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The feeling of agency hypothesis

a critique

Thor Grünbaum

pp. 3313-3337

Abstract

A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency (the FoA-hypothesis). An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology (the simple hypothesis). In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not only to scrutinize the FoA-hypothesis and data supposed to support it; it is equally to argue that experimentalists supporting the FoA-hypothesis fail to establish that the experimental outcomes are more probable given the FoA-hypothesis than given the simpler hypothesis.

Publication details

Published in:

Solé Albert, Hoefer Carl (2015) Space-time and the wave function. Synthese 192 (10).

Pages: 3313-3337

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0704-6

Full citation:

Grünbaum Thor (2015) „The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique“. Synthese 192 (10), 3313–3337.