Essentially Embodied Agency II: Guidance and Trying

Abstract

Abstract Second, in Section 4.2 we look at Brian O’Shaughnessy’s conception of trying in order to help us make sense of the synchronous mental activity of active guidance that causes intentional action. But while O’Shaughnessy correlates successful tryings with corresponding overt intentional body movements that are temporally separated from trying events, by contrast we take trying to be a conscious, intentional process, grounded in desirebased emotion, that begins as incarnated by the neurobiological processes of the agent’s living organismic body, occurs synchronously with those neurobiological processes, and also extends throughout the entire duration of the overt intentional body movements that arise from and accompany those trying-informed neurobiological processes. Finally, in Section 4.3, we respond to a serious challenge to our theory from contemporary cognitive science.