# Narrative Ownership After Activation **Entity class:** Authorial agency concept **Domain:** Agency / Decision-Making / Self-Narration **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed synthesis with contested experimental interpretation **Primary source article:** [[articles/We Were the Inference Machines First|The Inversion: We Were the Inference Machines First]] **Collections:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] · [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] --- ## Definition **Narrative Ownership After Activation** names the process by which a conscious self-model experiences, claims, and explains an action after some of its enabling neural, bodily, learned, and situational causes are already active. The narrative can become causally important by shaping inhibition, revision, memory, accountability, and future policy even when it lacks privileged access to the action's full origin. ## Experimental basis and dispute Benjamin Libet's readiness-potential experiments placed average premovement neural activity before reported awareness of an urge to move. Later work gave that buildup alternative interpretations, including stochastic accumulation toward a movement threshold. The experimental record therefore supports distributed and temporally layered agency more securely than a single decisive timestamp for “the decision.” Choice-blindness experiments add a separate constraint: participants sometimes accepted manipulated outcomes and supplied reasons for choices they had not made. This demonstrates limits on introspective access and the constructive role of explanation. ## Agency model - **Activation:** bodily, perceptual, learned, and situational processes begin biasing an action. - **Selection:** competing tendencies accumulate, inhibit, or cross an action threshold. - **Ownership:** the self-model recognizes the action as its own. - **Narration:** reasons organize the act into a socially and temporally coherent account. - **Recursion:** the account changes memory, future expectations, norms, and later choices. Agency remains real as a distributed regulatory capacity. Its location is the organized process rather than an isolated inner initiator. ## Relationships - **Self-model:** [[wiki/Recursive Self-Model|Recursive Self-Model]]. - **Temporal identity:** [[wiki/Continuity Fiction|Continuity Fiction]]. - **General architecture:** [[wiki/Recursive Binding Problem|Recursive Binding Problem]]. - **Presented experience:** [[wiki/Rendered Interface State|Rendered Interface State]]. - **Canonical agency nodes:** [[wiki/Agency|Agency]] and [[wiki/Free Will|Free Will]]. - **Article thesis:** [[wiki/Inference Machine Inversion|Inference Machine Inversion]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [[articles/We Were the Inference Machines First|The Inversion: We Were the Inference Machines First]] — source of the term and its layered-agency synthesis. - [Schurger, Sitt, and Dehaene, “An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement” (2012)](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22869750/) — stochastic-accumulator interpretation of readiness potential. - [Johansson et al., “Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task” (2005)](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16210542/) — original choice-blindness report.