Conscious intentions : do we need a creation myth? : A commentary on Elisabeth Pacherie

We experience ourselves as agents, performing goal-directed actions in the world. In her paper about Conscious Intentions: The social creation myth Pacherie develops a creation myth about the function of conscious intentions, based on her hierarchical concept of individual motor actions and joint action. In this creation myth, conscious intentions are not understood as internal mental states with a teleofunctional role. Having a conscious intention exerts a specific contribution to motor control and conscious intentions might have a potential causal power in this myth. In this commentary I want to postulate, that Pacherie’s social creation myth is more than a myth but rather the search for an explanation of the function of conscious intentions in the physical world. It tries to explain the feature of the intention being conscious that endows it with its particular causal function. Yet — speaking about a causal function  — the potential analytical and neuroscientific limitations of a causal function of conscious intentions in the social creation myth have to be analysed with regard to the argument of causal closure and results of experimental approaches to the causal relevance of conscious intentions. I argue that despite these limitations the social creation myth could be an important step on the way of finding an explanation about the function of conscious intentions, if the question about the function of conscious intentions is slightly adjusted and is not understood in a strictly causal way

Conscious intentions : the social creation myth

What are intentions for? Do they have a primary purpose or function? If so, what is this function? I start with a discussion of three existing approaches to these questions. One account, associated with Michael Bratman's planning theory of agency, emphasizes the pragmatic functions of intentions: having the capacity to form intentions allows us to place our actions more firmly under the control of deliberation and to coordinate our actions over time. A second account, inspired by Elizabeth Anscombe's theory of intentions, emphasizes their epistemic function and their contribution to self-knowledge. A third account, developed by David Velleman, suggests instead that the capacity for intentions may be an accident or a spandrel, that is, a byproduct of some more general and fundamental endowments of human nature. I argue that these accounts are at best partial and largely overlook two important dimensions of intention. I introduce and motivate a further pragmatic function of intentions, namely their role in the control and monitoring of ongoing action and argue that acknowledging the existence and importance of this function allows us to plug gaps in these accounts. I further argue that this pragmatic function of intentions plays a crucial role in contexts of joint action where agents must align their representations in order to coordinate their actions towards a joint goal. I speculate that a capacity for conscious control might have become established because of the role it served in solving inter-agent coordination problems in social contexts and because of the benefit conferred by the forms of cooperation it thus made possible

Free Will and Neuroscience

Has modern neuroscience shown that free will is an illusion? Those who give an affirmative answer often argue as follows. The overt actions that have been studied in some recent experiments do not have corresponding consciously made decisions or conscious intentions among their causes. Therefore no overt actions have corresponding consciously made decisions or conscious intentions among their causes. This paper challenges this inference, arguing that it is unwarranted

Right here, right now: situated interventions to change consumer habits

Consumer behavior-change interventions have traditionally encouraged consumers to form conscious intentions, but in the past decade it has been shown that while these interventions have a medium-to-large effect in changing intentions, they have a much smaller effect in changing behavior. Consumers often do not act in accordance with their conscious intentions because situational cues in the immediate environment automatically elicit learned, habitual behaviors. It has therefore been suggested that researchers refocus their efforts on developing interventions that target unconscious, unintentional influences on behavior, such as cue-behavior (“habit”) associations. To develop effective consumer behavior-change interventions, however, we argue that it is first important to understand how consumer experiences are represented in memory, in order to successfully target the situational cues that most strongly predict engagement in habitual behavior. In this article, we present a situated cognition perspective of habits and discuss how the situated cognition perspective extends our understanding of how consumer experiences are represented in memory, and the processes through which these situational representations can be retrieved in order to elicit habitual consumer behaviors. Based on the principles of situated cognition, we then discuss five ways that interventions could change consumer habits by targeting situational cues in the consumer environment and suggest how existing interventions utilizing these behavior-change strategies could be improved by integrating the principles of the situated cognition approach

A model of the quantum-classical and mind-brain connections, and of the role of the quantum Zeno effect in the physical implementation of conscious intent

A simple exactly solvable model is given of the dynamical coupling between a person's classically described perceptions and that person's quantum mechanically described brain. The model is based jointly upon von Neumann's theory of measurement and the empirical findings of close connections between conscious intentions and synchronous oscillations in well separated parts of the brain. A quantum-Zeno-effect-based mechanism is described that allows conscious intentions to influence brain activity in a functionally appropriate way. The robustness of this mechanism in the face of environmental decoherence effects is emphasized.Comment: 14 page

