Performance monitoring reconciles intentional reasons with neural causes

Abstract

Endorsing the conceptual clarity of Nachev and Hacker, we offer an alternative perspective on intention and action that focuses on consequences instead of the antecedents of action. We propose that given many-to-one mapping of brain states to body movements, the brain processes that monitor action consequences offer a reconciliation of intentional reasons with neural causes. This proposal offers an enriched compatibilist position providing useful leverage on questions of responsibility and culpability.

The neural antecedents to voluntary action: Response to commentaries

“…In confining ourselves to the antecedents here we do not wish to imply contemporaneous or subsequent neural aspects are immaterial. On the contrary, we wish to dissolve what we argue is mostly incoherent speculation about the antecedents precisely so as to shift attention to the later aspects Schall and Garr discuss (Schall & Garr, 2014 ). That this is necessary is easily seen from the disproportionate space discussion of the antecedents takes up in the literature: The most cited papers are either Libet’s or employ some variant of his flawed behavioral paradigm.…”

“…The notion of goals naturally presupposes a way of selecting one goal over another. This “executive” aspect, rightly emphasized by Schall and Garr ( 2014 ), is constitutive of two-way control, and therefore a feature of all intentional actions, not only complex ones, indeed, of all that can bear the name of action, as opposed to mere bodily movement. When a subject in a psychophysical experiment is engaged in something simple, say horizontal saccades in response to arrow cues at fixation, “executive control” is not suspended, for he may at any time do something else of arbitrary complexity.…”