Unconscious Volition

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Richard Rorty describes a distant planet inhabited by a community called the Antipodeans. The Antipodeans are very similar to humans; they have internal states, such as beliefs, desires, and headaches; they describe themselves as persons and think they are distinct from other animals because they can reason; they have art, literature, and all other accoutrements of culture. They differ from humans in that they claim that they do not have minds. When one asks them, for example, what it is like for them to feel the breeze or to see a red flower, they answer that sensations are merely physical states of the brain caused by objective properties in the world. According to the Antipodeans, psychological states do not have subjective aspects. In describing the Antipodeans, Rorty’s aim is not merely ethnographic; by characterizing them as very similar to humans, he wishes to show that our psychology and all its products can be accounted for without invocation of conscious mental states. His view is that humans in fact are Antipodeans. One need not go as far as Rorty to notice that consciousness, often treated as an indicator of the presence of mental states, has played an outsized role in a variety of debates in bioethics. Fischer and Truog (2017) rightly point out that there are intractable difficulties in identifying consciousness and in distinguishing it from unconsciousness, and that when it comes to offering life-prolonging treatment we ought not to rely on our limited abilities to determine whether an individual is conscious. Despite their skepticism about the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness, Fischer and Truog propose interactive capacity as one of the criteria by which we make decisions about who should receive life-prolonging treatment. Interactivity, according to them, rests on our ability for volitional behavior, which is the ability to process external stimuli and to react to them in a purposeful manner. Although they countenance that consciousness is not sufficient for volitional behavior, they maintain that it is necessary for it, that is, that volitional behavior is an indication of the presence of consciousness. I plan to show that there are reasons to doubt that volitional behavior always requires consciousness. If we take interactivity to require both the ability to process external stimuli, including commands or instruction, and the ability to respond to those, for instance, through action, then there is evidence that both those elements of interactive ability can be accomplished without consciousness. I begin by showing that purposeful behavior in response to instructions does not always require consciousness. Libet, Wright, and Gleason (1982) showed that voluntary action is preceded by unconscious preparatory motor activity. In an experiment, Libet, Wright, and Gleason (1982) asked participants to flick their wrist whenever they felt the urge to do so. Using electroencephalography (EEG), they showed that the movement of the wrist was preceded by preparatory activity in the brain. They called this burst of electrical activity in the scalp readiness potential. In a further study, Libet and colleagues (1983) demonstrated that the conscious intention to perform an action, what they called the first awareness of the wish to act, was also preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. In order to capture the awareness of the wish to act, Libet and his colleagues constructed an oscilloscope clock. The participants were told to look at the center of the clock. For each voluntary wrist flexion, the subjects were asked to indicate where the moving spot on the clock was located when they first experienced the conscious intention to move their wrist. This procedure was intended to capture the time the subjects had experienced awareness of the wish to act (Libet et al. 1983). In this study, as in the previous one, there was a lag between the muscular activity in the wrist and readiness potential, but there was also a delay between the awareness of the wish to act and readiness potential. The unconscious preparatory brain activity preceded the conscious intention to perform the action. Libet (1999) hypothesized that despite the role of the unconscious brain activation in volitional behavior, the conscious will to act would be required to determine the ultimate choice of action. This contention has been proven wrong. Contemporary brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been used to demonstrate that that the content of the decision is also made unconsciously and heralds the conscious awareness of the decision to move. In a study by Soon and colleagues (2008), participants were asked to fixate on the center of the computer screen as a stream of letters was presented to them. They were asked to press one of two buttons using either their left or right index fingers at any point they wished to do so. To capture conscious intent, Soon and