Consciousness and ActionIt’s unlikely that I would answer 1, 2, or 3 – since I’m not conscious or fully conscious of such
things. Depending on my understanding of your question, and perhaps prior bits of conversa-
tion, however, I might answer 4 or 5. If my wife asks me what I’m doing I might indeed say,
“I’m being careful not to make a mess.” But, generally speaking, if out of the blue you asked
what I was doing, I would say, “I’m making some tea.” This suggests that at some level, when
I am acting, and barring any other unusual happenings, I am generally aware of my actions as
I am engaged in them. I may not be aware of a lot of details – that I am tilting the kettle thus
and so, for example – but I am at least minimally aware that I am in the process of making tea,
even if I am thinking hard about the email, or talking to my wife at the same time. I’m not only
conscious during my action, I am, at some level, conscious of my action.
Again, two points are important. First, consciousness during action may or may not involve
awareness of specific details as I engage in action. Another appeal to the experimental literature
may make this clear. In experiments that are specifically about consciousness one might be led to
think that the subject is simply unconscious as they are engaged in a particular task. For example,
in experiments on blindsight, subjects are conscious as they perform the various tasks asked of
them. They are not conscious of a specific thing – an object, or location, or orientation, etc. – in
the visual modality; but they are conscious of what they are thinking; and they are conscious in
other sensory modalities. They hear the experimenter’s instructions, for example. And they are
aware of what they are doing in terms of the general task. They are asked to indicate the location
of some object that they cannot see, for example. They are conscious that they are being forced
to guess at the location. So, they are aware of specific things concerning the action when they
are engaged in the action, and they are aware of what they are doing, even if they are not aware
of how they are doing it, i.e., how they are getting the right answers. If we take the performance
of the blindsight subject in such experiments to be a case of non-conscious visual perception,
there is, nonetheless, a good deal of consciousness involved in their action.
Second, what I am conscious of, or to what degree I am conscious of it, whether it is my spe-
cific action or something else, may have some impact upon my action. Motor control processes
that I am not conscious of, such as processes described in terms of forward control models that
operate at the subpersonal neuronal level, do have impact on my action performance (Wolpert
and Flanagan 2001; Wolpert, Doya and Kawato 2003). But intentional actions, and even high-
level expert performances, are not reducible to just such non-conscious processes.
Dreyfus (2005), however, has famously argued that expert performance, when the expert is
in-the-flow of performance, is mindless. Even if there are some aspects of action of which we are
not aware – again, for example, the details of how we do an action, as well as subpersonal motor
control aspects – he would go further and suggest that anything like reflective consciousness
would necessarily interfere with expert performance. We may need to attend to our movements
as we learn new kinds of action, such as a new dance; and there may also be cases in which we
attend to our bodily movements in unusual circumstances (e.g., when we are on a ledge and
being careful about how we move). But when we are engaged in expert performance, Dreyfus
would even rule out thinking or reflecting about different aspects of the environment. The
downhill skier, for example, would not be thinking even about the snow or about upcoming
conditions on the hill when she is engaged in expert skiing (Gallagher 2016).
A phenomenological study by Høffding (2015), however, suggests that Dreyfus is wrong.
Høffding studied the expert musical performance of members of the Danish String Quartet. In
terms of being conscious of certain aspects of their playing, or of other things unrelated to their
playing, as they played in the quartet, Høffding showed variation across different circumstances.
In some cases, the musicians paid no explicit attention to what the others were doing. They may
be attending to the music itself, letting their movements and playing of instruments be entrained