Intrinsic Intentionality Research Articles

Some necessary constructs of consciousness as defined in the dynamic organicity theory

The Dynamic Organicity Theory (DOT) explains consciousness as a process that cannot be reduced to a thing or a structure. This process, called the Polanyian process, involves the evolving diachronic boundary conditions of our experienceability. These boundary conditions are ontologically intertwined with higher-level boundary conditions, which lead to physiological nonlocal cause-and-effect relationships. Thus, adaptive changes occur when self-referential causal closure transforms syntactic structures into experienceable forms. Self-referential causal closure is a causal agent for diachronic boundary conditions that majorly structure intrinsic information in ways that experienceabilities are across time, suggesting that consciousness is not driven by an “internal clock” or regular biological rhythm but rather by intrinsic intentionality preceding path selection through a non-mechanical force of hidden thermodynamic energy that cascades to form a volitional agency of information-based action due to the gain of hidden intrinsic information. The process of transforming syntactical structures to experienceable forms in intrinsic informational pathways is conflated with nonlinear time, and its structuring defines the functionality of the brain. Consciousness-in-the-moment is an “averaging out” between different informational pathways involved across such nonlinear time. The transduction of quantum potential information as negentropic action is a motif for “potential complexity” to decrease the maximum complexity (derived from the brain structure, dynamics, and function) due to the reduction of uncertainty. Given that the functionality of maximum complexity lacks the self-referential causal closure to be a volitional agent needed for precognitive consciousness, it is proposed that negentropic entanglement unifies experienceabilities so that the functionality of multiscale complexity is greater than the functionality of maximum complexity. This may be enough to produce consciousness in organic systems.

Intrinsic Lexical Intentionality and the Mathematics of Homomorphism

Moisl [1, 2] proposed a model of how the brain implements intrinsic intentionality with respect to lexical and sentence meaning, where 'intrinsic' is understood as 'independent of interpretation by observers external to the cognitive agent'. The discussion in both was mainly philosophical and qualitative; the present paper gives a mathematical account of the distance structure preservation that underlies the proposed mechanism of intrinsic intentionality. The three-layer autoassociative multilayer perceptron (aMLP) architecture with nonlinear hidden and linear output layers is the component in the model which generates representations homomorphic with the environment. The discussion first cites existing work which identifies the aMLP as an implementation architecture for principal component analysis (PCA), and then goes on to argue that the homomorphism characteristic of linear functions like PCA extends to aMLPs with nonlinear activation functions in the hidden layer. The discussion is in two main parts: the first part outlines the model, and the second presents the mathematical account.

Hume’s “projectivism” explained

Hume appeals to a mysterious mental process to explain how to world appears to possess features that are not present in sense perceptions, namely causal, moral, and aesthetic properties. He famously writes that the mind spreads itself onto the external world, and that we stain or gild natural objects with our sentiments. Projectivism is founded on these texts but it assumes a reading of Hume’s language as merely metaphorical. This assumption, however, conflicts sharply with the important explanatory role that “spreading” and “staining” are supposed to play, which, ironically, is the very appeal of Hume’s texts to projectivists. In this paper, I first consider the difficulties readers of Hume have encountered in their attempts to ascertain nature of the key psychological process. I then identify in Hume’s texts novel theoretical resources that allow Hume to produce a satisfying answer to the question of process, that is, an account of the precise nature of the key process. I offer this explanation assuming what I take to be Hume’s austere conception of the elements involved in the process: sense impressions and “internal impressions” lacking intrinsic intentionality. On my reading, the spreading process explains the gap between the meager input and the rich, novel output: causal, moral and aesthetic judgments.

Dans la Chambre Obscure de l'Esprit: John Locke et l'Invention du Mind by Philippe Hamou

