The hard part about the idea that everything carries objective information is that I don’t see how we parse the information into objective categories. You could say that the current state of the entire universe carries all the available information about the previous state; and I suspect that it takes minds to decide what that information is about.

I think that there is NOT a necessary connection between intentionality and consciousness; I think a chess computer exhibits clearly intentional behavior.

This is a fascinating discussion, both here and at Dr. V’s.

If I’m reading you right, is it then proper to say a chess-playing computer exhibits intentionality insofar as its subroutines are “about” what’s happening on the chessboard, and insofar as the computer’s moves exhibit a “measure of dependency” on what the opponent decides to do?

One of my own questions is whether there is a necessary link between intentionality and consciousness. If Daniel Dennett’s lock-and-key example is a type of intentionality, then it would seem that consciousness is not necessary for intentionality. The same would go for the chess-playing computer, I should think. Most would agree the computer isn’t conscious.

If, however, we apply the word “intentionality” to things that aren’t conscious, are we misusing the word, or will “intentional” simply have to be redefined to include a wider semantic field? The same might be true for “information,” a word I usually take to imply the existence of the informer and the informed (i.e., a conscious mind capable of receiving and digesting data).

Kevin

Note how this objective information, and so, whatever intentionality it partakes of, is tied to actually existing states of affairs. But that makes it distinct from the sort of intentionality that first captured the imaginations of philosophers who emphasized that intentional objects need not be actual. What aroused their interest was the way we have thoughts about “mere” possibilities. I, too, find that very, very interesting. But I recognize immediately that something other than the aboutness of objective information is at work here, since it requires whatever it’s about to actually exist.

I do tend to agree with Spur’s latest comment that brain structure is an important element in intentionality. I wonder if the problem with of the current theory comes down to an attempt to make the mental irreducibly distinct from the physical.

I get lost in a number of the discussions because philosophy tends to lift a thing out of its real context, manipulate it and when it the discussion is done the thing is not quite the same as when it started.

Bob,
I too would be interested in hearing more about the different types of intentionality as it seems to me that the usage of the word gets slightly modified depending on the context.

Thanks, as always, for commenting.

As far as the discussion over at Bill’s is concerned, I’d agree that representations such as pictures get all of their “aboutness” from the associative networks in the heads of the creator and the viewer. As for cognitive “aboutness”, I’d say that in the same way that I can make marks on a page that are “about” their intended subject, likewise I can make “marks” in my neural architecture that carry the same associative connections. All I am doing is using built-in, rather than external, memory.

I think that if one is to accept that humans have unconscious wishes, beliefs, anger, etc., then one must grant those phenomena intentional content, and therefore intentionality is separate from consciousness. Some say that it is sufficient that an intentional state is one that merely could become conscious, but that seems rather weak to me. Worth a new post, perhaps. But what “new” forms of intentionality do you imagine? Can you say more about that?

Many years of practice thinking about natural selective processes leave me very comfortable with the notion that products of selection are “for” something. But that needs to be clearly distinguished from the notion that representations are “about” something. Being a representation is a particular sort of “being for” which is not directly comparable to other sorts of “being for” (e.g., being for representing is not comparable to being for digesting, or being for locomotion, etc.). So establishing that natural selection can generate things that are “for” something, doesn’t allow an automatic inference that it can generate things that are “about” something. I think it can do the latter, but that depends entirely on how we articulate the notion of intentionality/aboutness.

Regarding the putative independence of intentionality and consciousness, I worry that you might be generalizing from a too narrow base. As I said over at the Maverick’s place, it might well be that consciousness gives rise to new forms of intentionality, limiting the scope of the independence thesis. But only time, much careful investigation and even more critical thinking will settle these issues.

In any case, thanks for blogging on this topic and prompting me to clarify, even a little, how I think the issues might connect to each other.