RESUMEN
Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information. This is possible by taking advantage of the features of the environment. The examples suggest an easy and appealing naturalization of rationality: on the one hand, people clearly can apply simple heuristics, and on the other hand, they intuitively ought do so when this brings them high accuracy at little cost.. The 'ought-can' principle is satisfied, and rationality is meaningfully normative. We show, however, that this naturalization program is endangered by a computational wrinkle in the adaptation process taken to be responsible for this heuristics-based ('ecological') rationality: for the adaptation process to guarantee even minimal rationality, it requires astronomical computational resources, making the problem intractable. We consider various plausible auxiliary assumptions in attempt to remove this obstacle, and show that they do not succeed; intractability is a robust property of adaptation. We discuss the implications of our findings for the project of naturalizing rationality.
RESUMEN
The development of a sense of agency is essential for understanding the causal structure of the world. Previous studies have shown that infants tend to increase the frequency of an action when it is followed by an effect. This was shown, for instance, in the mobile-paradigm, in which infants were in control of moving an overhead mobile by means of a ribbon attached to one of their limbs. These findings have been interpreted as evidence for a sense of agency early in life, as infants were thought to have detected the causal action-movement relation. We argue that solely the increase in action frequency is insufficient as evidence for this claim. Computer simulations are used to demonstrate that systematic, limb-specific increase in movement frequency found in mobile-paradigm studies can be produced by an artificial agent (a 'babybot') implemented with a mechanism that does not represent cause-effect relations at all. Given that a sense of agency requires representing one's actions as the cause of the effect, a behavior that is reproduced with this non-representational babybot can be argued to be, in itself, insufficient as evidence for a sense of agency. However, a behavioral pattern that to date has received little attention in the context of sense of agency, namely an additional increase in movement frequency after the action-effect relation is discontinued, is not produced by the babybot. Future research could benefit from focusing on patterns whose production cannot be reproduced by our babybot as these may require the capacity for causal learning.
