I’m starting a new thread to discuss what I call “the hard problem of intentionality”: what is intentionality, and to what extent can intentionality be reconciled with “naturalism” (however narrowly or loosely construed)?
Here’s my most recent attempt to address these issues:
McDowell writes:
Consider this passage from Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 41: “Dualism, the idea that the brain cannot be a thinking thing so a thinking thing cannot be a brain, is tempting for a variety of reasons, but we must resist temptation . . . Somehow the brain must be the mind”. But a brain cannot be a thinking thing (it is, as Dennett himself remarks, just a syntactic engine). Dualism resides not in the perfectly correct thought that a brain is not a thinking thing, but in postulating some thing immaterial to be the thinking thing that the brain is not, instead of realizing that the thinking thing is the rational animal. Dennett can be comfortable with the thought that the brain must be the mind, in combination with his own awareness that the brain is just a syntactic engine, only because he thinks that in the sense in which the brain is not really a thinking thing, nothing is: the status of possessor of intentional states is conferred by adoption of the intentional stance towards it, and that is no more correct for animals than for brains, or indeed thermostats. But this is a gratuitous addition to the real insight embodied in the invocation of the intentional stance. Rational animals genuinely are “semantic engines”. (“Naturalism in Philosophy of Mind,” 2004)
Elsewhere McDowell has implied that non-rational animals are also semantic engines, and I think this is a view he ought to endorse more forthrightly and boldly than he has. But brains are, of course, syntactic engines.
So it seems quite clear to me that one of the following has to be the case:
(1) neurocomputational processes (‘syntax’) are necessary and sufficient for intentional content (‘semantics’) [Churchland];
(2) intentional content is a convenient fiction for re-describing what can also be described as neurocomputational processes [Dennett] (in which case there really aren’t minds at all; here one could easily push on Dennett’s views to motivate eliminativism);
(3) neurocomputational processes are necessary but not sufficient for intentional content; the brain is merely a syntactic engine, whereas the rational animal is a semantic engine; the rational animal, and not the brain, is the thinking thing; the brain of a rational animal is not the rational animal, since it is a part of the whole and not the whole [McDowell].
I find myself strongly attracted to all three views, actually, but I think that (3) is slightly preferable to (1) and (2). My worry with (1) is that I don’t find Churchland’s response to Searle entirely persuasive (even though I find Searle’s own views completely unhelpful). Is syntax necessary and sufficient for semantics? Searle takes it for granted that this is obviously and intuitively false. In response, Churchland says, “maybe it’s true! we’ll have to see how the cognitive neuroscience turns out — maybe it’s our intuition that’s false!”. Well, sure. But unless I’m missing something really important, we’re not yet at a point in our understanding of the brain where we can understand how semantics emerges from syntax.
My objection to (2) is quite different — I think that the concept of intentionality plays far too central a role in our ordinary self-understanding for us to throw it under the bus as a mere convenient fiction. Of course, our ordinary self-understanding is hardly sacrosanct; we will have to revise it in the future in light of new scientific discoveries, just as we have in the past. But there is a limit to how much revision is conceivable, because if we jettison the very concept of rational agency, we will lose our grip on our ability to understand what science itself is and why it is worth doing. Our ability to do science at all, and to make sense of what we are doing when we do science, presupposes the notion of rational agency, hence intentionality, and abandoning that concept due to modern science would effectively mean that science has shown that we do not know what science is. That would be a fascinating step in the evolution of consciousness, but I’m not sure it’s one I’m prepared to take.
So that leaves (3), or something like it, as the contender: we must on the one hand, retain the mere sanity that we (and other animals) are semantic engines, bearers of intentional content; on the other hand, we accept that our brains are syntactic engines, running parallel neurocomputational processes. This entails that the mind is not the brain after all, but also that rejecting mind-brain identity offers no succor to dualism.
Neil Rickert’s response is here, followed by Petrushka’s here.
Many years ago, back in the 1960s, I worked in a lab that was down the hall from another lab that recorded the brain activity of cats under different forms of drugs. The cats had octal sockets in the top of their heads with probes into various parts of their brains.
I often wondered what would happen if one used a patch cable to plug two cats together. Would they think each others thoughts? What would they experience?
That can be approximated with sensory deprivation experiments. The result is usually hallucinations.
But that’s been done, to the extent allowed by ethics.
Mike,
Someone did a similar experiment last year:
Rodent mind-meld
keiths:
Mike:
Yes, but the hallucinations don’t start immediately, and the subject continues to think meaningful thoughts. His brain doesn’t cease to be a ‘semantic engine’.
That’s neat! And what better place to report it than on Wired.com. 🙂
That would be consistent with the behaviors of many complex systems that are disconnected from external stimuli that keep them “synchronized.” A very important part of neural development is stimuli very early on; otherwise networks don’t develop in a way that allows them to respond to stimuli.
