing tea, is what motivates me to get up to start that process.
All of this may seem obvious and rather tedious to even state. I do so only because it is often the
case that in scientific experiments addressing the question of consciousness one gets the impression
that one begins with a non-conscious 0-point and then asks what brings on consciousness. For
example, in the famous Libet experiments, the question is: When do I become conscious of the
decision or the urge to flick my finger or wrist? The results of Libet’s experiment suggest that we
become conscious of the decision or urge only after some 500–850 milliseconds of brain activity
(the “readiness potential”) that seems to correlate with preparation for that specific action, and this
suggests that consciousness doesn’t play a role in causing the action, at least until approximately
150 milliseconds before motor activation (Libet 1985, 1992). Libet and everyone else know, how-
ever, that the subject in these experiments is conscious well before the action and throughout the
experiment. The instructions given to the subject assume he is conscious, and in fact they direct
the subject to consciously think about the kind of abstract and artificial action (the basic action
of flicking a finger or wrist) that he is called on to perform. It’s not at all clear that this prior con-
sciousness, which itself involves not only some patterns of neural activation, but also intentional
aspects (in the sense of intentionality as consciousness of the instructions), or what Roepstorff and
Frith (2004) call ‘top-top-down’ socially contextualized factors, does not activate further processes
in the brain that ultimately lead to the readiness potential, which then seemingly accompanies
motor preparation for the specific action in question.^1 It’s clear that there is consciousness relevant
to the action long (relatively speaking) before this specific action occurs.
Moreover, in the Libet experiment, consciousness of the instructions clearly motivates the
subject to perform the specific action he is instructed to perform. The subject would not sit
there and flick his wrist whenever he wanted, without those instructions. So even if he is not
conscious of his precise decision to flick his wrist prior to the specific brain activation that
corresponds to the specific action of flicking his wrist, it doesn’t seem right to claim that the
subject’s previous consciousness plays no role in the action (see Gallagher 2017a).
We come back to the example of my growing gustatory awareness that I have not yet made
my tea. Can we not say that this awareness does play some role in my now getting up in order to
prepare my tea? Clearly it plays a motivating role. The notion of motivation is not equivalent to
a strong, billiard-ball conception of causality. But it seems clear that if I am asked why I started
to make this move at this point, I would say something like, “Because I just became aware that
I did not yet have my tea.” Or, “Because I felt the urge.” What did I become aware of? Not the
physiological processes that define thirst, but perhaps some interoceptive sensations of thirst; or
maybe just the thought that it was getting late and I had to move on to other things, like get-
ting my tea. There is not only consciousness before action, but in some cases that consciousness
motivates action.
I started with the example of preparing tea, rather than with the example of preparing a tea
party. As we all know from our experience of tea parties, preparing a tea party involves some plan-
ning, and typically such planning is conscious and deliberate. In this regard, we often find ourselves
consciously deliberating and forming prior intentions to act in some specific way. This clearly
involves a consciousness before action that seems to have some effect on action, otherwise we