The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. An influential series of experiments by Libet has suggested that conscious intentions arise as a result of brain activity. This contrasts with traditional concepts of free will, in which the mind controls the body. A more recent study by Haggard and Eimer has further examined the relation between intention and brain processes, concluding that conscious awareness of intention is linked to the (...) choice or selection of a specific action, and not to the earliest initiation of action processes. The exchange of views in this paper further explores the relation between conscious intention and brain activity. (shrink)

Some vegetative state patients show fMRI responses similar to those of healthy controls when instructed to perform mental imagery tasks. Many authors have argued that this provides evidence that such patients are in fact conscious, as response to commands requires intentional agency. I argue for an alternative reading, on which responsive patients have a deficit similar to that seen in severe forms of akinetic mutism. Akinetic mutism is marked by the inability to form and maintain intentions to act. Responsive (...) patients are likely still conscious. However, the route to this conclusion does not support attributions of intentional agency. I argue that aspects of consciousness, rather than broad diagnostic categories, are the more appropriate target of empirical investigation. Investigating aspects of consciousness provides a better method for investigating profound disorders of consciousness. 1 Introduction2 Responses in the Vegetative State2.1 The imaging evidence2.2 The need for models3 Responsive Patients and Akinetic Mutism3.1 Akinetic mutism3.2 Akinetic mutism as a deficit in intentions3.3 Arguments for the link3.4 Interim conclusion4 Other Models4.1 A deficit in ability?4.2 Modular intentions?5 Consciousness and Method5.1 Are they conscious?5.2 Aspects versus levels. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the nature of intentions and how it is discussed in a variety of fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, law, and several branches of psychology. It should be noted that the term is not understood in the same way in all fields; the chapter will focus on an account of intentions similar to that held by neuroscience, specifically the concept of occurrent intentions as commanding attitudes toward plans. A number of psychologists assume that intentions are conscious in nature—that (...) an intention appears in one’s consciousness preceding an action. Several questions arise from this assumption, and these questions are addressed here. The chapter argues that plans, including simple representations of prospective “basic” actions and complex strategies for achieving remote goals, constitute the representational content of intentions. (shrink)

Helen Steward holds that an agent’s settling something does not require a conscious, full-fledged intention. Rather, sub-intentional acts can be instances of settling by the agent if that act is subordinated to the agent’s personal-level conscious systems. I argue that this position is mistaken, and that agential settling does in fact require a conscious intention. I argue for this claim by offering a case which on Steward’s position has counterintuitive implications. I consider a variety of (...) ways in which Steward might respond, and show how each response incurs serious dialectical burdens. I then propose my preferred view of agential settling which does not share the aforementioned counterintuitive claims. (shrink)

The Author argues for a non-semantic theory of intentionality, i.e. a theory of intentional reference rooted in the perceptive world. Specifically, the paper concerns two aspects of the original theory of intentionality: the structure of intentional objects as appearance (an unfolding spatio-temporal structure endowed with a direction), and the cognitive processes involved in a psychic act at the primary level of cognition. Examples are given from the experimental psychology of vision, with a particular emphasis on the relation between phenomenal space (...) and colour appearances. (shrink)

The meaning and significance of Benjamin Libet’s studies on the timing of conscious will have been widely discussed, especially by those wishing to draw sceptical conclusions about conscious agency and free will. However, certain important correctives for thinking about mental states and processes undermine the apparent simplicity and logic of Libet’s data. The appropriateness, relevance and ecological validity of Libet’s methods are further undermined by considerations of how we ought to characterise intentional actions, conscious intention, and (...) what it means to act with conscious intent. Recent extensions of Libet’s paradigm using fMRI and decision-based tasks suffer from similar limitations. The result is that these sorts of laboratory studies of isolated, trivial, decontextualized bodily movements, in a context of extended (conscious) intentional experimental participation and cooperation, are of dubious and potentially misleading relevance to the study of agency. (shrink)

