“Can you live your life 100% guided by reason?”
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Living according to reason and rationality alone is impossible, because propositional knowledge is only a subset of needed knowledge for an embodied agent (the others being procedural, participatory- and perspectival knowledge)
Calling people “embodied agent[s]” like they’re barely superior to video-game characters is dehumanizing and weird.
This is also borrowed from cognitive science. But what I meant was to point to the fact that there are “pre-conceptual” models, desires, attentional salience etc. that impinge on and filter input to conscious cognition. An example is how brain regions originally used for moving the body through 3D space are repurposed cognitively to “move around” in idea-space. Some anecdotal evidence for this: notice how many movement metaphors structure propositional thinking. We say we’re close to the truth, we understand, we grasp a concept, we arrive at a conclusion.
I don’t think any of this addresses my original criticism that calling people “embodied agent[s]” is dehumanizing. It sounds like we’re studying rats. So what if cog-sci is dehumanizing? That doesn’t make it better.
Haven't thought about it like that. The purpose of speaking of an embodied agent is to generalize cognition. To understand what's relevant to an agent, you need to understand how that agent is embodied in the world.
Again, to me, that’s how programmers think about their video-game characters, and how researchers think about lab rats in mazes. I would avoid talking about people as ‘agents’ and instead treat them as human beings.
To understand what’s relevant to a person, you need to understand their problem situation.
I think I agree. But to formulate a general theory for agents, the term ‘people’ is too strong when speaking of what’s relevant for a bacterium (which also has problems that shape its actions, what it finds relevant, etc.). But I agree that persons and agents should be differentiated, since people exceed the pre-given problems set by evolution.
…a bacterium … also has problems that shape its actions, what it finds relevant, etc…
A bacterium has ‘problems’ in some sense but it cannot create new knowledge to solve them. It may be more accurate to say that its genes have problems.
But to formulate a general theory for agents, the term ‘people’ is too strong when speaking of what’s relevant for a bacterium…
Yes. This tells you that people aren’t just agents. They are agents in the sense that they exist in some environment they can interact with and move around in. But they’re so much more than that.
It’s a bit like saying humans are mammals. They are, but that’s not their distinguishing characteristic, so we can’t study mammals to learn about people.
I wouldn’t bother with cog sci or any ‘agentic’ notion of people. Focus on Popperian epistemology instead. It’s the only promising route we have.
The purpose of speaking of an embodied agent is to generalize cognition.
It’s possible that the actual purpose of such language is more sinister than that, having to do with static memes: to continue the age-old mystical tradition of portraying man as a pathetic, helpless being at the mercy of a universe he cannot understand or control.
But I’m purely speculating here and would have to think more about it. So I’m not marking this as a criticism (yet).
I don’t think so, but I don’t know enough of the history. But the framework emerged out of biology trying to make a theory of organisms in general (innate theories like autopoiesis/self-preservation, for example). Then it’s been used specifically in cognitive science to try and integrate the general framework with human cognition. Even though it is dehumanizing, there is some value to viewing at least parts of human cognition in these terms. Whatever creativity is, most of human experience is already pre-given moment to moment, not willed by the person. I don’t think we as people derive our sense of autonomy from this world construction and pre-given coupling (we receive automatic responses/affordances). The only real change I seem to have is in every conscious moment.
Whatever creativity is, most of human experience is already pre-given moment to moment, not willed by the person.
I think what really happens is this: when we’re young, we guess theories about how to experience the world, and then we correct errors in those theories and practice them to the point they become completely automated. Much of this happens in childhood. As adults, we don’t remember doing it. So then experience seems ‘given’.
The only real change I seem to have is in every conscious moment.
I don’t know what it means to ‘have change’, but note that even unconscious ideas evolve in our minds all the time. So those change as well, if that’s what you mean.
[T]he framework emerged out of biology trying to make a theory of organisms in general…
That doesn’t mean static memes couldn’t have co-opted the framework to undermine man and his mind.