[Wittrs] Re: Original and derived intentionality
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:27:40 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
>
> So a referential relation between an A and a B,
> even if A is unaware and B is unaware of the said relation,
> counts as intentional? Well, maybe. I can see why you'd say
> that
OK!
> and, given my oft-expressed view about continuums, I'd be
> inclined to be sympathetic with this to some degree. Still,
> it doesn't "look" like anything we recognize as intentional
> in ourselves.
But I suggest it does.
I think your "recognize" here is that it lacks the qualia
we "feel" with intention. But if you want "feel", get an
injection of adrenaline. Your mind then has to decide if
you are feeling fear or anger or exhilaration. The quale
comes separately from the intentionality.
> Of course, that doesn't mean there is a qualitative
> difference between our being "intentional" toward B
> and A's being "intentional". As I've tried to suggest
> in the past, consideration of what happens in our own
> experience when we think about something (have
> intentionality toward it) suggests that what's
> going on is a complex set of connections via
> association being made by us.
I'm generally suspicious (to the point of automatic
rejection) of any arguments that involve scale. What
is going on may be complex, but the intentionality,
I think, may come in very small pieces - the mind is
a bunch of little intentionalities, not a case of
you need a zillion things to have one intentionality.
There may be some minimum number of components in
a complete set. If you have one wheel and one piston
you don't have a car, but it's not a matter that you
need more complexity, it's that you need enough pieces
of various shapes and functions to constitute a
minimal whole. I do see a need for that kind of
mereological or compositional logic, in talking about
computation per se.
> > That's still pretty vague, and we probably need an
> > agent A somewhere in the story.
>
> On your view anything that causes something else is
> an agent.
No, not at all.
Or, well, ... now that you put it that way,
I'm not sure. I've never been quite certain just
how to define agent, actually. It's something along
the lines of a circumscribed physical system. The
blue jay is an agent for begging peanuts and caching
them in the flower pots, but I'm not "causation" is
the issue, indeed an agent may be the unit of measure
for receiving causation.
> Of course, usually when someone speaks of "agent"
> they mean a subjective agent, an agent that initiates
> things for reasons rather than because they are caused to.
> Which kind of an agent do you have in mind?
Not Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. Not.
But "subjective", perhaps, in my usual deflationary
style. If X is an agent, and you hit X with a hammer,
than it will have a subjective dent, even if X is just
a chunk of wood. So much for subjective. But no, I don't
really want to say a chunk of wood is either an agent,
or has subjective properties. We get to, we have to,
stipulate just what we want to refer to as such an agent
in regards to discussions of mind, that's half the
battle, at least. Something about having intentional
states THAT CAN BE EXPLICITLY MAPPED is going to be a
part of it, I think. That's *almost* a "stance", but
not really.
The question of how one defines "agent" gets tied
up with a lot of traditional philosophical speculations
about identity, right on down to Ship of Theseus and
all that. One wants to respect some of that work,
but also not get bogged down in it. A lot of traditional
philosophy does a nice Wittgensteinian job of dissolving
the entire idea of identity - leaving you standing with
nothing. We need something.
(there, got in my ObW)
And, Turing computation is the new item in the
discussion. Ship of Theseus didn't have a digital nav
system. If a computer chip isn't an agent for running
programs, then I give up on the whole project and I'll
take up philately instead.
> > ObW: Does Wittgenstein accept, require, or forbid intentionality?
> >
> > Er, ... probably none of the above. Ouch.
> >
> > Josh
> >
>
> I don't recall Wittgenstein dealing in any explicit way
> with intentionality but perhaps I'm wrong. Nevertheless, I can't
> imagine he would have denied that we think about things though
> perhaps he'd have denied the significance of trying to
> characterize the phenomenon linguistically in any
> technical way as Brentano did.
Well, as I see it in brief, "meaning is use" gives you
something like intentionality in the use side of things,
with no further need to reify and discuss it, W might say,
boom, all dissolved. And this is all well and good, for
W's purposes. But I don't want to just dissolve things,
I need to put handles on them, come up with specs for
them, and turn them out in job lots. Different game,
even if the things are the same and we recognize them
as such.
Josh
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