Reviewed by: Dans la Chambre Obscure de l'Esprit: John Locke et l'Invention du Mind by Philippe Hamou Walter Ott Philippe Hamou. Dans la Chambre Obscure de l'Esprit: John Locke et l'Invention du Mind. Paris: Ithaque, 2018. Pp. 444. Paper, €24. Philippe Hamou claims that Locke played a decisive but underappreciated role in inventing the current notion of mind, and in setting the agenda for contemporary philosophy of mind (16). These provocative theses, even when qualified as Hamou does, strike me as strained. It is hard, for example, to imagine the convoluted route by which one might identify Locke's secondary qualities with contemporary qualia, as Hamou does (17); surely, there must be qualia associated with primary qualities too. However, for most of his book, Hamou is concerned to advance his own intriguing interpretation of Locke himself, rather than engaging with contemporary philosophy of [End Page 347] mind. The first and larger half of the book deals with Locke's theory of ideas, while the second takes up a number of issues related to the ontological status of the mind, including Locke's use of the cogito, the hypothesis of thinking matter, and personal identity. Hamou's book is organized around the notion of "attracteurs doxastiques," "physical or metaphysical [positions] by means of which Locke's text is, so to speak, secretly organized" (51; all translations are mine). These doctrines run the gamut from familiar claims such as corpuscularianism and mechanism to the more esoteric, and certainly original, reading Hamou gives of Lockean ideas, a tacit doctrine that, despite Locke's official agnosticism, "polarizes the description" of ideas (116; 409). On Hamou's "picturaliste" reading, a Lockean idea is not a mental act or object but a picture in the most literal sense: a state of the eye or brain that results from bodies acting on us (200, 230, 409). This sort of view is familiar from Descartes's early works, such as Le Monde, but seems foreign to Locke. Hamou bases his interpretation partly on Locke's objections to Malebranche, though I would give these texts a different reading. (Admittedly, it is hard to know what sort of evidence counts when attributing an esoteric doctrine to a historical figure.) A different kind of argument for the picturaliste reading emerges when Hamou says that the attracteurs doxastiques are meant to explain otherwise puzzling features of the text, rather than appearing in the text themselves. In this vein, Hamou advertises the picturaliste reading as accounting for Locke's insouciance in the face of skepticism. Locke cannot take the veil of ideas worry seriously, since for him ideas are already physical objects. As Hamou puts it, "with ideas, a corner of the world is embedded in our head: this part of reality, at least, is shared with us!" (230–31). How the picturaliste reading improves over others is at times unclear. Hamou attacks imagist interpretations of Locke on the grounds that they cannot account for abstract ideas and ideas of reflection (164–65). However, it is hard to see how the picturaliste reading is any better off (unless that reading is simply re-defined, as appears to happen on 164). Another aspect of picturalisme is equally striking. One might think that the literal picture in the eye or brain represents something in the world in virtue of resembling it; this would be a natural way for the picturaliste to take all of Locke's talk of resemblance. Nevertheless, as Hamou's Locke sees it, "to identify the content of an idea is already to place it in the circle of ideas" (169; see 199). On Hamou's view, ideas have no intrinsic intentionality; they come to serve as representations only when subjected to "mental operations and habitual inferences," such as abstraction, comparison, and naming (230; 410). For evidence, Hamou appeals to Locke's metaphor of anamorphic painting in the Essay's discussion of confused ideas (II.xxix.8), though I confess the interpretive argument here eludes me. The second half of the book develops a reading of the Lockean self. As a result of the tension between Locke's agnosticism and another of those attracteurs doxastiques, Locke oscillates between...

Semantics Embodied: Cognitive Linguistics and Searle’s Account of Linguistic Intentionality

Semantics Embodied: Cognitive Linguistics and Searle’s Account of Linguistic Intentionality

I-The Presidential Address: Sensory Experience and Representational Properties

This paper is about the nature of conscious sensory properties. My initial thesis is that these properties should not be equated with representational properties. I argue that any such representationalist view is in danger of implying that conscious sensory properties are constituted by relations to propositions or other abstract objects outside space and time; and I add that, even if this implication can be avoided, the broadness of representational properties in any case renders them unsuitable to constitute conscious properties. In place of the representational account, I then defend an equation of conscious sensory properties with intrinsic non-relational properties of subjects, and I show how this view deals naturally with all the difficulties facing representationalism. I conclude by defending this non-relational account of conscious experience against arguments from the ‘transparency’ and the ‘intrinsic intentionality’ of experience.

Intentionality and Presence: On the Intrinsic Of-ness of Consciousness from a Transcendental-Phenomenological Perspective.

This paper discusses the nature of consciousness’ intrinsic intentionality from a transcendental-phenomenological viewpoint. In recent philosophy of mind the essentially intentional character of consciousness has become obscured because the latter is predominantly understood in terms of “qualia” or the “what-it-is-like-ness” of mental states and it is hard to see why such subjective “feels”, of all things, could bestow states with objective reference. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, this is an inadequate understanding of consciousness, which should instead be defined in terms of presence. Consciousness essentially takes place as presence-of, i.e., consists in something coming to appearance. This presence-of is not only a fundamental, irreducible phenomenon, but also in a radical sense un-naturalisable. Naturalism only knows “nature”, as the world of objects, and the question of intentionality then seems to be how certain inner-worldly objects can be “representations” of other inner-worldly objects. In fact, no object is ever intrinsically “about” anything. This is exclusively the nature of subjectivity qua consciousness, which is not an object alongside other objects but rather exists as the manifestation of objects.

