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Jonathan Delafield-Butt

2 papers in the library · publishing 2022

Papers

Consciousness generates agent action.

The Behavioral and brain sciences March 23, 2022 Jonathan Delafield-Butt, Colwyn Trevarthen

Consciousness enables an agent to act for its own purposes, reorganizing simple stimulus-response causality into generative, creative action that evaluates future experience. This reversal of causality provides control properties not explained by integrated information theory (IIT), which relies on a linear, deterministic cause-effect model. IIT is therefore incomplete, abstract, and disembodied, lacking an account of the psychobiology of consciousness that serves the vital agency of the organism.

Autism and Panpsychism: Putting process in mind

Jonathan Delafield-Butt preprint

Panpsychism offers a metaphysical framework in which mind and body form a coherent unity driven by agentive purpose. Motor control is a core aspect of mind, combining sensory experience, evaluation, and intentional movement. This mind-body process is disrupted in autistic individuals, as shown by empirical analysis of spatiotemporal movement properties. The paper argues that panpsychism explains mind as fundamentally composed of mind-body sensorimotor agency units, the basic building blocks of embodied experience. This post-Cartesian view allows deeper consideration of movement's role in subjective experience and its disturbance in autism, affecting cognition and neural substrates.