I don’t know the details of “phantom pain” that many amputees experience. However, I have read reports and have seen videos of the relief of phantom pain by fooling the brain into seeing the missing limb and the use of technology to allow those parts of the brain that were associated with the missing limb to send signals that manipulate the image. This is all part of the research that is currently going on to use implanted electronics to control artificial limbs.
I suspect the philosophical arguments over what the brain does, and how it does it, will be settled by science and technology. There is an awful lot of data that point to the necessity of the brain being connected to an external world in order to function properly; and that is – perhaps not surprisingly – evidence that the brain is like many other complex systems immersed in an environment that provides stimuli.
Some of these ideas have even been captured in the notion of “the invisible hand of the marketplace.” Stimuli are needed to keep the complex system stable, even though the origin of “stability” is as hard to pin down as “intentionality”; and inappropriate manipulation and/or loss of feedback can send the system into chaos.
There is a BBC Horizon documentary called Alone: Total Isolation, where subjects were sensorily deprived for 48 hours. Haven’t watched it yet.
Interestingly, 50% of people can see their body movements in the dark, which reduces sensory deprivation.
This is all tangential, as the question is the possibility of thought for a brain without a body, an active research area.
Seems that the conclusion is that intentionality is not compatible with naturalism.
a) The major objections are: A process with no intention like evolution cannot produce intentionality.
b) The brain made by neurons is able only to make feed beck loops. That can explain conditioned responses not intention. Adding the entire body do not solve the problem, as the brain only needs the at least one sensory conections to express intention.
The practical conclusion is that our feel of intentionality is only an evolved illusion that give us reproductive success. Consistent with the nichilism and the irrationality of naturalistic morality.
The problem still to be solved for naturalists is our capacity of abstraction or as you call the semantic activity of our brain. Because we can say that our intentionality is an illusion, but our capacity of abstraction is real.
That is an assertion not an argument.
I presume you mean intentionality not intention. Why are you so sure that the brain alone is involved in intentionality?
Conclusion of what?
Is that what you think, or are you saying that is what naturalists think? Dennett’s views are not universally accepted.
Why not start with God. Does God have a brain. NO. So why do we need one.?
Why not just say we have a soul and that is meshed to the material world in what is called the brain. I think the brain is just a big memory machine. or a machine that seems to be just about memory. Its self operating.
We just use this memory ability to control our body and to think. however our souls think fine but we need to have memory to think with.
A computer without memory is worthless today. A computer with memory can play chess. Yet no thinking is going on. just memory equations.
likewise we are DUAL only in being souls needing a memory.
This is why all issues with the mind, like retardation, phobias, depressions etc are entirely problems with the triggering mechanism for the memory.
nothing to do with the soul. nothing wrong with the thinking except the use of memory.
Therefore babies are just severally retarded people with , also, no original information.
They come out it in time.
This explains also prodigy’s . they are simply kids whose memories were more provoked into action. Its always about things dealing with memory.
The old concept of the soul and the addition of the dominating power of the memory is all that is needed to explain human thinking.
animals have spirits meshed with their memories but are not made in Gods image.
Oops. Thanks. I meant “intentionality”, which is the one we are discussing here. When I ducked under water I had the intention of encouraging the horsefly to go away. (Successfully, as it happens).
I did not mean to use the word “intensionality”, whose meaning I don’t know, and which is not AFAIK under discussion here.
The reason I said “confuse you further” is that the technical term “intentionality” does not mean the same thing as in everyday use. When you think about the horsefly, you are using your intentionality, whether you have formed an intention to act or not. What is relevant is that a thing, the horsefly, is the object of your thought, in both senses of the word. “Intentionality” as a technical term in philosophy is to do with “aboutness”, not intention to act.
The horsefly is not thinking about you. Probably. It does not have intentionality.
davehooke,
The horsefly is not thinking about you. Probably. It does not have intentionality.
How can you possibly know this? What test did you use?
And how is that philosophers speak with such authority on subjects where they’ve done no experiments at all?
Well, that’s the difference between mathematics and science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. If I asked the analogous question of a mathematician and scientist, I’d either get “We don’t know” or an answer or a explicit reference to the literature. With a philosopher I get a vague assurance about the size of the literature, but no reference or answer … thus leaving me just as much in the dark as before.
: That is an assertion not an argument.
Yes, that led to my conclusion.
davehooke
I presume you mean intentionality not intention. Why are you so sure that the brain alone is involved in intentionality?
Nobody bring any evidence that any other part of the body has influence in itentionality.
davehooke
Is that what you think, or are you saying that is what naturalists think? Dennett’s views are not universally accepted.
Is the logical conclusion if you accept naturalism.
Do you believe in ghosts?
shallit:
Your error was in assuming that if we don’t drop everything and define intentionality to your satisfaction, then we can’t say “anything meaningful” about it.
