The Phenomenology of Agency and the Libet Results

This chapter focuses on the phenomenal character of agentive experience-i.e., what it is like to experience oneself as the conscious author of one's behavior. Experiences with this distinctive kind of "what-it's-like-ness," have representational content-i.e., they represent oneself, to oneself, as willfully generating one's actions. This chapter argues that the representational content of act-commencement experience, as determined by the phenomenal character of such experience, is quite compatible with the possibility that action-triggering neural activity in the motor cortex is already occurring at a point in time prior to the onset of the experience of conscious act-commencement; hence, even if one were to grant that the work of Libet and others really does establish that the acts experienced as willfully produced are causally initiated by brain-events that occur prior to the experienced onset of act-commencement, this presumptive fact would not show that the experience of conscious will is an illusion.