Conscious Agent Choice

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A Conscious Agent Choice is a cognitive agent action that involves a deliberate selection among conscious agent action options through conscious agent intentional processes to achieve conscious agent goals or uphold conscious agent values.

References

2015

  • (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bad_faith_(existentialism)#Intentional_consciousness_and_freedom Retrieved:2015-5-22.
    • For Sartre this attitude is manifestly self-deceiving. As conscious humans, we are always aware that we are more than what we are aware of, so we are not whatever we are aware of. We cannot, in this sense, be defined as our "intentional objects" of consciousness, including our restrictions imposed by (facticity) our personal history, character, bodies, or objective responsibility. Thus, as Sartre often repeated, "Human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is." An example would be if one were now a doctor but wished and started to "transcend" to become a pig farmer. One is who one is not (a pig farmer), not who one is (a doctor): it can only define itself negatively, as "what it is not"; but this negation is simultaneously the only positive definition it can make of "what it is."

      From this we are aware of a host of alternative reactions to our freedom to choose (an objective situation), since no situation can dictate a single response. Only in assuming social roles and value systems external to this nature as conscious beings can we pretend that these possibilities are denied to us; but this is itself a decision made possible by our freedom and our separation from these things. “Bad faith" is the paradoxical free decision to deny to ourselves this inescapable freedom.

2014

  • (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/choice Retrieved:2014-6-22.
    • Choice consists of a mental decision, of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one or more of them. While a choice can be made between imagined options ("what would I do if ...?"), often a choice is made between real options and followed by the corresponding action. For example, a route for a journey is chosen based on the preference of arriving at a given destination as soon as possible. The preferred (and therefore chosen) route is then derived from information about how long each of the possible routes take. This can be done by a route planner. If the preference is more complex, such as involving the scenery of the route, cognition and feeling are more intertwined, and the choice is less easy to delegate to a computer program or assistant.

      More complex examples (often decisions that affect what a person thinks or their core beliefs) include choosing a lifestyle, religious affiliation, or political position.

      Most people regard having choices as a good thing, though a severely limited or artificially restricted choice can lead to discomfort with choosing and possibly, an unsatisfactory outcome. In contrast, a choice with excessively numerous options may lead to confusion, regret of the alternatives not taken, and indifference in an unstructured existence; [1] and the illusion that choosing an object or a course leads necessarily to control of that object or course can cause psychological problems.

  1. ↑ Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

2013

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice
    • Choice consists of the mental process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one or more of them. While a choice can be made between imagined options ("what would I do if ...?"), often a choice is made between real options and followed by the corresponding action. For example, a route for a journey is chosen based on the preference of arriving at a given destination as soon as possible. The preferred (and therefore chosen) route is then derived from information about how long each of the possible routes take. This can be done by a route planner. If the preference is more complex, such as involving the scenery of the route, cognition and feeling are more intertwined, and the choice is less easy to delegate to a computer program or assistant.

      More complex examples (often decisions that affect what a person thinks or their core beliefs) include choosing a lifestyle, religious affiliation, or political position.

      Most people regard having choices as a good thing, though a severely limited or artificially restricted choice can lead to discomfort with choosing and possibly, an unsatisfactory outcome. In contrast, a choice with excessively numerous options may lead to confusion, regret of the alternatives not taken, and indifference in an unstructured existence;[1] and the illusion that choosing an object or a course leads necessarily to control of that object or course can cause psychological problems[citation needed].

  1. ↑ Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

2011

  • http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/action/
    • If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when the person moves her head, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off her ear. Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but ‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that there is a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, in even the most minimal sense, seem to be essentially ‘active’. But how can we explain what this property amounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fall in the category of the ‘active’ and which do not?

       Donald Davidson [1980, essay 3] asserted that an action, in some basic sense, is something an agent does that was ‘intentional under some description,’ and many other philosophers have agreed with him that there is a conceptual tie between genuine action, on the one hand, and intention, on the other. However, it is tricky to explicate the purported tie between the two concepts. First, the concept of ‘intention’ has various conceptual inflections whose connections to one another are not at all easy to delineate, and there have been many attempts to map the relations between intentions for the future, acting intentionally, and acting with a certain intention. Second, the notion that human behavior is often intentional under one description but not under another is itself hard to pin down. For example, as Davidson pointed out, an agent may intentionally cause himself to trip, and the activity that caused the tripping may have been intentional under that description while, presumably, the foreseen but involuntary tripping behavior that it caused is not supposed to be intentional under any heading. Nevertheless, both the tripping and its active cause are required to make it true that the agent intentionally caused himself to trip. Both occurrences fall equally, in that sense, ‘under’ the operative description. So further clarification is called for.

      There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether the agent's reasons in acting are causes of the action — a longstanding debate about the character of our common sense explanations of actions. Some philosophers have maintained that we explain why an agent acted as he did when we explicate how the agent's normative reasons rendered the action intelligible in his eyes. Others have stressed that the concept of ‘an intention with which a person acted’ has a teleological dimension that does not, in their view, reduce to the concept of ‘causal guidance by the agent's reasons.’ But the view that reason explanations are somehow causal explanations remains the dominant position. Finally, recent discussions have revived interest in important questions about the nature of intention and its distinctiveness as a mental state, and about the norms governing rational intending.

2005

1980

  • (Davidson, 1980) ⇒ Donald Davidson. (1980). “Essays on Actions and Events." Oxford University Press.
    • QUOTE: action, in some basic sense, is something an agent does that was ‘intentional under some description,’

1957

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