Action Without Obvious Choice

Hold up your fist and extend your index finger.

Do it again.

When I do this, I find no moment in which several possibilities appear and I choose one of them.

What would the possibilities even be? Every possible moment at which I might move?

I simply extend the finger.

Still, it seems very clearly to be my doing.

It is quite different from someone else forcefully extending my finger. It is also different from my finger moving in a sudden involuntary jerk.

Whatever distinguishes these cases, an observable act of choosing does not seem necessary.

After a run, I take a bottle of water and unscrew it while continuing a conversation. I may barely notice what my hands are doing. There is no weighing of possibilities. No question appears. I do not choose between unscrewing the bottle and doing something else.

I simply unscrew it and drink.

Yet afterwards I would have little difficulty saying that I opened the bottle. The action can be mine without becoming an object of deliberation while I perform it.

More complicated movements can work in much the same way. When practising a motor activity, movements that initially require attention can become increasingly fluent. At some point, deliberately controlling every part may make the activity worse.

In rope flow, for example, one movement can lead into another without my first choosing the next figure. A pattern emerges, like in musical improvisation. I can interrupt it or change direction. I can begin again.

But while it is happening, much of what I am doing is not preceded by a choice between explicit possibilities. Often I find myself monitoring what happens more than deciding each movement.

Still, the movement remains recognizably mine.

The exact experience probably differs between people.

It is enough here that the phenomenon occurs.

Walking, speaking, typing, playing an instrument, and many movements in sport can proceed without a sequence of choices corresponding to every movement performed. Many of these activities were once learned deliberately. They may still be interruptible or redirectable, and often depend on preparation and training.

Yet at the moment of action, much of the doing unfolds without an identifiable choice.

Choice seems unable to mark the boundary of our doing.

Some things we choose are clearly our doing.

But some things that are clearly our doing do not seem to involve choice at all.

We began with the possibility that choice might mark the boundary of our doing.

It does not seem to.

But where choice and doing come apart, we learn something about what such a boundary would have to account for.