What is the
difference between a wink and a blink? Most of us think we know, but in over
two millenia of investigation, neither scientists nor philosophers have been
able to agree on what makes the difference. Juarrero argues that the
difficulties arise from an erroneous assumption by Aristotle that what
originates motion must be different from what is moved. This error was
compounded by the impoverished mechanical account of causation of modern
science, according to which all causation is a series of bumps and nudges. The
consequences of these problems are well-known. Aristotle, having ruled out the
possibility of a self-moving universe, invoked the incomprehensible notion of a
Prime Mover, outside the rest of the world, moving the world, but itself
unmoved. Similarly, the body was thought to be moved by a separate soul, which
with Descartes became an entirely separate substance from the body, with all of
the problem of mind-body interaction the separation entails. Materialist
accounts of mind avoid dualism, but are restricted to chains of efficient
causation with no end, undermining any attempt to place the origin of action in
the person. Bumps and nudges may occur in the agent, but these are either
accidental, and hence not intentional, or else they can be traced back to
external bumps and nudges, moving the origin outside of the agent. It seems
that we are caught between mysterious dualism that separates volitions from
their consequences, and mechanistic reduction that eliminates an originating
role for volitions.

The difference
between a wink and a blink, between an intentional and unintentional action, is
the difference between an action originated by the agent, and one that is not.
If the mover must be separate from the moved, then intentional acts must
originate in something separate from what is moved. Action theory, for many
years now, has been directed toward explaining how this might be possible in a
way that allows us to assign responsibility to agents for acts like winks, but
not for actions like blinks. Atomistic reductionism and some psychologies, like
behaviorism and many versions of functionalism, escape the problems by denying
any real basis for usual notions of freedom and responsibility, placing all
psychological variation in the mechanical capacities of the body together with
externally determined conditioning histories. Juarrero follows many action theorists
in rejecting such reductionist accounts because they ignore either the temporal
directedness of action, the logical connection between intentions and behavior,
or both.

Although action
theorists recognize the problem, they have worked within the Aristotelian
framework, and never escape the dilemma of dualism versus mechanism. Juarrero
takes four chapters to review various attempts to resolve the dilemma, and
carefully shows not only that the attempts are unsuccessful, but but also where
they fail. The gist is that either volitions play no essential role in
outcomes, or else outcomes are merely the causal consequences of volitions. The
second choice allows all manner of unintended outcomes to be volitional. These
chapters are tedious, and rife with the arcana of analytic philosophy, but it
is a job that needs to be done, and Juarrero can hardly be faulted for adopting
the methodology of logical analysis, example and counterexample in order to
show the flaws. Nonetheless, this part of the book is obscure, full of red
herrings, and potentially confusing even to the trained philosopher. Things
open up, however, when Juarrero starts in on an alternative approach, based in
dynamical systems theory and its expanded view of causation and explanation.

The last chapter
before the second part introduces information theory and shows how it can be
used to critique the analysis of action. This chapter presents information
theory clearly and concisely, with regard to both its strengths and
limitations. The reader who understands the point of this chapter is well on
their way to understanding the rest of the book. The central idea is that
information links intentions with activity through it role as a causally
efficacious source that does not disengage after initiation, but continues to
guide and direct while flowing into behavior. This alone is not enough to
explain action, but it permits a linkage between intentions and actions that
has both causal and logical properties. Contrary to the behaviorists, information
has an inner source breaking the potential infinite regress of causes (the
origination issue requires further material on self-organization that comes
later in the book), but contrary to the Aristotelian volitionists, the
information in the cause must also be present in the outcome, ruling out
unintended consequences that follow from an intention being acts. This solution
to the dilemma is extremely clever, and Juarrero demonstrates nicely how it can
solve various problem cases in the literature on action.

Even so, one might
ask why the informational chain originates in the agent rather than in, say,
the agent’s environment. Connected to this is the issue of how decisions are
made to select one action over another. To answer these questions, Juarrero
introduces the apparatus of dynamical systems theory, including attractors,
bifurcations, non-equilibrium mechanics and the like. This may seem like a lot
of apparatus to answer a simple and old question, and many sceptical readers
will either dismiss it or fail to see the point. Nonetheless, I agree that
something like this approach is required in order to explain how an agent can
initiate action. Humans are at least complex dynamical systems, and any attempt
to understand actions as causes must take this into consideration. Juarrero’s
specific explanation is in terms of the emergence of self-organized information
carrying dynamical structures in the brain. 
Decisions are the dynamical collapse of intentional states, whether
deliberative or spontaneous, guided and constrained by other intentional
states. Her details might be questioned, and I found some to be unlikely on the
surface, or a bit vague, but the basic idea is promising: self-organizing
neurophysiological processes create meaningful information where it did not
exist before, and decisions further create information by reducing the set of
alternatives, not by a sort of filtering of pre-existing possibilities, but be
active dynamical processes governed by the dynamics of information in
intentional states and the processes connecting them. In this sense, the agent
is the origin of the information that guides action. Now, this point will not
be appreciated by the sceptic who believes that all meaning must be innate, or
who believes that that all causation must be reducible to bumps and nudges.
Juarrero addresses these issues, but I feel that it will be some time before
the necessity of a dynamical approach is fully appreciated, and there is much
to fill in.

The final part of the
book explains why narrative explanations are suitable for an information based
dynamical account of action, and ends with some reflections on the implications
for freedom, agency and individuality. The reasoning in these chapters will be
especially useful to those interested in applications to law and psychological
representations of action and responsibility for actions.

It is worth noting
that recent work on human-human and human-machine interaction has turned up
attractors that emerge in very simple games. These high level but simple
dynamical systems phenomena suggest that a dynamical approach to action can set
a useful research program, and that at least some of Juarrero’s philosophical
claims can be found to have empirical counterparts. They also suggest further
work directed at the social emergence of dynamical states in interactions among
intentional agents. At least some traditional philosophers will be appalled at
these developments and the encroachment into realms traditionally dealt with
through a priori linguistic analysis and phenomenological studies, but it would
not be the first time that traditional philosophical problems that have
appeared to concern meaning alone have led into hard science.

This book is the most
original approach to the problem of explaining action that I have seen. I think
it might have been clearer and more accessible to the non-specialist, and I
agree with some critics that much of the apparatus could have been left out in
developing an account of action alone. I hope that Juarrero will write a
further book that is less technical and more accessible to a wider audience,
and perhaps is more explicit on the definitions of action and decision making.
Nonetheless, this book should be read by anyone interested in action theory, or
anyone interested in dynamical theories of the mind. It is much deeper and more
astute than any other recent book on emerging dynamical theories of mind that I
have seen, including others I have reviewed here. The reader interested in the
main results rather than the argumentation will find the summaries at the end
of the chapters very helpful. The book is now out in paperback, making it more
accessible.

©
2002 John Collier

John Collier is a
Visiting Scientist at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition
Research, and is soon to become Associate Professor in
Philosophy at the University of Natal in Durban. His current work is in
foundations of information theory, autonomy, evolutionary theory, and various
areas in metaphysics and the philosophy of physics. He is currently working on
a book on reduction in complex systems with C.A. Hooker and another with
Michael Stingl on Evolutionary Moral Realism.

Categories: Philosophical