ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that conscious intentions are central to the cognitive control of activity, in contrast to the view that the experience of conscious control is an illusion. It suggests that instantiating a goal to form a conscious intention serves the information-processing function of establishing a procedural frame of reference that organizes mental activity. The chapter provides support for the predictions derived from the cospecification hypothesis. The cospecification hypothesis suggests that the content of a conscious intention represents the self as achieving an outcome by performing an operation on an object. For example, a conscious intention to add two digits represents the self as performing a calculation on particular tokens of those digits. The representation of an outcome that satisfies a conscious intention will thus be structurally very similar to the representation of the intention.
