Penumbra,
The first article gives a brief explanation of Libet's work:
Benjamin Libet - neurophysiologist studied the nature of free will - SFGate
This article refers to mistaken intentions or confabulated intentions in brain damaged patients, although this also occurs under different circumstances in normal brains as well, in which case it is called choice blindness:
Split Brain Studies: One Mind per Hemisphere
Choice blindness:
Using choice blindness to study decision making and introspection
There are many other relevant examples on related material in Daniel Wegner's
Illusion of Conscious Will. It is very difficult to know what our own intentions are, much less assign causality to them. I think that mechanisms in the brain which are not voluntary are responsible for both intention and act rather than an intention causing an act.
I do not claim to understand consciousness. It is a new field, and we know very little. But I don't see how it could be a causal agency.
Our own subjective perceptions of intention are so flawed and unreliable that I have a hard time believing that the perception of intention is actually the cause of any action.
Yes, I have. I am just not convinced that our intentions are actually causal agents when humans so easily confabulate them and in some circumstances can be fooled into thinking they performed an action which was caused by an external agent or vice versa.
It may be that consciousness plays a role in volition. I don't know. One must be careful with such a claim because it often borders on dualism. But I am not convinced that our sense of will is causal. It is likely just a prediction of what the organism is going to do and may come from an underlying mechanism that is actually the "cause," if you will, of both the perceived intention and action. That is why the perception of free will is increased when an action follows through with the intention, but when this is not the case, the sense of free will decreases. Our sense of intention is not objective at all.