On the Distinctively Human: Two Perspectives on the Evolution of Language and Conscious Mind

In this paper, two alternative naturalistic standpoints on the relations between language, human consciousness and social life are contrasted. The first, dubbed “intrinsic naturalism,” is advocated among others by the realist philosopher John Searle; it starts with intrinsic intentionality and consciousness emerging from the brain, explains language as an outgrowth of consciousness and ends with institutional reality being created by language‐use. That standpoint leans on what may be described as the standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution. The other type of naturalism, in contrast, making use of the concept of evolutionary niches, suggests that the search for the explanatory mechanisms of language and consciousness should begin with the human community (of social action), because that is the cultural niche for everything distinctively human to evolve, including language and human consciousness.

After the genes, the mind evolution

In his famous book The chance and the necessity, J. Monod has suggested that the crucial implication of the scientific method is the elaboration of the postulate of the intrinsic objectivity of the natural world. This postulate leads: (a) to the elimination of any use of final causes and projects from the interpretations of the natural phenomena, and (b) to the concept of an absolute objectivity of the scientific knowledge. According to Monod this postulate leads to an interpretation of evolution as a process of chance and necessity. The question, then, arises as to whether the principle of chance and necessity is adequate to explain the whole evolutionary process. In the present paper I argue that the Monod’s principle can be used to explain only the completely determinist evolution of the natural non-biological world but not the non-determinist evolution of the natural biological world as well as the human evolution. The reason is that in the biological world, both in the case of the human and of the non-human living organisms, the behaviours of the living organisms are largely dependent on the intentionality generated by their neural network systems. How are the intentional behaviours of the living organisms generated? Searle and Donaldson have pointed out that the most important feature of the mind products is that of being expression of intentional and voluntary behaviours, where both intentional and voluntary behaviours are intrinsic property of the mental world. The introduction of the concept of the mind intentionality implies that the voluntary behaviours should be interpreted as the expressions of thoughts, beliefs, desires and other mental operations. The intentional states, such as those of beliefs, have always conditions of satisfaction and directions of adaptation. The beliefs are true or false depending on whether the content or the beliefs adapt or do not adapt to the external reality. The beliefs have, therefore, a direction of adaptation described as from the mind-to-the-world. For what concerns the desires or the intentions, these are satisfied or not satisfied, depending on whether the world adapts, or does not adapt, to the content of the intention or of the desires. If the intentions are satisfied it can be said that the intentions have a direction of adaptation indicated as from the world-to-the-mind: the world must adapt to the intentions of the mind in order to satisfy them. The most important property, the one which establishes the attribution of the generation of the voluntary behaviours directly to the mental world, is the intrinsic intentionality of the mind behaviours. The neural networks of the mind–brain system have the capacity to produce the intentional processes because they obey the principles of the deterministic chaos. The deterministic chaos analysis was introduced in physics in order to explain the transitions from small and simple causes to great and complex effects. The properties of the mind–brain system have been then discussed in order to find an explanation for the classic problem of the free will. How can a system where the molecular and cellular connections that obey determinist principles realize the most fundamental property of the human beings, namely that of the free will? The solution is the introduction of a gap between the areas of the mind where the neural networks develop intentions, motivations and decisions and the areas where all the above-mentioned intentions, motivations and decisions are transformed into manifestations of voluntary behaviours. The agent who is responsible for the regulation of this transition is indicated as the Self, the agent who is capable of overcoming the gap which separates the elaboration of the intentions and the decisions from the manifestations of free will and voluntary behaviours.

