Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 11, 2023

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Internalization of Natural Reason and the Origin of Intentional Explanations

(Abstract)

Liu Chuang

Action is not mere behavior. Without beliefs and desires as its reason, it wouldn’t be action at all. This is the central tenet of the contemporary philosophy of action. And yet, what is the nature of intentional explanations via beliefs, desires and will? Where do they come from? What is the fundamental difference between intentional states and neuro- or physical states? The literature of philosophy brims with competing views and answers. The neuro- or physical explanations of action are explanations by proximate or efficient causes. What Davidson and Searle emphasize as being intentional explanations are in fact internalized teleological explanations in animals and humans. Such internalized teleological explanations, which follow the least free energy principle for self-organized systems, emerged through the long and tenuous process of evolutionary game competition and natural selection. The author argues in the paper that the active inference mechanism that has evolved through evolutionary games in fact obeys a second-order law of nature (i.e., the minimum free energy principle), and this provides a natural mechanism for solving body-mind problems like anomalous monism.