conscious automatism en · NOUN
Etymology
From conscious + automatism. Coined by physician and author w: in 1876.
Meanings
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(archaic, uncountable) Synonym of epiphenomenalism
Now, this theory of conscious automatism is not merely a legitimate outcome of the theory that nervous changes are the causes of mental changes, but it is logically the only possible outcome. Nor do I see any way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of physiology. If we persist in regarding the association between brain and thought exclusively from a physiological point of view, we must of necessity be materialists.
1896, George John Romanes, Mind and Motion and Monism, new edition, London; New York; Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., page 19:[…] and in that case even proud man's consciousness is no more a cause of his actions than the flash is the cause of the explosion of which it is a concomitant. A strange conclusion seems to come from this theory of Conscious Automatism, however the “Automatists” themselves may be able to evade it.
1879, J. Whiteley, “Machinery and Morals”, in Paper for the Times on Religion, Ethics and Conduct, volume I, London: E. W. Allen, page 25:The theory of human automatism that best captured the Victorian imagination was Thomas Huxley’s conscious automatism. Huxley argued, to great notoriety at the 1874 meeting of the British Association of Science, that humans are automata. According to Huxley, an inefficacious consciousness takes itself to be in control, when in reality it merely accompanies the automatic, unconscious production of behavior. That is, all human behavior is automatic.
2024 March 15, Suzy Anger, Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; New Dehli; Singapore: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 5: