Can motor or muscle actions actually be conscious?

Question

Of course I can think of performing actions, but all of that seems to be part of sensory feedback or memory. The implementation of how the action itself is done feels unconscious. I've also heard of a study saying we're aware of our voluntary actions after the start. And seeing as most of our CNS(edit: interneurons) is inhibitory neurons, it makes sense that consciousness is some sort of feedback mechanism rather than some "doer".

Answer 1

Motor control is pretty complicated; I'd say with a bit of hand-waving that it involves about 80-90% of your entire central nervous system (CNS): brain and spinal cord (of course that's not to say that "everything else" only has 10-20% of the brain to work with; there's a lot of overlap in sensory and motor systems!). Here's an online textbook on motor control that you might be interested in:

https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/kines531/chapter/what-are-some-of-the-complexities-involved-in-the-control-of-movement/

Consider one of the diagrams from this online book, borrowed from Purves' textbook Neuroscience:

(Figure originally from Neuroscience. (2010). (D. Purves, G. J. Augustine, D. Fitzpatrick, W. C. Hall, A.-S. Lamantia, J. O. Mcnamara, & S. M. Williams Eds. 4th ed.). Sunderland, Massachusetts U.S.A.: Sinauer Associates, Inc.)

We're still figuring out what exactly "consciousness" is, but most neuroscientists focus on the cerebral cortex as the place where consciousness happens, perhaps with some influence of the thalamus. All the other features on this diagram like the basal ganglia, cerebellum, brain stem, spinal cord are CNS areas that are absolutely critical for motor control but don't seem to involve conscious processing. Another page from the book talks about some of the motor deficits observed when there are problems with some of these areas.

The signals generated in premotor and even motor cortex that you are conscious of are more like a "plan" for an overall movement rather than the specific instructions. During development, connections between these various regions work to translate between the "plan" and the actual motor actions. This is a learning process; it works by starting from somewhat random connections and pruning them until the instruction produces the desired action. Conscious cognitive control of muscles would be very undesirable; you need to contract and relax dozens to hundreds of muscles to perform most actions. It's not as simple as reaching your arm out in front of you, when you do that you also need to shift muscle contractions throughout your whole trunk to prevent the change in balance from tipping you over.