Jake Gavenas

This chapter discusses contemporary perspectives on the role of consciousness in decision-making and action production. Everyday experience and common sense suggest that the subjective experience of will causes overt movement. But some neuroscientific research seems to provide evidence against this notion, with some claiming consciousness has no causal role in decision-making and action. Scientific perspectives that retain a role for consciousness vary across at least two dimensions. First, perspectives differ in whether consciousness has an active, online, immediate role in producing action (proximal) or a delayed, modulatory role—perhaps related to learning or planning (distal). Second, perspectives differ in whether consciousness itself generates actions or decisions or modulates them by inhibiting or vetoing decisions and actions generated by unconscious processes. These two dimensions define four quadrants, each with predictions about how action-related neural mechanisms relate to consciousness. The chapter places contemporary action-oriented theories of consciousness into these quadrants.