- Duration
- 6 min
Agency Without Consciousness
Can something act for reasons with no one home?
Watch small agents pursue goals in a changing world. Switch their capacities on and off — goal-directedness, sensitivity to reasons, a self-model, experience — and see which philosophical accounts would still call what you see "action".
The experiment
Dennett proposed that we attribute beliefs and desires to a system whenever doing so lets us predict it — the intentional stance. Critics reply that prediction is not the point: to act is to act for reasons, and reasons need a subject.
In this experiment you watch a small population of agents seek resources and avoid hazards. You can add or remove capacities. With each change, four accounts of agency — behavioural, intentional-stance, reasons-responsive and phenomenal — deliver their verdicts.
What to notice. The behavioural and intentional-stance accounts say yes long before the others. The phenomenal account never says yes, because nothing you can switch on in the simulation is experience. Whether that is a limit of the simulation or a limit of the account is the question.
Other instruments
The Mind Detector
What are you actually measuring when you decide something has a mind?
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At what point in a gradual replacement do you stop being you?
Run experimentThe Epistemic Chain
Where does responsibility for a belief live when it arrives through a machine?
Run experiment