Phenomenal Intentionality Research Articles

Phenomenal Intentionality Without Compromise

In recent years, several philosophers have defended the idea of phenomenal intentionality: the intrinsic directedness of certain conscious mental events which is inseparable from these events’ phenomenal character. On this conception, phenomenology is usually conceived as narrow, that is, as supervening on the internal states of subjects, and hence phenomenal intentionality is a form of narrow intentionality. However, defenders of this idea usually maintain that there is another kind of, externalistic intentionality, which depends on factors external to the subject. We may ask whether this concession to content externalism is obligatory. In this paper, I shall argue that it isn’t. I shall suggest that if one is convinced that narrow phenomenal intentionality is legitimate, there is nothing stopping one from claiming that all intentionality is narrow.

Phenomenology and digital neural architectures

A model of conscious mechanisms called Axiomatic Consciousness Theory (ACT) is used to develop a neuroarchitectural model of visual phenomenology. The result is an extension of concepts in neural systems towards phenomenal intentionality: the lack of which is a common starting point for critiques of AI. Here the argument is developed at four interacting grain levels of description and the associated analysis. The visual domain is highlighted due to its dominance in discussions involving inner mental states.

The fiction of phenomenal intentionality

This paper argues that there is no such thing as “phenomenal intentionality”. The arguments used by its advocates rely upon an appeal to “what it is like” (WIL) to attend on some occasion to one’s intentional state. I argue that there is an important asymmetry in the application of the WIL phenomenon to sensory and intentional states. Advocates of “phenomenal intentionality” fail to recognize this, but this asymmetry undermines their arguments for phenomenal intentionality. The broader issue driving the advocacy of phenomenal intentionality is the belief that consciousness must somehow be implicated in intentionality. With this I agree. But because of the asymmetry of application of WIL, the path chosen by advocates of phenomenal intentionality to secure this conclusion cannot succeed. A brief overview of recent philosophy of mind explains the temptation to take this wrong path. Fortunately, there are other routes that implicate consciousness in intentionality. In consequence, though there is no phenomenal intentionality, there is a phenomenology of intentionality.

INTENTIONALITY AND PHENOMENOLOGY

: This paper examines two recent attempts to articulate a particular relationship between intentionality and phenomenology. Terry Horgan and John Tienson (2002) have argued for what they call the inseparability thesis: that the intentional and the phenomenal are, in a certain sense, inseparable. Brian Loar (2002, 2003), following on from earlier work, has argued for a kind of intentionality, phenomenal intentionality, that is pervasive and more fundamental than ordinary wide content. Problems with both views can be seen once we consider a number of dimensions to intentionality, and reflect more generally on the notion of phenomenal intentionality itself.

Functional MRI and the study of human consciousness.

Functional brain imaging offers new opportunities for the study of that most pervasive of cognitive conditions, human consciousness. Since consciousness is attendant to so much of human cognitive life, its study requires secondary analysis of multiple experimental datasets. Here, four preprocessed datasets from the National fMRI Data Center are considered: Hazeltine et al., Neural activation during response competition; Ishai et al., The representation of objects in the human occipital and temporal cortex; Mechelli et al., The effects of presentation rate during word and pseudoword reading; and Postle et al., Activity in human frontal cortex associated with spatial working memory and saccadic behavior. The study of consciousness also draws from multiple disciplines. In this article, the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology provides initial characterization of phenomenal structures conceptually necessary for an analysis of consciousness. These structures include phenomenal intentionality, phenomenal superposition, and experienced temporality. The empirical predictions arising from these structures require new interpretive methods for their confirmation. These methods begin with single-subject (preprocessed) scan series, and consider the patterns of all voxels as potential multivariate encodings of phenomenal information. Twenty-seven subjects from the four studies were analyzed with multivariate methods, revealing analogues of phenomenal structures, particularly the structures of temporality. In a second interpretive approach, artificial neural networks were used to detect a more explicit prediction from phenomenology, namely, that present experience contains and is inflected by past states of awareness and anticipated events. In all of 21 subjects in this analysis, nets were successfully trained to extract aspects of relative past and future brain states, in comparison with statistically similar controls. This exploratory study thus concludes that the proposed methods for "neurophenomenology" warrant further application, including the exploration of individual differences, multivariate differences between cognitive task conditions, and exploration of specific brain regions possibly contributing to the observations. All of these attractive questions, however, must be reserved for future research.