You can Google “intentionality” just as easily as a non-mathematician can Google “Lie groups”.
P.S. I’m not a philosopher.
Nature has done that experiment with human conjoint twins:
Do conjoint twins share a mind?
I see parallels with Intelligent Design advocates and concepts such as “complex specified information”. How can anyone present such a concept as a measure or estimate of something without any clear definition or example?
Having first fallen into the trap that “intentionality” has something to do with intention, I looked it up using Google. I must say I didn’t find the references (linked in a comment above) very illuminating. What the heck is “aboutness” about? Seems a similar red herring to “quale” to me.
This is closely related to Plantinga’s EAAN; he argues that we clearly have reliable beliefs but such a facility could not be produced by naturalistic evolution, hence naturalistic evolution as the sole mechanism for human development must be false.
Any counter-argument require a naturalistic explanations for the evolution of reliable mental content. Such explanations are still works in progress. Millikan’s take on teleological semantics is one contender.
Discussed at SZ here
Plantinga’s EAAN
What would the thoughts of a brain in a vat mean, in the sense of what would they refer to?
Putnam’s “twin water” argument is intended to show that meaning is not just in the head but involves the external environment as well. He extends that to brains in a vat.
Suppose the envatted brain is being artificially stimulated by some computer. If such a brain was thinking of water, are its thoughts about that wet stuff we drink or are they about the virtual world maintained by the computer which is controlling the envatted brain?
Meaning and Envatted Brains
For similar reasons, I think that brains alone are not enough for understanding intentionality. We also need to understand the environment the brain/body is causally interacting with and the environment its ancestors interacted with and how the resulting evolutionary/biological history affected the current functionality of the brain in serving its purpose of helping the human being to live and reproduce.
That question was made by davehooke, I suppose he will answer .
I think that as we know how a neuron works there is no way for a naturalistic explanation of mental content. The most you can build with many neurons is a sophisticated net of feedback loops.
Hi Blas: I think we agreed to disagree in a previous discussion (about stochastic processes and science) and I suspect we’ll end up at the same place in this case, but let’s see how far we get.
I agree that we don’t have a naturalistic explanation for mental content yet, but I don’t agree that there is an irrefutable argument that we never will have it.
Can you help me understand why you think we think we never will and how it relates to your concerns with an evolutionary explanation?
1. Do you think that people have reliable mental content today?
2. If so, do you think that there is a completely naturalistic explanation as to why we have reliable mental content today? I just mean how it works today, not how such capability may be been created/evolved/designed.
3. If answer to 2 is no, you don’t think mental content today can be explained naturally, then probably that is the point where we will agree to disagree, although I’d like to understand how you think mental content works then.
4. If answer to 2 is yes, then where is your concern with explaining mental content? Is it that we just are not smart enough to do it, or is it that it could not have evolved naturally (I understand the latter to be Plantinga’s position).
The difference between us here, is that you see categorization as something that is done with data, while I see categorization as interaction with the world that is prior to having data.
oops
I don’t. I am describing the use of the term.
I am simply interested in philosophy. I claim no authority on intentionality.
If your argument has a premise which is not established as true then there is no good reason to accept the argument as true. The argument fails. It is labelled “unsound”. What evidence do you have that the premise “A process with no intention like evolution cannot produce intentionality” is, at the very least, probably true?
Here.
You can find more if you want to.
I don’t believe in ghosts but I didn’t ask the question.
Blas ignores the fact that from the long view, evolution displays intention.
Intention is an attribute supplied by us to describe the behavior of systems that adapt to or anticipate consequences.
It is, as most such words are, a metaphor.
I think the metaphor applies to the human emotional state that accompanies action. A related word is motivation. There was some research a few years ago that suggested the emotional state follows the start of action, rather than precedes it.
I’m still trying to figure out whether the thread topic applies to this or to sentences or statements. Gregory is correct in asserting I am too simple minded to meddle in philosophy.
The EAAN depends on Plantinga’s metaphysics.
That seems exactly right to me.
For similar reasons, I think that a suitably “envatted” brain — a brain that had some categorical structure encoded in its synaptic patterns, and wired up to the right inputs and outputs, receiving information from an environment (presumably a computer), would be a component in a semantic engine — only the semantic engine would be the brain+vat+computer, rather than, as in our case, the brain+body+environment. However, if the computer inputs were such to produce the appearance of a body+environment system, then the brain’s thoughts, although genuine thoughts, would not be about its actual, causal situation. It would as systematically deceived as Descartes’ res cogitans would be if there were an ‘evil genius’ afoot.
