You glanced off something important that I just wanted to reiterate, that human beings already have a psychological tendency to blame people's behaviors on their character which is another way of saying they assume the behaviors always derive from considered, rational choices; or really, that if they aren't good behaviors then that reflects that their thinking is unconsidered, irrational, all of this leading to stupid. So this isn't just a philosophical crisis, it's a social one, people refusing to understand each other because they demand that understanding only narrowly derives from intellect.
That has a great deal to do with it. What I find so interesting about Taylor's way of looking at agency, versus phenomenal consciousness, is that it isn't an either/or proposition.
Many things we do *are* motivated by unconscious forces. *Some* things we do are considered and intentional. The line between them is murky and constantly shifting, as our own understanding shifts the boundaries. The unconscious motives can become explicit, and what should be explicit can sink out of awareness.
The phrase "our own understanding" must be qualified, since this is no longer something special and private "inside the mind". It has a quality inseparable from language, and from our own self-descriptions.
Off-the-shelf Cartesianism, which is almost everywhere in AI and cog-sci debates, can't even frame that way of thinking because it rules them out at the level of basic categories.
You glanced off something important that I just wanted to reiterate, that human beings already have a psychological tendency to blame people's behaviors on their character which is another way of saying they assume the behaviors always derive from considered, rational choices; or really, that if they aren't good behaviors then that reflects that their thinking is unconsidered, irrational, all of this leading to stupid. So this isn't just a philosophical crisis, it's a social one, people refusing to understand each other because they demand that understanding only narrowly derives from intellect.
That has a great deal to do with it. What I find so interesting about Taylor's way of looking at agency, versus phenomenal consciousness, is that it isn't an either/or proposition.
Many things we do *are* motivated by unconscious forces. *Some* things we do are considered and intentional. The line between them is murky and constantly shifting, as our own understanding shifts the boundaries. The unconscious motives can become explicit, and what should be explicit can sink out of awareness.
The phrase "our own understanding" must be qualified, since this is no longer something special and private "inside the mind". It has a quality inseparable from language, and from our own self-descriptions.
Off-the-shelf Cartesianism, which is almost everywhere in AI and cog-sci debates, can't even frame that way of thinking because it rules them out at the level of basic categories.