It is typically assumed that while we know other people’s mental states by observing and interpreting their behavior, we know our own mental states by introspection, i.e., without interpreting ourselves. In his latest book, The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-knowledge, Peter Carruthers (2011) argues against this assumption. He holds that findings from across the cognitive sciences strongly suggest that self-knowledge of conscious propositional attitudes such as intentions, judgments, and decisions involves a swift and unconscious process of (...) self-interpretation that utilizes the same sensory channels that we employ when working out other people’s mental states. I provide an overview of Carruthers’ book before discussing a pathological case that challenges his account of self-knowledge and mentioning empirical evidence that undermines his use of a particular kind of data in his case against introspection of conscious attitudes. (shrink)

Conscious intentional states are mental states that represent things as being a certain way and do so consciously: they involve a phenomenally conscious representation. For any phenomenally conscious state, there is something it is like for its subject to be in it. The way it is like for a subject to be in a certain phenomenal state is the state’s phenomenal character. According to some authors, phenomenal character has two components: qualitative character (i.e., the “what it is (...) like” component) and subjective character (the “for the subject” component). Elsewhere, I have argued for an acquaintance theory of subjective character: a conscious representation is “for the subject” iff the subject is acquainted with it (Giustina forthcoming). The aim of this paper is to take some initial steps toward developing an acquaintance account of qualitative character. More specifically, I develop an acquaintance-representational account of the qualitative character of conscious intentional states, on which qualitative character is constituted by a subject’s being acquainted with the conscious intentional state’s representational properties. By reviewing the main extant accounts of qualitative character and highlighting their shortcomings, I argue that the acquaintance-representational account is antecedently more plausible than its competitors. (shrink)

We assume that we can act—in at least some cases—by consciously intending to do so. Wegner (2002) appeals to empirical research carried out by Libet et al. (1983) to challenge this assumption. I argue that his conclusion presupposes a particular view of conscious intention. But there is an alternative model available, which has been developed by various writers in the phenomenological tradition, and most recently defended by Moran (2001). If we adopt this alternative account of conscious (...) class='Hi'>intention, Wegner’s argument no longer goes through, and we can retain the claim that our conscious intentions can give rise to action. (shrink)

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 measurements 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. (shrink)

S. Pockett and G. Gomes discuss a possible bias in the method by which Libet's subjects estimated the time at which they became aware of their intent to move their hands. The bias, caused by sensory delay processing the clock information, would be sufficient to alter Trevena and Miller's conclusions regarding the timing of the lateralized readiness potential. I show that the flash-lag effect would compensate for that bias. In the last part of my commentary I note that the other (...) target articles do not examine the most interesting aspect of Libet's unfashionable views on free will. I point out that Libet's views are less strange than they at first appear to be. (shrink)

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while the (...) first is not. And we also occasionally distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the ‘physical pain’ one feels in one’s body. So what can be meant by saying that pain is a mental state? Of course, it only takes a little reflection shows that this naive view is mistaken. Pain is a state of consciousness, or an event in consciousness, and whether or not all states of mind are conscious, it is indisputable that only minds, or states of mind, are conscious.2 But does the naive view tell us anything about the concept of pain, or the concept of mind? I think it does. In this paper, I shall give reasons for thinking that consciousness is a form of intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’. I shall claim that the consciousness involved in bodily sensations like pain is constituted by the mind’s direction upon the part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. Given this, it is less surprising that the naive view of pain says what it does: the apparent ‘physicality’ of pain is a consequence of confusing the object of the intentional state—the part of the body in which the pain is felt—with the state of being in pain. (shrink)

Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the (...) evidence offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions. In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this. Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book. (shrink)

Intentional action involves both a series of neural events in the motor areas of the brain, and also a distinctive conscious experience that ''I'' am the author of the action. This paper investigates some possible ways in which these neural and phenomenal events may be related. Recent models of motor prediction are relevant to the conscious experience of action as well as to its neural control. Such models depend critically on matching the actual consequences of a movement against (...) its internally predicted effects. However, it remains unclear whether our conscious experience of action depends on a precise matching process, or a retrospective inference that ''I'' must have been responsible for a particular event. We report an experiment in which normal subjects judged the perceived time of either intentional actions, involuntary movements, or subsequent effects (auditory tones) of these. We found that the subject's intention to produce the auditory tone produced an intentional binding between the perceived times of the subject's action and the tone. However, if the intention was interrupted by an imposed involuntary movement, followed by the identical tone, no such binding occurred. The phenomenology of intentional action requires an appropriate predictive link between intentions and effects, rather than a retrospective inference that ''I'' caused the effect. (shrink)

