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#31
10-18-2007, 11:18 PM
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Re: The illusion of agency/intent
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[ QUOTE ] The researchers showed that people performed certain motor actions before they were consciously aware of the intention to do so. [/ QUOTE ] This is the crux of the question. The fact that motor actions can be initiated prior to the actor being aware of the intention to act does not mean that prior intention does not exist. [/ QUOTE ] The model of volition and agency this study assumes is too simple. Clearly we can have beliefs, for example, that are dispositional in nature and so not occurrent. Nor do all of our actions have to be explained on the basis of conscious thoughts, as in occurrent thoughts that are being entertained at the moment of action. Nor can we even consciously recall having any accompanying thoughts with respect to some actions--like when we drive to work on 'auto-pilot' and can't recall taking a right turn at Elm Street and then getting onto the freeway, even though we know we did. In fact, the vast majority of our actions occur without any accompanying thoughts like "Now I will open the door, now I will put my right foot in front, now my left..." This fact does not undermine the idea of volitional behavior or action, unless one is operating with a simplistic model that claims I must always be consciously entertaining my thoughts to act in certain ways. Given this, it is not at all surprising that the brain can "initiate movement" before we are "consciously aware" of any thought we might have to move in a certain way. One point of clarification--I just had a protracted discussion about "intentional agency" in another thread. The sense of "intentional" introduced in that thread by me, from an example by John Perry, is not the same sense of "intentional" that this article is discussing. "Intentional" in the sense that Perry was discussing refers to the sense of intentionality introduced by Franz Brentano as the mark of the mental--our ability to think "about" and represent things outside of ourselves mentally. "Intentional content" in this context refers to the meaning of, say, belief statements that represent the world as being a certain way (e.g., "I believe that Indianapolis won the Super Bowl last year" is 'about' the Indianapolis Colts and represents the world as being such that the Colts won the Super Bowl last year)--and the content of the belief, given by the meaning of the statement following the that-clause, is what then goes into the explanation of the behavior of an intentional agent. This is not the same sense of intentionality we have in mind when we say something like "I intended to throw the rock at the window." 
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