Thomas Metzinger
Wanja Wiese
Wanja Wiese
This paper deals with the question of agency and intentionality in the context of the free-energy principle. The free-energy
principle is a system-theoretic framework for understanding living self-organizing systems and how they relate to their environments.
I will first sketch the main philosophical positions in the literature: a rationalist Helmholtzian interpretation (Hohwy 2013;
Clark 2013), a cybernetic interpretation (Seth 2015b) and the enactive affordance-based interpretation (Bruineberg and Rietveld
2014; Bruineberg et al. 2016) and will then show how agency and intentionality are construed differently on these different
philosophical interpretations. I will then argue that a purely Helmholtzian is limited, in that it can account only account
for agency in the context of perceptual inference. The cybernetic account cannot give a full account of action, since purposiveness
is accounted for only to the extent that it pertains to the control of homeostatic essential variables. I will then argue
that the enactive affordance-based account attempts to provide broader account of purposive action without presupposing goals
and intentions coming from outside of the theory. In the second part of the paper, I will discuss how each of these three
interpretations conceives of the sense agency and intentionality in different ways.