Nano-intentionality: a defense of intrinsic intentionality

I suggest that most discussions of intentional systems have overlooked an important aspect of living organisms: the intrinsic goal-directedness inherent in the behaviour of living eukaryotic cells. This goal directedness is nicely displayed by a normal cell’s ability to rearrange its own local material structure in response to damage, nutrient distribution or other aspects of its individual experience. While at a vastly simpler level than intentionality at the human cognitive level, I propose that this basic capacity of living things provides a necessary building block for cognition and high-order intentionality, because the neurons that make up vertebrate brains, like most cells in our body, embody such capacities. I provisionally dub the capacities in question “nano-intentionality”: a microscopic form of “aboutness”. The form of intrinsic intentionality I propose is thoroughly materialistic, fully compatible with known biological facts, and derived non-mysteriously through evolution. Crucially, these capacities are not shared by any existing computers or computer components, and thus provide a clear, empirically-based distinction between brains and currently existing artificial information processing systems. I suggest that an appreciation of this aspect of living matter provides a potential route out of what may otherwise appear to be a hopeless philosophical quagmire confronting information-processing models of the mind.

Virtual neurorobotics (VNR) to accelerate development of plausible neuromorphic brain architectures

Traditional research in artificial intelligence and machine learning has viewed the brain as a specially adapted information-processing system. More recently the field of social robotics has been advanced to capture the important dynamics of human cognition and interaction. An overarching societal goal of this research is to incorporate the resultant knowledge about intelligence into technology for prosthetic, assistive, security, and decision support applications. However, despite many decades of investment in learning and classification systems, this paradigm has yet to yield truly “intelligent” systems. For this reason, many investigators are now attempting to incorporate more realistic neuromorphic properties into machine learning systems, encouraged by over two decades of neuroscience research that has provided parameters that characterize the brain's interdependent genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, anatomic, and electrophysiological networks. Given the complexity of neural systems, developing tenable models to capture the essence of natural intelligence for real-time application requires that we discriminate features underlying information processing and intrinsic motivation from those reflecting biological constraints (such as maintaining structural integrity and transporting metabolic products). We propose herein a conceptual framework and an iterative method of virtual neurorobotics (VNR) intended to rapidly forward-engineer and test progressively more complex putative neuromorphic brain prototypes for their ability to support intrinsically intelligent, intentional interaction with humans. The VNR system is based on the viewpoint that a truly intelligent system must be driven by emotion rather than programmed tasking, incorporating intrinsic motivation and intentionality. We report pilot results of a closed-loop, real-time interactive VNR system with a spiking neural brain, and provide a video demonstration as online supplemental material.

Teleonomic functions and intrinsic intentionality: Dretske’s theory as a test case

Fred Dretske’s theory of indicatory functions [Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior: reasons in a world of causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford; Dretske, F. (1994). A recipe for thought. Originally published as “If You Can’t Make One, You Don’t Know How It Works.” In P. French, T. Uehling, & H. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest studies in philosophy: Vol. 19. Reprinted in D. J. Chalmers (2002) (pp. 468–482).] is undoubtedly one of the more ambitious attempts to articulate a sound naturalistic foundation for an adequate theory of intentional content. In what follows I argue that, contrary to Dretske’s explicit intentions, his theory fails a crucial adequacy test – that of accounting for mental content as a system-intrinsic property. Once examined in light of the first-person perspective of an embodied psychological agent, I argue, it becomes clear that neither ‘indication’, nor ‘function’, as used by Dretske, can be consistently applied. Dretske’s theory of indicatory functions is, thus, doubly incoherent. It is then argued that the problems identified here stretch far beyond Dretske’s specific theory – covering the better part of contemporary attempts to naturalize content. I conclude by suggesting that these general problems of representation, exemplified so vividly in Dretske’s theory, also testify to the inadequacy of the quest to reduce teleological phenomena (function and purpose) to predominantly mechanistic variables.

The Intentionality of Formal Systems

One of the most interesting and entertaining philosophical discussions of the last few decades is the discussion between Daniel Dennett and John Searle on the existence of intrinsic intentionality. Dennett denies the existence of phenomena with intrinsic intentionality. Searle, however, is convinced that some mental phenomena exhibit intrinsic intentionality. According to me, this discussion has been obscured by some serious misunderstandings with regard to the concept ‘intrinsic intentionality’. For instance, most philosophers fail to realize that it is possible that the intentionality of a phenomenon is partly intrinsic and partly observer relative. Moreover, many philosophers are mixing up the concepts ‘original intentionality’ and ‘intrinsic intentionality’. In fact, there is, in the philosophical literature, no strict and unambiguous definition of the concept ‘intrinsic intentionality’. In this article, I will try to remedy this. I will also try to give strict and unambiguous definitions of the concepts ‘observer relative intentionality’, ‘original intentionality’, and ‘derived intentionality’. These definitions will be used for an examination of the intentionality of formal mathematical systems. In conclusion, I will make a comparison between the (intrinsic) intentionality of formal mathematical systems on the one hand, and the (intrinsic) intentionality of human beings on the other hand.

