Craig DeLancey

Some qualitative aspects of conscious experience appear to correlate with the purposes of the organism. For example, pleasure often accompanies the satisfaction of a purpose, an aversive affect often accompanies failure to achieve one’s purposes, and so on. To explore this relationship, we need a more complete descriptive teleological theory. Philosophers have developed two theories that explain inherited purposes by reducing them either to evolutionary selection (the etiological theory) or to the relationship between existing biological processes (the systematic theory). But we have no comprehensive naturalistic theory of how an individual organism can acquire new purposes. We propose a theory of acquired purposes, where each acquired purpose depends upon and is constrained by existing purposes; kinds of actions can become purposes of an organism if the organism is aware that they tend to lead to the satisfaction of an existing purpose. The result is that through learning the organism acquires a network of purposes that can be represented as an acyclic graph that has as terminal nodes the inherited purposes of the organism. This model allows for a friendly amendment to representational theories of consciousness. Representational theories offer no explanation for the intensity or character of phenomenal experiences, other than to claim that different such experiences are different representations. But a representational system that serves the acquisition of purposes will also have to model the degree to which various actions serve to hinder or help the achievement of purposes, including purposes throughout the network of purposes that constitutes the organism. We consider the hypothesis that the character and intensity of pleasure is determined by the extent of satisfaction of purposes in the network and the speed of this satisfaction. The more widespread and fast the satisfaction, the greater the experience of pleasure.

Craig DeLancey is a philosopher and cognitive scientist.  He has twice been an NEH fellow, has received funding from the Army Office of Basic Research, and has been a fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh. His publications include Passionate Engines (OUP) and Consciousness as Complex Event (Routledge).