Spirited Motivation and the Novelty of Reason

Chapter 5 examines “early” works that anticipate the Republic’s account of the role of spirited motivations in social and political life and the related challenges of promoting proper moral education and civic unity. It surveys Plato’s early depictions of traditional moral education and popular values, as well as his early treatment of political unity, civic strife, and the ethics of helping friends and harming enemies. The chapter also argues against the common view that the spirited part of the soul represented the main innovation of Plato’s tripartite theory. Rather, it suggests, the reasoning part was his contribution to received folk psychology and ethics, and that is why “early” dialogues focus so heavily on intellectual and rational aspects of human psychology.

Commentary: Content-Free Awareness: EEG-fcMRI Correlates of Consciousness as Such in an Expert Meditator

The search for minimal neuronal requirements for consciousness rests on the premise that there exists a unique state of the human brain, the conscious state, that if one carefully excludes all the confounding cognitive functions, one will be able to isolate those regions that are involved in generating consciousness itself; nothing more, nothing less. I have argued elsewhere (Rahimian, 2021) why this view is deeply flawed and is based on unjustified assumptions mainly from folk psychology. Here I focus on some issues that arise while pursuing such assumptions in scientific paradigms.

Piercing the Smoke Screen: Dualism, Free Will, and Christianity

Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, (2) that people with predominantly incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and (3) people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies (n = 378) that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity.

Active inference models do not contradict folk psychology

Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires (or other conative constructs) at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations of motor control (which need not have desires under folk psychology) and active inference formulations of decision processes (which do have desires within folk psychology). We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information vs. reward – and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues (i.e., “as if” desires) in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms.

Experiences of Ugliness in Nature and Urban environments

In folk psychology experiences of ugliness are associated with the negation of beauty and disorder, but empirical evidence is remarkably rare. Here, participants (called informed) took 102 photographs of ugly landscapes and urban scenes and reflected on their experiences. Later, participants naïve to the intentional ugliness in the photographs rated landscapes higher than informed participants. The ratings for urban scenes were similar in the two cohorts. Reflective notes revealed that emotional experiences with visual ugliness could overlap (e.g. decay), but ugliness was associated more frequently with fear and death in landscapes, and with sadness and disgust in urban scenes. The findings uncovered a complex layer of associations. Experiences triggered by perceived ugliness were contingent on a composite of socio-cultural, emotional, and evolutionary factors. Rather than being the endpoint on an aesthetic scale culminating with beauty, ugliness seems to be experienced as an independent aesthetic experience with its own processing streams.