In this chapter I look closely at the intentionality of consciousness from a naturalistic perspective. I begin with a consideration of Gurwitsch's suggestive ideas about the role of acts of consciousness in constituting both the objects and the subjects of consciousness. I turn next to a discussion of how these ideas relate to my own empirical approach to intentional relations seen from a developmental perspective. This is followed by a discussion of some recent ideas in philosophical cognitive science on the (...) intentionality of consciousness, both with respect to the objects and the subjects of consciousness. I show that these recent trends tend to naturalize intentionality and consciousness in directions compatible with the descriptive aspects of Gurwitsch's constitutive phenomenology. (shrink)

According to explanatory individualism, every action must be explained in terms of an agent's desire. According to explanatory nonindividualism, we sometimes act on our desires, but it is also possible for us to act on others' desires without acting on desires of our own. While explanatory nonindividualism has guided the thinking of many social scientists, it is considered to be incoherent by most philosophers of mind who insist that actions must be explained ultimately in terms of some desire of the (...) agent. In the first part of the paper, I show that some powerful arguments designed to demonstrate the incoherence of explanatory nonindividualism fail. In the second part of the paper, I offer a nonindividualist explanation of the apparent obviousness of belief-desire psychology. I argue that there are two levels of the intelligibility of our actions. On the more fundamental (explanatory) level, the question "Why did the agent do something?" admits a variety of folk-psychological categories. But there is another (formation-of-self) level, at which the same question admits only of answers that ultimately appeal only to the agent's own desires. Explanatory individualism results from the confusion of the two levels. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that there is such a barrier created by self-conscious intentional states—conscious intentional states that are about one’s own conscious intentional states. As we will see, however, this result is entirely compatible with a scientific theory of mind, and, in fact, there is an elegant non-reductive framework in which just such a theory may be pursued.

This article considers Edmund Husserl’s description of image consciousness from the viewpoint of the role played by attentive meaning (meinen) in the intention of the image subject. We argue that the intention of the image subject has to be interpreted in the sense of the attentive meaning as presented in the second part of Husserl’s 1904/5 lecture on Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge. Attentive meaning performs 1) the segregation of a specific apprehension along with the attentive articulation of (...) experience, and 2), as a formative and preferential function, it introduces a difference in the objective consideration. First, we explain the connection between apprehension, attentive meaning, and object; then, we clarify the relationship between apprehension and attentive meaning in image consciousness in the 1898 manuscripts and the 1904 lecture; finally, we set forth the motivation for the intending of the image subject on the basis of the image apprehension. (shrink)

In the field of machine consciousness, it has been argued that in order to build human-like conscious machines, we must first have a computational model of qualia. To this end, some have proposed a framework that supports qualia in machines by implementing a model with three computational areas (i.e., the subconceptual, conceptual, and linguistic areas). These abstract mechanisms purportedly enable the assessment of artificial qualia. However, several critics of the machine consciousness project dispute this possibility. For instance, Searle, in (...) his Chinese room objection, argues that however sophisticated a computational system is, it can never exhibit intentionality; thus, would also fail to exhibit consciousness or any of its varieties. This paper argues that the proposed architecture mentioned above answers the problem posed by Searle, at least in part. Specifically, it argues that we could reformulate Searle’s worries in the Chinese room in terms of the three-stage artificial qualia model. And by doing so, we could see that the person doing all the translations in the room could realize the three areas in the proposed framework. Consequently, this demonstrates the actualization of self-consciousness in machines. (shrink)

