Automaticity Does Not Settle the Question of Agency
Much of what keeps us alive does not wait for conscious instruction. Digestion proceeds. Heart rate is regulated. Familiar movements can become highly automatic, and habits can begin before deliberate reflection catches up with them.
From there it is tempting to make a much larger conclusion: if so much is automatic, perhaps everything is automatic and agency is an illusion. The conclusion does not follow that easily.
There are different questions inside an action: whether to act, what to do, when to do it, and how we experience ourselves as controlling the result. Automatic processes and deliberate processes can coexist within the same nervous system.
That does not prove a particular theory of free will. It also does not establish that agency has been disproved. The philosophical debate asks what counts as freedom, what kind of causation matters, how reasons participate in action, and what responsibility requires. Those questions remain contested.
A more precise inquiry is available without settling them. Which parts of this action are automatic? Where does deliberation enter? What changes when options are represented, compared, inhibited, or selected? How reliable is my felt sense that I authored what just happened?
Automaticity does not release us from responsibility, and agency does not mean every process is consciously controlled. Both belong in the picture. The tension between them is the inquiry.