Consciousness and Action5 ConclusionEpiphenomenalism is the idea, explicated by Shadworth Holloway Hodgson in 1870, that in regard
to action, the presence of consciousness doesn’t matter, since it plays no causal role. One can think
of this in terms that place neural events in charge of action: neural events form an autonomous
causal chain that is independent of any accompanying conscious mental states. The epiphenomenal-
ist holds that neural events cause bodily movement and consciousness, but consciousness cannot
cause neural events or bodily movement. Consciousness is thus incapable of having any effect on
the nervous system. We could, for example, build a non-conscious robot that would prepare my tea,
and it is also possible that aspects of my initial motivation, e.g., my thirst, are themselves reducible to
non-conscious processes that launch the larger action process. Consciousness, on this view, may keep
us informed about what is going on in broad and general terms, and it can act as a “dormant moni-
tor” ( Jeannerod 2003: 162), allowing us to know what we are doing, but it plays no role in the causal
processes that move or motivate us. We, as conscious animals, are seemingly just along for the ride.
In contrast to this epiphenomenal view, I’ve suggested that in a variety of contexts, con-
sciousness prior to action is motivating for action; conscious attunement to events or to other
people in the environment during action may have an effect on action; and even conscious-
ness after action may redefine what that action is. More generally, the extent to which con-
sciousness before, during, and after action involves intentionality – that is, to the extent that
consciousness is directed to the world, or to the action itself – whether in terms of intentional
planning, or in terms of a marginal perceptual monitoring of what one is doing, or in terms
of retrospective evaluation, consciousness may motivate, or guide, or interpret action in a
way that makes the action what it is. In these regards, it is difficult to regard consciousness as
epiphenomenal.
AcknowledgementsResearch on this chapter was supported by the author’s Anneliese Maier Research Award from
the Humboldt Foundation, and by an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant, Minds in
Skilled Performance (DP170102987).
Notes1 But see Schurger, Sitt and Dehaene (2012) for a dissenting discussion on the nature of the readiness
potential.
2 In addition, some comparator models include the idea that there is a functional element in the system
that counts as an intention; this subpersonal intention is compared to efference copy or sensory input
from the movement to facilitate motor control (e.g., Frith 1992; Wolpert and Flanagan 2001).
3 Here I ignore the fact that in asking the subjects to report on their experience Daprati et al. are intro-
ducing a judgment about agency over and above SA. The same applies to the experiment by Farrer and
Frith (2002), discussed below. In both cases, the assumption is simply that the judgment of agency is a
veridical report on the sense of agency. This is a complication Grünbaum does not discuss.
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