Hi Dariusz,

Thank you very much for reading the article and for your thoughtful comment!

Whether reasons can be causes remains controversial in philosophy and some corners of science. Part of the difficulty has to do with disagreements about the nature of the mind.

For example, the likes of Dennett see the mind as functionally definable and therefore in principle algorithmically replicable. This means that he ultimately sees intentionality (that aspect of the mind that's directed at the world via beliefs, desires etc) as a folk-theorem; meaning that our beliefs are a shorthand for ascribing mental states to ourselves and others, but they're only a coarse grained description of what's going on. What's really going on is a complex neural causal state that's too complex to describe at our stage of understanding.

I don't disagree with him that the mind is functionally definable, but where we potentially disagree is that beliefs are only a short-hand for a neural causal story (I personally believe that beliefs are neurally constituted but we can't explain them away or describe them as on par with unconscious neural processing). The complication comes from how we end up characterizing consciousness. Dennett's been characterized as an eliminativist about consciousness. The problem with Dennett's account is that his view of intentionality has no way of discriminating humans causally from, let's say, proximate species. This is where "mental contents", however way they're neurally constituted, seem explanatory relevant as exerting influence on behaviour in virtue of the agent's internal access to them.

Anyway, this was a bit of a roundabout reply, but if there's any hope of building an AGI (artificial general intelligence), we'd need to engineer systems that can reflect like we do and we don't seem to be able to put our finger yet on how it is that our brains can generate reflective awareness.