Abstract

In his article “On the Necessity of Bodily Awareness for Bodily Action” in this volume of Psyche Hong Yu Wong challenges the claim that bodily awareness is a necessary precondition for being able to voluntarily act with one’s body parts . Wong discusses empirical findings from studies of deafferented patients, brain-computer interfaces and the automaticity of skilled movements, which constitute prima facie counterexamples against a strong version of the necessity thesis. While I consider Wong’s arguments as generally convincing, in this commentary I put them in the wider context of psychological theories stressing the role of distal action effectsin the control of voluntary action and the experience of agency. Moreover, I point to an ambiguity between first- and third-person readings of the necessity thesis