The power to exercise control is a crucial feature of agency. Necessarily, if S cannot exercise some degree of control over anything - any state of affairs, event, process, object, or whatever - S is not an agent. If S is not an agent, S cannot act intentionally, responsibly, or rationally, nor can S possess or exercise free will. In my dissertation I reflect on the nature of control, and on the roles consciousness plays in its exercise. I first consider (...) the fragmented state of philosophical and empirical work on control. I argue that a mature philosophy of agency stands in need of a detailed personal-level account of control, and I begin by explicating a notion I call intentional control. On this explication, an agent J exercises intentional control in service of an intention X to the degree that behavior of J's for which X plays a (non-deviant) causal role approximates the representational content of X. With this explication in hand, I offer analyses of theoretically salient points along a degreed spectrum (covering, e.g., the exercise of minimal, successful, and perfect intentional control). Next, I develop an account of the degrees of intentional control's possession. This involves elucidation of ingredients of intentional control, i.e. those features of agents and environments that constitute an agent's causal potency and skill. It turns out that an agent's possession of control regarding an intention is intimately tied to her ability to repeatedly execute that intention across some specified (hypothetical) set of scenarios. Finally, I discuss a number of potentially fruitful applications of the account. In chapter three I confront a strong intuition, persistent in both philosophy and cognitive science, that consciousness is somehow intimately involved in the exercise of control. In this connection recent empirical work indicates the causal powers of consciousness remain poorly understood. I argue that Functional Agnosticism - the view that any claim regarding a function of consciousness for behavior is currently underdetermined by the data - is the wisest position on the causal powers of consciousness. Recognition of this unsatisfying state of affairs motivates reflection on what might enable progress beyond it. I argue that establishing a causal function for consciousness is facilitated by clarity on several issues. First, what is the sense of consciousness at issue? I isolate state consciousness, discuss the potential relevance of various types of conscious states, and distinguish between ambitious and modest approaches to the causal powers of state consciousness. In short, ambitious approaches seek to understand the causal contributions of a conscious mental state in virtue of the fact that the state is conscious; modest approaches seek to understand the causal contributions of conscious mental states, full stop. I argue that for various theoretical purposes, both approaches can be useful. Second, what is the sense of control at issue? I argue that for many important theoretical purposes, intentional control is the relevant sense. Finally, I illustrate the usefulness of clarity on these issues by examining recent work on the roles of conscious and unconscious vision for action. This work suggests that some important subset of our overt action is controlled by non-conscious processes. I apply insights developed earlier, noting common mistakes made in this literature, and highlighting important empirical possibilities these mistakes obscure. In later chapters I develop a novel account of conscious control. In chapter four I develop a central part of the account, which involves a view on the intentional structure of conscious trying. The leading view entails that conscious trying possesses a descriptive (or thetic) structure. Based on relevant empirical work concerning deafferented and paralyzed patients, I argue for the view that conscious trying is (at least) partially constituted by directive (or telic) structure. Finally, I argue that the exercise of conscious control is best understood as an exercise of intentional control for which the experience of trying plays a constitutive role. After presenting arguments for this view and defending the view against objections, I discuss the importance of conscious control for a mature philosophy of mind and agency. (shrink)

According to the standard view in philosophy, intentionality is the mark of genuine action. In psychology, human cognition and agency are now widely explained in terms of the workings of two distinct systems (or types of processes), and intentionality is not a central notion in this dual-system theory. Further, it is often claimed, in psychology, that most human actions are automatic, rather than consciously controlled. This raises pressing questions. Does the dual-system theory preserve the philosophical account of intentional action? How (...) much of our behavior is intentional according to this view? And what is the role of consciousness? I will propose here a revised account of intentional action within the dual-system framework, and we will see that most of our behavior can qualify as intentional, even if most of it is automatic. An important lesson will be that philosophical accounts of intentional action need to pay more attention to the role of consciousness in action. (shrink)

Representationalists argue that phenomenal states are intentional states of a special kind. This paper offers an account of the kind of intentional state phenomenal states are: I argue that they are underived intentional states. This account of phenomenal states is equivalent to two theses: first, all possible phenomenal states are underived intentional states; second, all possible underived intentional states are phenomenal states. I clarify these claims and argue for each of them. I also address objections which touch on a range (...) of topics, including meaning holism and concept empiricism. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the proposed view for the project of naturalizing consciousness. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 182-195, March 2022.

The aim of this paper is to challenge the claim that the neural activity commonly referred to as 'readiness potential' constitutes evidence for the unconscious initiation of action. Although I accept that such neural activity seriously challenges the commonly held view that one's sense of volition is causally efficacious, I nevertheless contend that much of our everyday engagement with the world is consciously initiated. Thus, a distinction is made between awareness and what the awareness is of: the latter constituting the (...) conscious decision to act in accordance with one's goal, or what I have termed intentional project. Initiation of an action in accordance with one's intentional project grounds the action in meaning, something that would be lacking in an exclusively unconscious decision to act. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).