Basal ganglia / striatum, SMA / pre-SMA, Dorsal premotor cortex, Premotor cortex, Posterior parietal cortex, dACC / midcingulate cortex, Sensory cortex / sensory systems, Neuromodulatory systems, Substantia nigra dopaminergic system, Locus coeruleus / noradrenergic system
In plain language
A person can genuinely want to act, know what to do, and have the ability to do it while the action still does not begin. When the action finally starts, the fact that it happened does not, by itself, explain what caused the transition.
The paper also separates doing something from noticing that you are doing it. Awareness of an ongoing action is another observation; it does not automatically tell us when the action began or why it began.
Abstract
People can want to act, know what to do, and remain capable of doing it while the action still does not occur. When action finally begins, it is tempting to treat onset as evidence for a favored internal mechanism, and to treat awareness of acting as evidence about what caused the onset. This paper argues that those substitutions are not licensed. Prior frameworks already decompose intention, action selection and timing, inhibition, and the prospective and retrospective sources of agency. The proposed contribution is narrower: a cross-literature identification architecture that keeps intention evidence, action-specific realization, causal-provenance evidence, and awareness/origin evidence from substituting for one another. Behavioral realization is defined by a predeclared action-specific criterion, while the causal route to that criterion remains a separate empirical question. Changes in realization can occur without a manipulation supplying a new external action identity, but that observation alone cannot establish that latent internal action content remained unchanged. Likewise, explicit awareness may precede, accompany, or follow portions of action, but any downstream causal role requires awareness-specific evidence rather than a generic monitoring effect. The framework does not propose a new mechanism or universal stage model; it specifies what observations do and do not identify when 'I want to do this' becomes 'I am doing this.'
Why it matters
We often compress wanting, starting, and noticing into one explanation. That can make a visible action seem to prove which internal process caused it, even when several routes could produce the same behavior.
WhatchyaDoin proposes a common identification audit across intention, action-specific realization, causal provenance, and awareness. Its contribution is a disciplined way to ask what an observation establishes, without proposing a new action mechanism or universal sequence of consciousness.