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16 Intentions as Complex Dynamical Attractors
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16 Intentions as Complex Dynamical Attractors Alicia Juarrero 1 Background What is the difference between a wink and a blink? Intuitively, we would say that a wink is intentional and a blink is not. From a philosophical point of view, answering the question, what is an intention and how does an agent’s intention cause his or her behavior, has a long history. This “problem of action” dates back to ancient times. In the Crito, Socrates wonders how philosophers such as Anaxagoras or Anaximenes would explain his refusal to escape from prison. How could merely physical phenomena explain how his reasons for remaining keep him in jail? In the last half of the twentieth century, papers and books on action theory proliferated . Can reasons be causes? Doesn’t the purposiveness or goal-directedness of action imply the occurrence of backward causation when an anticipated outcome plays a role in bringing about present behavior? If intentions are just brain events, how can they carry meaning such that it is the meaning or content of the intention that results in the appropriate kind of behavior? From these few questions alone it becomes clear that the philosophical problem of action is fundamentally tied to the problem of causation: how does meaningful behavior come about? In this essay I will argue that a uniquely modern combination of views about causality—that only efficient causality is true causality, and that recursive or circular causality is impossible—is responsible for the impasse in which philosophical action theory finds itself. Elsewhere (Juarrero 1999; Juarrero-Roqué 1983a,b, 1985, 1987–88, 1988), I chronicle in detail those philosophical equivalents of epicyclic contortions designed to shoehorn the analysis of action into the modern notion of efficient causality, where intentional causes are understood as instantaneous forces that push the body into motion in billiardball -like fashion. For that reason alone none of these standard causalist 254 A. Juarrero theories of action succeeds. But then neither do the attempts that offer behaviorist or identity-theory reductions of the purposiveness of action. The impediment, I argued in those earlier works, is their inability to frame a scientifically acceptable way of understanding mereological (especially top-down) causality. I claim that concepts borrowed from complex dynamical systems theory can provide just such a theory-constitutive metaphor that makes intentional causation tractable. During classical times it is left to Aristotle to provide a thorough analysis of the difference between voluntary, involuntary, and nonvoluntary behavior. As is well known, Aristotle accounts for all phenomena, not just intentional behavior, in terms of four causes. Suppose I intend to write a book. While my arm and hand movements serve as the efficient cause of the actual writing, the goal of producing a book functions as its final or purposive cause. Its material cause, the stuff from which it is physically constructed, includes the ink, paper, and so on. What makes the behavior a case of writing a book—instead of something else—is the formal defining or essential cause that sustains the behavior along that essential path and guides it to completion. Less well known, however, is the role that another of Aristotle’s principles plays in the history of action theory: the principle that there exists no circular or recursive causality; no self-cause. The concepts of potentiality and actuality lead to the conclusion that whatever happens is caused to occur because of something other than itself. Since nothing can be both potential and actual at the same time with respect to the same phenomenon , mover (actual) and moved (potential) cannot be identical. Even in the case of the (apparent) self-motion of organisms, one aspect of the organism qua active principle changes a second aspect from passive to active; this aspect, in turn, now qua active principle can move a third . . . and so on, until the animal moves. By the time the intellectual giants of the seventeenth century and their followers got through changing the way philosophy and science are done, Aristotle’s formal and final causes had been discarded as superstitious nonsense. With material cause left to one side, only efficient cause—the instantaneous, billiard-ball-collision-type causality of mechanistic science —qualified as cause. While discarding three of the four causes, however, modern science retained the Aristotelian thesis that nothing causes itself. When combined with the reductionist belief that wholes are no different from aggregates, the claim that anything that is caused must be caused by something other than itself—and only as a...