The Elementary Nature of Purposive Behavior: Evolving Minimal Neural Structures that Display Intrinsic Intentionality

A study of the evolution of agency in artificial life was designed to access the potential emergence of purposiveness and intentionality as these attributes of behavior have been defined in psychology and philosophy. The study involved Darwinian evolution of mobile neural nets (autonomous agents) in terms of their adaptive weight patterning and structure (number of sensory, hidden, and memory units) that controlled movement. An agent was embedded in a 10 × 10 toroidal matrix along with “containers” that held benefit or harm if entered. Sensory exposure to content of a container was only briefly available at a distance so that adaptive response to a nearby container required use of relevant memory. The best 20% of each generation of agents, based on net benefit consumed during limited lifetime, were selected to parent the following generation. Purposiveness emerged for all selected agents by 300 generations. By 4000 generations, 90% passed a test of purposive intentionality based on Piaget's criteria for Stage IV object permanence in human infants. An additional test of these agents confirmed that the behavior of 67% of them was consistent with the philosophical criterion of intention being “about” the container's contents. Given that the evolved neural structure of more than half of the successful agents had only 1 hidden and 1 memory node, it is argued that, contrary to common assumption, purposive and intentional aspects of adaptive behavior require an evolution of minimal complexity of supportive neural structure.

Consciousness, explanatory inversion and cognitive science

Cognitive science typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena, computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the Principle. The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The essential point is that intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape: Our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects, and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being the state that it is. Once we recognize the Connection Principle, we see that it is necessary to perform an inversion on the explanatory models of cognitive science, an inversion analogous to the one evolutionary biology imposes on preDarwinian animistic modes of explanation. In place of the original intentionalistic explanations we have a combination of hardware and functional explanations. This radically alters the structure of explanation, because instead of a mental representation (such as a rule) causing the pattern of behavior it represents (such as rule-governed behavior), there is a neurophysiological cause of a pattern (such as a pattern of behavior), and the pattern plays a functional role in the life of the organism. What we mistakenly thought were descriptions of underlying mental principles in, for example, theories of vision and language were in fact descriptions of functional aspects of systems, which will have to be explained by underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. In such cases, what looks like mentalistic psychology is sometimes better construed as speculative neurophysiology. The moral is that the big mistake in cognitive science is not the overestimation of the computer metaphor (though that is indeed a mistake) but the neglect of consciousness.

The sensorimotor theory of cognition

The sensorimotor theory of cognition holds that human cognition, along with that of other animals, is determined by sensorimotor structures rather than by uniquely human linguistic structures. The theory has been offered to explain the use of bodily terminology in nonphysical contexts, and to recognize the role of experienced embodiment in cognition. This paper defends a version of the theory which specifies that reasoning makes use of mental models constructed by means of action-planning mechanisms. Evidence is offered from cognitive psychology, the neurosciences, and work in primatology and evolutionary theory. Further scientific and philosophical advantages of the theory are discussed: the theory is more parsimonious than its rival, and it offers better accounts of intrinsic intentionality and consciousness. The paper concludes with observations concerning the role of language in thought.

Consciousness, explanatory inversion, and cognitive science

AbstractCognitive science typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena, computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the “Connection Principle.” The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The essential point is that intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape: Our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects, and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being the state that it is.Once we recognize the Connection Principle, we see that it is necessary to perform an inversion on the explanatory models of cognitive science, an inversion analogous to the one evolutionary biology imposes on preDarwinian animistic modes of explanation. In place of the original intentionalistic explanations we have a combination of hardware and functional explanations. This radically alters the structure of explanation, because instead of a mental representation (such as a rule) causing the pattern of behavior it represents (such as rule-governed behavior), there is a neurophysiological cause of a pattern (such as a pattern of behavior), and the pattern plays a functional role in the life of the organism. What we mistakenly thought were descriptions of underlying mental principles in, for example, theories of vision and language were in fact descriptions of functional aspects of systems, which will have to be explained by underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. In such cases, what looks like mentalistic psychology is sometimes better construed as speculative neurophysiology. The moral is that the big mistake in cognitive science is not the overestimation of the computer metaphor (though that is indeed a mistake) but the neglect of consciousness.

Intrinsic versus contrived intentionality

Intrinsic versus contrived intentionality