Shaun Gallagherwould never say that people sometimes act in a way inconsistent with their intentions, nor would
we ask them their reasons for acting as they did. I take this idea that we sometimes consciously
form prior or distal intentions that motivate later action to be uncontroversial.
2 Consciousness during ActionClearly, I do not fall into an unconscious state when I start to prepare my tea. This is not the
same as saying that I am fully conscious of everything I’m doing. I may in fact be operating
from habit, and many of my movements may be non-conscious. I reach for the kettle, clearly
without a focused attention on the movements of my arm, or my grasp, and perhaps not even
with a focused attention on the kettle. I may still be thinking about that last email, and that may
be taking all of my attention. The fact that I am not conscious of my movements (reaching and
grasping) is the circumstance of ordinary motor control features of action. In the Libet experi-
ments, the subject may be conscious specifically of the flicking of his hand – but that’s because
the subject is in an abstract and artificial situation, where he is asked to focus on precisely these
things. Even in this case, as in every case, however, the subject is not aware of the neural com-
ponents of the motor control process. In almost all cases of intentional action, the agent is not
aware of the precise specifics of bodily movement – joint angles, muscle tension, etc. As many
experiments have shown, kinaesthesis (movement sense) and proprioception (postural sense) are
attenuated, i.e., pushed into the outer margins of consciousness to the point where an agent can
say that she is aware that she is moving, but not precisely how she is moving. Moving, in this case,
is like posture. Unless we are practicing a kind of mindfulness or Alexander Technique (where
one’s focus is on one’s situated posture), we are not usually aware of our posture or of how we
are moving. Nonetheless, as ecological psychology shows, I do have a minimal awareness of, for
example, the fact that I am sitting, or standing, or walking, or running (e.g., Gibson 2014).
Accordingly, I may not be aware of the details of my movement as I am engaged in prepar-
ing my tea – much of the process, such as the shaping of my fingers as I grasp the kettle, may
be non-conscious (Jeannerod 1997), and many other aspects of the process may be shunted
off into the margins of my consciousness, such as transformations in my posture, my walking
around grabbing the tea and the mug and so forth. The latter are things that I can become
aware of, e.g., if something suddenly goes wrong and I spill some water, or burn myself. But
even without being aware of such things, in some sense I am aware that I am preparing my tea.
There is a certain level of action that not only describes best what I am doing, but to which I
am consciously attuned.
What’s the nature of this conscious attunement? Again, the idea is not that at every moment
I am fully attending to what I am doing. Indeed, I may be doing a number of different things
across the same span of time – making tea, thinking about my email, responding to my wife’s
(previous or ongoing) instructions about not making a mess. This may be distributed across
bouts of interim consciousness. Right now, I’m attending to the amount of water to put into the
kettle and asking my wife if she wants a cup. Setting the kettle on the stovetop, I start thinking
about that email as I get my cup from the cupboard. What action am I engaged in? If you ask
me, I’ll respond, “I’m making some tea,” rather than:
1 I’m exercising my neurons.
2 I’m moving my body thus and so.
3 I’m reaching and grasping.
4 I’m being careful not to make a mess.
5 I’m reconsidering the email I just sent.