Feeling and Thinking about the Future: Offline Metacognition in Decision-Making

Abstract

In the article, I will argue that metacognition plays an important role in decision-making not only as direct online monitoring and control of decision-making processes but also by enabling us to influence our decisions and actions -and mental states and processes, related to them -in an offline manner. That is, offline metacognition allows us to observe, refer to and, to a certain degree, exert influence on mental states and processes related to our decisions and actions in the way of being removed, decoupled from the task/decision at hand and present time demands. As such, it enables us to observe, form thoughts and have feelings about mental states and processes directly related to our future decisions, to plan our future decisions, to reflect on our past choices, and to think and have feelings about our broader goals, desires, and personal values that are indirectly related to our decisions.To illustrate the importance of offline metacognition in decision-making, I will firstly review and discuss some experimental findings on implementation intentions ("decisions about the future") and anticipated emotions (beliefs about future emotional states related to outcomes of our decisions). Secondly, I will argue that our ability to reflect (think and feel) on our broader goals, desires and personal values -that represent a kind of structure into which our specific decisions are embeddedreveals how offline metacognition can exert influence on our decisions also in an indirect way. All in all, I will try to show that our ability to refer to our own minds in an offline way -be it to mental states and processes directly or indirectly related to specific decisions -is essential for us to decide, as we decide, and act, as we act.

Extended Cognition: Feedback Loops and Coupled Systems

“…I am more sceptic, as were in fact also Clark and Chalmers, about qualitative experiences and feelings. I think we are still struggling to give them a proper treatment in naturalistic approaches [26][27][28]. Nevertheless I think that the hypothesis of extended cognition opens up the need for new interdisciplinary collaborations between biological, humanistic, social and technical approaches.…”

“…[27][28]. In Tetris, the player rotates falling blocks to form complete horizontal rows which are then eliminated.…”

Suspension of Phenomenological Judgement of Scientific Naivety

“…No, the path to a better life practice, to a more sovereign mastery of the world and life, to a more perfected well-being, the path of perfecting the usefulness of actualpractical and hypothetical-abstract tools is not a good path to take?! Of course, the path of fruitfully intertwining the rationality of positive science and philosophy has already been taken decades ago, as witnessed, for example, in many a study and research projects by cognitive scientists [9][10][11][12]. Cognitive science is thus a rewarding example of a successful intertwining of theory and practice, where the phenomenological, strictly theoretical insights are invested into the scientific manipulation of cognitive reality.…”

Belief without Representation

“…This creates a normative perspective on the world where some interactions or possibilities are more important than others [11]. Thus, organisms (or their cognitive systems) "cast a web of significance on their world … and this is the definitional property of a cognitive system: the creation and appreciation of meaning or sense-making, in short" [11; p.39] (see also [12,13]). Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher [11] emphasise that the organism is not just a passive recipient of information from the environment, which is then translated into internal representations and evaluated: "cognitive systems are simply not in the business of accessing their world in order to build accurate pictures of it" [11: 39].…”