The elusive experience of agency

Abstract

I here present some doubts about whether Mandik's (2010) proposed intermediacy and recurrence constraints are necessary and sufficient for agentive experience. I also argue that in order to vindicate the conclusion that agentive experience is an exclusively perceptual phenomenon (Prinz, 2007), it is not enough to show that the predictions produced by forward models of planned motor actions are conveyed by mock sensory signals. Rather, it must also be shown that the outputs of "comparator" mechanisms that compare these predictions against actual sensory feedback are also coded in a perceptual representational format.

Keywords: Action monitoring; Agency; Agentive experience; Comparators; Consciousness; Forward models; Motor control; Will.