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  1. (1 other version)Hunger, Homeostasis, and Desire.Mohan Matthen - 2023 - Mind and Language 40:1–18.
    Hunger is a psychological state that serves physiological energy homeostasis. I argue that it is a pure underived desire to eat and examine its role in homeostasis. After scene-setting explanations of homeostasis and desire, I argue that hunger is a close phenomenological match with underived desire. Then, I show why desire is an apt instrument for energy homeostasis. Finally, I argue that energy homeostasis is a multi-factorial future-regarding behavioural strategy. Hunger is a special purpose sensory state that serves only to (...)
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  • Reinforcement learning and artificial agency.Patrick Butlin - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (1):22-38.
    There is an apparent connection between reinforcement learning and agency. Artificial entities controlled by reinforcement learning algorithms are standardly referred to as agents, and the mainstream view in the psychology and neuroscience of agency is that humans and other animals are reinforcement learners. This article examines this connection, focusing on artificial reinforcement learning systems and assuming that there are various forms of agency. Artificial reinforcement learning systems satisfy plausible conditions for minimal agency, and those which use models of the environment (...)
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  • The normativity of gender.Rach Cosker-Rowland - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):244-270.
    There are important similarities between moral thought and talk and thought and talk about gender: disagreements about gender, like disagreements about morality, seem to be intractable and to outstrip descriptive agreement; and it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be a woman in terms of particular social, biological, or other descriptive features, just as it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be good or right in terms of any set of (...)
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  • Do affective desires provide reasons for action?Ashley Shaw - 2020 - Ratio 34 (2):147-157.
    This paper evaluates the claim that some desires provide reasons in virtue of their connection with conscious affective experiences like feelings of attraction or aversion. I clarify the nature of affective desires and several distinct ways in which affective desires might provide reasons. Against accounts proposed by Ruth Chang, Declan Smithies and Jeremy Weiss, I motivate doubts that it is the phenomenology of affective experiences that explains their normative or rational significance. I outline an alternative approach that centralises the function (...)
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  • (1 other version)Defending the motivational theory of desire.David Pineda Oliva - forthcoming - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science.
    In this paper I offer a defense of the motivational theory of desire. According to the motivational view, a desire is basically a disposition to bring about the desire's content. First, I argue that two rival views on the nature of desire, the evaluative theory and the deontic theory, fall prey to the problem of the death of desire and that, when one tries to develop a plausible version of these theories which is able to overcome this problem, one ends (...)
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  • (1 other version)Hunger, homeostasis, and desire.Mohan Matthen - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (3):397-414.
    Hunger is a psychological state that serves physiological energy homeostasis. I argue that it is a pure underived desire to eat and examine its role in homeostasis. After scene‐setting explanations of homeostasis and desire, I argue that hunger is a close phenomenological match with underived desire. Then, I show why desire is an apt instrument for energy homeostasis. Finally, I argue that energy homeostasis is a multi‐factorial future‐regarding behavioural strategy. Hunger is a special purpose sensory state that serves only to (...)
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