Agency and Self-Awareness
August 27, 1992
Anthony Marcel
Abstract All four quotations cited above connect action and self, or self consciousness, and as such are in a long tradition. But the first and second pairs pull in opposite I am the author of this chapter in that I wrote it. However, certain other people are part agents of it, in that they played causal roles in its production and its content, and therefore must take partial responsibility,...
Agency and Self-Awareness
August 27, 1992
Michael Lewis
Abstract The concept of agency implies an active organism, one who desires, one who makes plans, carries out actions, and compares their actions to their desires. Such a concept of agency requires consciousness. There is little question that in adults, such conscious processes exist. The question is, from a developmental perspective when do they arise? In our work on the development of...
Agency and Self-Awareness
August 27, 1992
Naomi Eilan, Johannes Roessler
Abstract In the mid-1980s Libet conducted a series of experiments which, he argued, showed that we are aware of intentions to act only after the brain area responsible for initiating acting has already been activated. He, and others, took these experiments to show that our brain ‘decides’ on courses of action independently of our consciousness, where this in turn threatens the idea of free...
Agency and Self-Awareness
August 27, 1992
Marc Jeannerod
Abstract The mutual relationships of action to consciousness are complex and far from unequivocal. We execute many of our daily actions unconsciously; conversely, we can consciously simulate or imagine actions we do not execute. This vast domain of research, motor cognition, is central to the study, not only of action itself (how it is planned, prepared, and finally executed), but also of how...