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Volition and the Function of Consciousness Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers Volume 26 Issue 5 Article 6 12-1-2009 Volition and the Function of Consciousness Hakwan Lau Follow this and additional works at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy Recommended Citation Lau, Hakwan (2009) "Volition and the Function of Consciousness," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 26 : Iss. 5 , Article 6. DOI: 10.5840/faithphil200926554 Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol26/iss5/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers by an authorized editor of ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. VOLITION AND THE FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS Hakwan Lau People have intuitively assumed that many acts of volition are not influenced by unconscious information. However, the available evidence suggests that under suitable conditions, unconscious information can influence behavior and the underlying neural mechanisms. One possibility is that stimuli that are consciously perceived tend to yield strong signals in the brain, and this makes us think that consciousness has the function of sending such strong signals. However, if we could create conditions where the stimuli could produce strong signals but not the conscious experience of perception, perhaps we would find that such stimuli are just as effective in influencing volitional behavior. Introduction Many acts of volition seem to require conscious effort. We consciously initiate spontaneous motor movements. We cancel planned actions at will. We deliberately avoid particular actions. We intentionally shift our action plans in order to pursue different goals. Sometimes, theorists say, these are the functions of consciousness, as if evolution has equipped us with the gift of consciousness just to perform these acts. Without conscious- ness, presumably, we would only be able to perform much simpler actions that are no more sophisticated than embellished reflexes. In this paper I will review available evidence to see if these intuitive claims are empirically supported. Recent studies in cognitive neurosci- ence suggest that many of these complex processes can actually be per- formed without consciousness. Or at least, many of them can be directly influenced by unconscious information. This calls into question what is the true function of consciousness, if not to enable us to deliberate over our actions. I will end by discussing what is logically required for an ex- periment to demonstrate the true function of consciousness. 1. Spontaneous Motor Initiation Motor actions that are made not in immediate or direct response to exter- nal stimuli can be said to be spontaneously initiated. These are also some- times called self-paced or self-generated actions. For instance, one may choose to casually flex one’s wrist while sitting in a dark room, out of one’s own free choice and timing, not to react to anything in particular. Some philosophers have argued that in cases like that, it should seem obvious FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY Vol. 26 No. 5 Special Issue 2009 537 All rights reserved 538 Faith and Philosophy that the action is caused by one’s conscious intention.1 Whereas one may argue that fast reactions to external stimuli may be driven by unconscious reflex (e.g., a runner leaping forward upon hearing the starting whistle), spontaneous actions do not seem to have any immediate cause but the conscious intention itself. However, it has been shown that there is preparatory activity in the brain that starts at as early as 1–2 seconds before spontaneous actions are executed. This piece of one of the most perplexing findings in cognitive neuroscience was originally reported by Kornhuber and Deecke in the 1960s.2 They placed electrodes on the scalp to measure electroencephalog- raphy (EEG) while subjects made spontaneous movements at their own Figure 1. A typical recording of the readiness potential (RP) preceding spontane- ous movements. The RP is usually recorded at the top of the scalp, above medial frontal premotor areas. It gradually ramps up, beginning about 1–2 seconds before movement and peaking around the time of movement execution. Figure edited and adapted from Haggard and Eimer, 1999. timing. The EEG data that were time-locked to the point of motor execu- tion (as measured by muscle contraction indicated by electromyography, EMG) were averaged over many trials, which produced an event-related potential (ERP) known as the bereitschaftspotential (BP) or readiness po- tential (RP). The readiness potential is slowly rising, peaking at around the point of action execution and starting from 1–2 seconds before that (see Fig. 1). The readiness potential is most pronounced at electrodes near the vertex (Cz in the EEG coordinate system), which is directly above the medial premotor