AUTHOR=Carruthers Glenn TITLE=What makes us conscious of our own agency? And why the conscious versus unconscious representation distinction matters JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2014 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00434 DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2014.00434 ISSN=1662-5161 ABSTRACT=
Existing accounts of the sense of agency tend to focus on the proximal causal history of the feeling. That is, they explain the sense of agency by describing the cognitive mechanism that causes the sense of agency to be elicited. However, it is possible to elicit an unconscious representation of one’s own agency that plays a different role in a cognitive system. I use the “occasionality problem” to suggest that taking this distinction seriously has potential theoretical pay-offs for this reason. We are faced, then, with a need to distinguish instances of the representation of one’s own agency in which the subject is aware of their sense of own agency from instances in which they are not. This corresponds to a specific instance of what Dennett calls the “Hard Question”: once the representation is elicited,