The Mystery of Unconscious Action

​I was patting my Golden Doodle the other day, thinking about really nothing at all - just sort of daydreaming and then, as I put my coffee cup down and hearing/feeling the gulp of the swallow, it dawned on me that I didn’t remember even reaching for it. Or that I ached to even take a swig of it.  A 2 second old memory, that I couldn’t recall.  At all.  It’s the core of something ancient and unresolved in neuroscience and philosophy alike: the mystery of unconscious action.
 
I likely experienced what some cognitive scientists call an automatized behavior — a deeply ingrained action triggered by context, body memory, and environmental cues rather than conscious deliberation. My hand moved, but my awareness didn’t light up in time to register the decision. Like blinking, scratching, or turning off a light as you leave a room, my brain offloaded the task to what’s sometimes referred to as procedural memory or non-declarative cognition.
 
But here’s the kicker: this time, I noticed its absence. That moment of “wait, I don’t even remember wanting to do that” was me witnessing the lag between unconscious motor initiation and conscious reflection — something Benjamin Libet apparently (and famously) studied in the 1980s. He found that the brain begins preparing for action milliseconds before a person feels the will to act.
 
So maybe it’s not that I chose to sip my coffee - it’s that my body chose, and my consciousness showed up just in time to wonder why; a strange, flickering space between action and awareness.
 
That moment - hand already in motion, cup already lifted - feels like life slipped a scene past my internal narrator. Like some editor spliced in an unscripted frame of film. And it begs the question: Who’s really steering this thing?
 
Most of what we do - truly, the vast majority - never passes through conscious intention. We breathe, shift our weight, glance toward sounds, fidget with our shirt, all while our thoughts are elsewhere. And it’s not just background noise; your brain is constantly making decisions for you. It guesses your needs, weighs probabilities, and nudges your body toward outcomes you rarely reflect on. It’s efficient, elegant, and a little bit haunting.
 
I didn’t want the coffee in that instant. I was busy patting my dog, maybe not thinking at all.  But something in me - maybe the room’s light, the fading warmth of the mug, the time of day - knew it was time. And so it acted. And then I arrived to witness the aftermath and ask, “Why?”
 
What’s strange is that this lag doesn’t usually bother us. We live most of our lives in it. But once in a while, like now, it catches the light - and the illusion of authorship wobbles.
 
So maybe I’m not the captain of what I've been assuming all these years is MY ship.  Maybe I’m just the lookout, perched high in the crow’s nest, watching decisions made in the depths rise to the surface as motion, speech, or habit. And every now and then, we blink and say: Who just steered that?
 
There’s a version of you, let’s call it the Narrator, that walks with you believing it’s the author of your life. It thinks in language, reflects on choices, feels regret or pride, and strings moments into a coherent story. That’s the voice I hear right now, the one wondering why my hand lifted that mug without permission and the one who keeps interrupting me as I type this with all kinds of things I’m not interested in at the moment. In that one sentence alone, as I was typing it, the Narrator was talking a lot to me in my head:  I was thinking about work, I felt my sleeping cat near me stretch, I thought it cute in my peripheral, I then thought it would be fun to type about, as I’m already typing, while various parts of my body also twitch, move, grab, reach etc. etc. 
 
But beneath the Narrator is a vast, ancient architecture — a silent, signal-processing cathedral of flesh and time. It’s built from layers: the brainstem keeping me breathing, the limbic system managing fear and pleasure, the basal ganglia triggering habits. All of it is older than "me" or “you.” And none of it requires consciousness to act.  It just does.  Even as we sleep.  
 
Here’s the unsettling part: Neuroscience is leaning closer to the idea that conscious will is often a post-hoc justification - meaning that you don’t decide what to do and then act, but rather, you act… and then decide that you decided. You rationalize, after the fact, why it “made sense” to reach for the coffee (or whatever tasks we do). But the act was already underway before you knew it.
 
This gap, between intention and action, is measurable. In the Libet experiments, the brain’s motor cortex showed readiness to move hundreds of milliseconds before the subjects reported deciding to move. That’s not a minor lag. That’s what you call a ghost in the machine - it's hard to catch.
 
So who - or what - is doing the choosing?
 
One possibility: consciousness isn’t the driver, but the witness. It’s not the CEO of the brain; it’s the PR department. It spins a story out of chaos, keeping us sane by giving the illusion of unity. It says, I chose that, even when it didn’t. Because the alternative, that we are all a storm of impulses dressed up in stories,  is hard to bear.
 
Another possibility: consciousness emerges only at key thresholds, when competing impulses demand arbitration. When the body can’t decide - fight or flee, speak or stay silent, then the Narrator is summoned. In this view, free will is rare and precious. Not gone, but expensive, metabolically speaking, so the brain uses it sparingly.
 
Now here’s the real interesting bit: your awareness of the absence of intention may be one of the clearest signs that consciousness isn’t always in control. When you notice the slip, you’re seeing behind the curtain - catching the machinery mid-spin.  That's what happened when I grabbed the coffee and took a swig and put it back.
 
It’s dizzying to think about, to realize that most of “you” operates in the dark. But maybe that’s not something to fear. Maybe it’s like deep space: vast, unknowable, and yet, from time to time, it reflects light.
 
And then it hits me.  It always hits me….that according to science, I’m supposed to believe all this complexity and illusion came from and out of nowhere. From 13.8 billion year old quarks to a website while munching on snacks?  Bodies, mind, consciousness – the gatekeepers of the science world will say - just add air, water and sun – that’s it. No mystery at all.  I mean really?  
 
This entire cathedral of biology - cells that remember, nerves that fire in perfect sequence, eyes that decode photons, hands that reach for cups without conscious permission - and we’re told it’s all just random mutation filtered by survival odds?
 
It’s not that evolution is wrong - the evidence is mountainous. But evolution as an explanation for meaning? For the emergence of self, of inner voice, of your quiet awareness watching your own hand move when you didn't summon it to move? That feels like trying to explain Beethoven by rattling off the chemistry of wood and string.
 
You look at a single synapse — a microscopic gap between neurons — and inside that space is more complexity than a city. Electrical potential, neurotransmitters, ion channels, all functioning like a fine tuned orchestra. Billions of them. And each atom of the trillions we are made of…….enough locked energy inside to LEVEL a city.  Yet they hum in peace holding everything together.  And somehow, out of all that noise, you show up. A self.  A soul, if we still dare to use that word.
 
And it’s not even just biology. It’s timing. If the Earth forms a little closer to the sun, you’re vapor. A little farther, you’re ice. If a few particles didn’t annihilate their twins in the early universe, there’d be no atoms at all. No carbon. No coffee cups. No dogs. No you.
 
So I feel it’s right to balk at “stupid luck.” Because stupid luck doesn’t build Shakespeare, or jazz, or grief, or the fact that you can notice your own noticing.
 
Maybe we’ll never explain this in terms that satisfy both the heart and the equations. Maybe consciousness - this flicker of awareness inside a meat body on a dying planet - is the universe’s way of looking back on itself. Or maybe it’s just an accident so exquisite that we can’t help but call it sacred.