areas (including the supplementary motor area, SMA, 1J. R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 2H. Kornhuber, and L. Deecke, “Hirnpotentialänderungen bei Willkurbewegungen und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschaftspotential und reafferente Potentiale,“ Pflügers Archive 284 (1965), pp. 1–17. VOLITION AND THE FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 539 pre-supplementary motor area, pre-SMA, and the cingulate motor areas below them). It is generally believed that one major source of the readi- ness potential lies in the medial premotor areas.3 The demonstration of the readiness potential calls into question wheth- er spontaneous movements are really caused by the preceding conscious intentions. Intuitively, conscious intentions seem to cause motor actions almost immediately—it seems to take much less time than 1–2 seconds. This could mean that the brain starts to prepare for the actions way before we consciously initiate them. Benjamin Libet and colleagues empirically studied the timing of the conscious intention in relation to the readiness potential and the action.4 To measure the onset of conscious intention, he invented a creative but controversial paradigm which is sometimes called the “Libet clock para- digm.” In those studies, subjects watched a dot revolving around a clock face at a speed of 2.56 second per cycle, while they flexed their wrist spon- taneously (see Fig. 2). After the action was finished, subjects were required to report the location of the dot when they “first felt the urge” to produce the action, i.e., the onset of intention. The subjects might say it was at 3 Figure 2. The Libet clock paradigm. A. The subject views a dot rotating slowly (2.56 seconds per cycle) around a clock face and waits for an urge to move to arise spontaneously. When the urge arrives, the subject makes a movement (e.g. a key press). B. After making the movement, the subject estimates the earliest time at which the intention to move was experienced. To carry out this time estimate, the subject moves the dot to the position on the clock face corresponding to the time when intention was first felt. In a common control condition, the subject uses the clock to estimate the time of movement rather than the onset of intention. Figure edited and adapted from Lau et al., 2007. 3T. Ball et al., “The Role of Higher-order Motor Areas in Voluntary Movement as Re- vealed by High-resolution EEG and fMRI,” NeuroImage 10 (1999), pp. 682–694. M. Erdler et al., “Supplementary Motor Area Activation Preceding Voluntary Movement Is Detectable with a Whole-Scalp Magnetoencephalography System,” NeuroImage 11 (2000), pp. 697–707. F. Weilke et al., “Time-resolved fMRI of Activation Patterns in M1 and SMA During Complex Voluntary Movement,” Journal of Neurophysiology 85 (2001), pp. 1858–1863. R. Cunnington, C. Windischberger, L. Deecke, and E. Moser, ”The Preparation and Readiness for Voluntary Movement: A High-field Event-related fMRI Study of the Bereitschafts-BOLD Response,” NeuroImage 20 (2003), pp. 404–412. 4B. Libet, E. W. Wright, and C. A. Gleason, ”Preparation- or Intention-to-act, in Relation to Pre-event Potentials Recorded at the Vertex,” Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiol- ogy 56 (1983), pp. 367–372. 540 Faith and Philosophy o’clock or 4 o’clock position when they first felt the intention, for instance. This way the subjects could time and report the onset of their intention, and the experimenter could then work out actually when the action was produced, and hence the temporal distance between the two. Libet and colleagues reported that subjects on average report the onset of intention to be about 250 ms before major execution. Many people feel uncomfortable with the fact that the onset of the readiness potential seems to be so much earlier than the onset of inten- tion, and some have tried to explain away the gap. Libet and colleagues have tried to study the onset of the readiness potential more carefully, dis- carding trials which might have been “contaminated” by pre-planning of action well before the action, as reported by the subjects. By only looking at the trials where the actions were supposed to be genuinely spontane- ous, Libet and colleagues reported that the onset of the readiness poten- tial is only about 500 ms before action execution.5 However, this is still clearly earlier than the reported onset of intention. And by discarding so many trials, it may be that the analysis just lacked the power to detect an earlier onset. Some have argued that the onset of readiness potential might be an ar- tifact due to the averaging needed to produce the ERP.6 However, Romo and Schultz have made recordings from neurons in the medial premo- tor areas while monkeys made self-paced movements.7 It was found that these neurons in fact fired as early as 2.6 seconds before movement onset.
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