Goal priming as a situated intervention tool

Research on goal priming has shown that cues in the environment can lead to goal-directed cognition and behaviour without the need for conscious intentions. This has sparked an interest in using goal priming as an intervention tool to strategically influence behaviour in line with an individual's long-term goals. The present article first gives a brief overview of goal priming effects and their mechanisms. Then, goal priming is discussed as a situated intervention tool that changes the cognitive responses triggered by a situation and can stimulate the pursuit of long-term investment goals over short-term hedonic goals. Applying the principle of situating interventions leads to a set of recommendations for applying goal primes effectively, which are illustrated with examples from various domains

Post-Action Determinants of the Reported Time of Conscious Intentions

The question of whether our behavior is guided by our conscious intentions is gaining momentum within the field of cognitive neuroscience. It has been demonstrated that the subjective experience that conscious intentions are the driving force of our actions, is built partially on a post hoc reconstruction. Our hypothesis was that this reconstructive process is mediated by an action-monitoring system that compares the predicted and the actual sensory consequences of an action. We applied event-related potentials (ERP) to a variant of the Libet's task in which participants were asked to press a button and to report the time of decision – will judgment (W) – to press. We provided delayed auditory feedbacks after participants’ action to signify an action time later than the actual action. We found that auditory feedbacks evoked a negative component in the 250–300 time range, namely action-effect negativity (NAE), that is thought to reflect the activity of a system that detects violation from expectancies. We showed that the amplitude of the NAE was sensitive to the delay of the auditory feedback, with a larger amplitude for more delayed feedbacks. Furthermore, changes in the NAE were also associated with changes in the reported W. These results not only confirm that we infer the time we decided to act from events occurring after the response, but these results also indicate that the subjective experience of when an action is decided is influenced by the activity of an action-monitoring system that detects mismatches between predicted and actual sensory consequences of the actions

Why neuroscience does not disprove free will

While the question whether free will exists or not has concerned philosophers for centuries, empirical research on this question is relatively young. About 35 years ago Benjamin Libet designed an experiment that challenged the common intuition of free will, namely that conscious intentions are causally efficacious. Libet demonstrated that conscious intentions are preceded by a specific pattern of brain activation, suggesting that unconscious processes determine our decisions and we are only retrospectively informed about these decisions. Libet-style experiments have ever since dominated the discourse about the existence of free will and have found their way into the public media. Here we review the most important challenges to the common interpretation of Libet-style tasks and argue that the common interpretation is questionable. Brain activity preceding conscious decisions reflects the decision process rather than its outcome. Furthermore, the decision process is configured by conditional intentions that participants form at the beginning of the experiment. We conclude that Libet-style tasks do not provide a serious challenge to our intuition of free will

The Tell-Tale Hand: Gothic Narratives and the Brain

The opening story in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson is called simply “Hands.” It is about a teacher’s remarkable hands that sometimes seem to move independently of his will. This essay explores some of the relevant contexts and potential links, beginning with other representations of teachers’ hands, such as Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and the Angel, early efforts to establish a sign-language for the deaf, and including the Montessori method of teaching children to read and write by tracing the shape of letters with their hands on rough emery paper. The essay then explores filmic hands that betray or work independently of conscious intentions, from Dr Strangelove, Mad Love, to The Beast With Five Fingers. Discussion of the medical literature about the “double” of our hands in the brain, including “phantom hands,” leads on to a series of images that register Rodin’s lifelong fascination with sculpting separate hands

The Relationship of Goal Setting, Extrinsic Motivation and Performance Outcome to Expectancies, Causal Attributions, and Goal Acceptance and Commitment

Locke’s (1968) theory of goal setting stipulates that specific, hard goals, if accepted, lead to better performance than do less difficult goals. Locke suggests that conscious intentions are the underlying determinants of performance. However, Locke was more concerned with testing the results of these conscious intentions (goals) than with understanding the cognitions and motivation behind them. While some research has begun to consider the motivational components of goal setting (e.g., Terborg, 1976) very little attention has been given to the factors which determine goal acceptance. Recently, Mento, Cartledge, and Locke (1980) have suggested that Valence-Instrumentality-Expectancy (VIE) theory may provide a suitable method for predicting goal acceptance. While this theory may provide a means for predicting goal acceptance, it does not seem capable of fully explaining the phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to integrate research on cognitive evaluation theory (Deci, 1975) and on causal attributions (Weiner, Frieze, Kukla, Reed, Rest, § Rosenbaum, 1971), which suggests that attributions to locus of causality may have significant effects on levels of motivation for performing a task, with VIE theory in order to better understand the cognitive processes of goal acceptance and goal commitment