This paper offers a phenomenological description of how conscious decision episodes are structured when we experience ourselves as facing a live choice and “taking a stand.” Drawing on Husserl’s object–horizon structure, Gurwitsch’s theme/field/margin, and James’s focus/fringe, I argue that such episodes instantiate an i-structure: a center–horizon pattern in which (i) a minimal focal node represents “this situation” as a unified whole and (ii) a surrounding field or horizon encodes articulated considerations, constraints, and practical possibilities. Over this structure, two gradients of determinacy can be discerned: identity-determinacy (how settled “what this is” is), increasing toward the center, and affordance-determinacy (how settled “what I can still do” is), increasing toward the horizon or periphery. In live decisions, there is a phase in which the situation is firmly experienced as “this decision now,” yet more than one option remains experientially live. I call the transition from such a phase to settled commitment an authored resolution: an instance of “taking a stand” that is not mandated by reasons alone, not felt as random or alien, and experienced as “my doing.” I suggest that this structural map should be acceptable to both compatibilist and libertarian accounts of agential sourcehood and that making the experiential and structural shape of “up-to-me” decision episodes more explicit helps clarify what is at issue when we say that agents “author” their commitments.
A 2026 study studied this question.