## 3 Are the Neural Processes That Result in Voluntary Actions Conscious?
### Experimental Evidence on the Relationship of Consciousness to Action  
Essentially all of the experimental evidence summarised here [70; 71; 73; 74; 75; 76; 77; 78] suggests that people are not conscious of exactly when they initiate voluntary actions--or indeed of why, or even whether they initiated the action at all. For example, when subjects were instructed to stop a moving cursor [79] or move a pair of rubber hands [80] whenever they felt like it, they were significantly unsure whether they or the experimenter had caused any particular stop or movement. The confluence of evidence in this regard suggests that the initiation and control of voluntary actions is not accessible to consciousness, and that our awareness about such matters comes largely from any sensory feedback that might result from our actions. With regard to the rationale behind our behavior, we readily come up with plausible explanations of why we did things, but these are actually only inferences, which are about as accurate as our inferences about why someone else did what they did. Figure 3: Laminar profile of LFPs in auditory cortex of awake monkeys (after [81]). Figure 2: Schematic diagram of proposed electromagnetic (EM) field shapes characterising (**A**) conscious and (**B**) unconscious fields. Roman numerals indicate cortical layers: Layer I is at the surface of the cortex (After [71]). This represents a snapshot of one instant in time: the pattern is assumed to change on a time scale concomitant with the rise and fall of the conscious experience, as in the right hand panel of Figure 3.  
Although the experimental evidence leading to these conclusions is strong, the conclusions themselves are sufficiently unpalatable that a number of objections to them have been raised. For example, various of the philosophers contributing to [76] argue that the relevant experiments should be ignored because (a) they put people in abnormal situations (as indeed do all experiments), or (b) they show that some but not ALL actions are initiated unconsciously (the problem of induction has always been tricky), or (c) we do not yet know enough about the neurophysiology of action to interpret the experimental evidence properly (an argument that would carry more force if its author did not then conclude that enough is already known to support the prescientific intuition that consciousness does cause action). In any case, both psychological experiments on the initiation and control of voluntary actions and direct stimulation of the motor cortex of awake neurosurgical patients combine to support the conclusion that most of the processing underpinning the initiation of actions is unconscious--and more radically, that consciousness usually does not accompany either the initiation or the control of voluntary actions at all. From the point of view of the proposal that conscious experiences are patterned electromagnetic fields, this again suggests that it should be instructive to ask what anatomical feature distinguishes motor areas of cortex. As we have just seen, the motor areas of cortex do not produce conscious experiences, while sensory areas of cortex do. Hence, any major anatomical difference between motor and sensory areas might provide an important clue as to the structural differences between conscious and unconscious EM fields. Distinguishing Anatomical Feature of Motor Cortex and Predicted Characteristics of Conscious vs. Unconscious Fields  
The anatomical feature distinguishing motor areas of the neocortex from non-motor areas is the lack of a Layer 4. This led [71] to the prediction that the three-dimensional LFP pattern that is produced by cortico-cortical synapses on motor cortical pyramidal cells might differ from that which is produced by cortico-cortical synapses on sensory pyramidal cells as shown in Figure 2.  
Figure 2A shows a surface layer of negative-going potentials resulting from the action of feed-back synapses on the apical tuft of pyramidal cell dendrites, and two layers of positive-going potentials lower down in the radial direction.