On a slightly different topic — I think that the EAAN doesn’t depend on Plantinga’s metaphysics, but it does depend on his semantics. (Specifically, it relies on his intuitions about how to think about the reliability of cognition, what beliefs are, how they acquire content, and how to think about the correspondence between beliefs and the world. Plantinga is an internalist about content and an atomist about beliefs) But since Plantinga’s semantics is not an account of semantic content that any naturalist would (or should) accept, it fails as an internal criticism of naturalism, and so fails to show that naturalism is self-refuting. A naturalist who accepts Millikan’s teleosemantics or Churchland’s neurosemantics is not vulnerable to the EAAN — as both Millikan and Churchland have shown in their responses to Plantinga. So the EAAN is simply a non-starter, period.
Here is how I see it. Plantinga simply assumes that, regarding contingent, physical states of affairs in our universe, there can be justified true belief about such states of affairs beyond what is uncovered by empirical enquiry. This seems to me to be dependent on a metaphysics, but either way the important thing is it may not be the case.
The supernatural must interact with the physical if any such thing has any influence on the physical. Thus there must be physical effects that can be uncovered by empirical enquiry. Yay science. There is no good evidence for the supernatural, and so via methodological naturalism, naturalism is a provisional metaphysics, which I will abandon as soon as there IS good evidence for the supernatural.
I know I will and I understand, I know other people knows and understand.
No.
I do not know. I know that in orther to know I need a starting point, and to will I need the ability to “immagine” other situation. There is no possible naturalistic explanation for a starting point for knowledge or immagination.
There is no possible naturalistic explanation for a starting point for knowledge or immagination.
Well all the darwinists explains that there is no intention in evolution. Ramdom mutation and ramdom fixation by drift are the main process of it. Also they states that humans, then intentional beens are just here by chance.
Here.
You can find more if you want to.
In the comments of this posts where asked, what add tha body to the brain? Which part of the body is necessary for intentionality?
And I have to say, there are people that have his body disconected from his brain due lesions in the spinal cord that live attached at a machine having only his head working. They are still intentionally beens.
Yes you did here.
Darwinist change speach as usual. Now we have teleology in evolution.
Well we agree for naturalists intention is a metaphor.
Yes. It used to be “speech”. And now, apparently, it is “speach”.
(Just having a bit of fun there).
As for teleology – the scientific objection is to the kind of teleology typically argued by theists. Biologists have coined the word “teleonomy” for the kind of teleology that they see appropriate. There’s actually less change than you think there is.
There is no change in “speach.”
Darwin started with Paley’s design inference and showed how design could be explained by a natural process. Reality does not change because you use different metaphors to describe it.
What has happened is that there are holdovers from Paley’s day who are obsessed with denying that people are cousins to chimps. They do not give a damn about truth or evidence. All they care about is extracting donations from stupid and ignorant people. In the United States, they are the Discovery Institute, plus numerous unaffiliated churches. In other parts of the world they have other sponsors and allies.
But let us be honest about what is being discussed. Intention, when applied to active agents — people or otherwise — is a metaphor for a little man inside the man. A decider inside the decider. Call it a soul, or whatever suits your philosophy or theology.
Philosophers and theologians seem to consider thinking to be comprised of words and sentences.
Is this the case?
Well the difference is as big as the difference between teleonomy and teleology.
Can you explain to me which of this is an intentional process:
A gas expanding in another gas.
A system changing to the lower level of energy maximun entropy
A self replicator replicating
An individual E. coli maintaining itself in optimum nutrient concentration by “tumble and run”.
Off course. If you accept a naturalistic metaphysics intent is a metaphor. I said that.
Concepts and statements.
If your “is this the case” is asking about philosophers and theologians, then it does seem to be the case. There are probably exceptions.
If you are asking whether thinking is linguistic – probably not, at least in my opinion. I’m inclined to say that thinking is primarily semantic, and that the syntactic elements (words and sentences) just come along for a free ride, mostly because we are in the habit of accompanying our semantics with words.
My own thinking is not confined by my vocabulary. I can think about ideas where I might later have to coin words if I want to communicate those ideas.
You would do better to ask “to which of these would you ascribe intention”. It isn’t a question of what is happening physically. Rather, it is the question of which form of language expression is most useful to describe what is happening.
Would it be cheating to suggest that some kinds of thinking require language?
I think language is another layer of the onion. Support for language is almost literally another layer of the cortex.
I would say language enables thinking but is not thinking.
More is different. You can determine that thinking and consciousness require a physical substrate, but you cannot explain them in terms of the substrate.
Emergence is not an explanation, but it is what we mean when when we say you cannot derive the properties of complex things from the properties of their constituents.
Well, which is your answer?
This does not answer my question. What evidence do you have that this premise:
A process with no intention like evolution cannot produce intentionality
is at the very least probably true?
Read what I linked to, and perhaps some of the other literature on embodied brains v disembodied brains, and respond to that. The source gives reasons why we should think of the body+brain as a whole system.