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Okay, so intentionality is essential to information. Let's take your example of the pixels on your screen. There is nothing intrinsic to those pixels or that a

Okay, so intentionality is essential to information. Let's take your example of the pixels on your screen. There is nothing intrinsic to those pixels or that arrangement of pixels that points to the state of your brain. That doesn't mean there isn't a causal history the effect of which are those physical pixel states. It is, however, entirely a matter of convention how those pixels are arranged by the designers and how they must be interpreted in conformity with the intended convention. You must bring with you the hermeneutic baggage, so to speak, that allows you to interpret those pixels in the manner intended by the designers. Those same pixels will signify something else within a different context and it is the observer that needs to have the contextual information to be able to interpret them in conformity with the designer's intentions. Furthermore, the designers of the program could have chosen to cause different pixels to light up to convey the same information. They could have instead caused those pixels to resemble, in aggregate, English language sentences that, when interpreted, describe the image of the state in your brain. But there is nothing about those pixels qua pixels that can tell you anything about your brain state. The meaning of each pixel is just that it is a pixel in a particular state, and the meaning of the aggregate of pixels is that they are an aggregate of pixels, each in a particular state. You can call that supervenience in that the meaning of the aggregate follows from the meanings of individual constituting pixels, but none of that changes the fact that the pixel states as such, whether individually or in aggregate, do not intrinsically mean your brain state. This is analogous to written text. A human actor with some meaning in mind causes blobs of ink to be arranged in some way on paper in accordance with some convention. Those blobs of ink are just blobs of ink no matter how many there are or how they're arranged. The reader, which is to say the interpreter, must bring with him a mental dictionary of conventions (a grammar) that relates symbols and arrangements of symbols to meanings to be able to reconstruct the meaning intended by the author. The meaning (or information) is in no way in the text even if it influences what meaning the interpreter attaches to it. As Feser notes[0], Searle calls this derived intentionality which is different from intrinsic intentionality (thoughts are one example of the latter). So I do not agree that anything abstract is happening in your panel of flashing lightbulbs. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/08/fodors-trinity.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/08/fodors-trinity.html

hackinthebochs 6y ago
>Searle calls this derived intentionality which is different from intrinsic intentionality But what makes derived intentionality not abstract? What definition of abstract are you using that excludes derived intentionality while including intrinsic intentionality? But lets look more closely at the differences between derived and intrinsic intentionality. Derived intentionality is some relation that picks out a target in a specified context. E.g. a binary bit picks out heads/tails or day/night in my phone depending on the context set up by the programmer. Essentially the laws of physics are exploited to create a system where some symbol in the right context stands in a certain relation with the intended entities. We can boil this process down to a ball rolling down the hill along one track vs another track is picking between two objects at the bottom of the hill. How does intrinsic intentionality fare? Presumably the idea is that such a system picks out the intended object without any external context needed to establish the reference. But is such a system categorically different than the derived sort? It doesn't seem so. The brain relies on the laws of physics to establish the context that allows signals to propagate along specific circuits. The brain also stands in specific relation to external objects such that the necessary causal chains can be established for concepts to be extracted from experience. Without this experience there would be no reference and no intentionality. So intrinsic intentionality of this sort has an essential dependence on an externally specified context. But what about sensory concepts and internal states? Surely my experience of pain intrinsically references damaging bodily states as seen by my unlearned but competent behavior in the presence of pain, e.g. avoidance behaviors. But this reference didn't form in a vacuum. We represent a billion years of computation in the form of evolution to craft specific organizing principles in our bodies and brains that entail competent behavior for sensory stimuli. If there is a distinction between intrinsic and derived intentionality, it is not categorical. It is simply due to the right computational processes having created the right organizing principles to allow for it.
- danielam 6y ago
  An essential feature of abstract things is that they do not exist independently and in their own right. For example, this chair or that man (whose name is John) are concrete objects. However, the concepts "chair" and "man" are abstract. They do not exist in themselves as such. The same can be said for something like "brown", an attribute that, let's say, is instantiated by both the chair and by John in some way, but which cannot exist by itself as such. So we can say that "chair", "man" and "brown" all exist "in" these concrete things (or more precisely, determine these things to be those things or in those ways). However, apart from those things that instantiate them, these forms also exist somewhere else, namely, the intellect. However, they exist in our intellects without instantiating them. Otherwise, we would literally have to have a chair or a man or something brown in our intellects the moment we thought these things. So you have a problem. You have a kind of substratum in which these forms can exist without being those things. That does not sound like matter because when those forms exist in matter, they always exist as concrete instantiations of those things. W.r.t. derived intentionality, the relation that obtains here between a signifier and the signified is in the mind of the observer. When you read "banana", you know what I mean because the concept, in all its intrinstic intentionality and semantic content, already exists in your intellect and you have learned that that string of symbols is meant to refer to that concept. I could, however, take a non-English speaker and mischievously teach them that "banana" refers to what you and I would use the term "apple" to mean. No intrinsic relation exists between the signifier and the concept. However, there is an intrinsic relation that obtains between concepts and their instantiations. The concept "banana" is what it means to be a banana. So the derived intention involves two relations, namely, one between the signifier and the concept (which is a matter of arbitrary convention) and another relation between the concept and the signified, which necessarily obtains between the two. Derived intentionality is parasitic on intrinsic intentionality. The former requires the latter. So what is meant when we say that computers do not possess concepts (i.e., abstract things), only derived intentionality, we mean that computers are, for all intents and purposes, syntactic machines composed of symbols and symbol manipulation rules (I would go further and say that what that describes are really abstract computing models like Turing machines, whereas physical computers are merely used to simulate these abstract machines). Now, my whole point earlier was that if we presuppose a materialist metaphysical account of matter, we will be unable to account for intrinsic intentionality. This is a well known problem. And if we cannot account for intrinstic intentionality, then we certainly cannot make sense of derived intentionality.

hackinthebochs 6y ago

>Searle calls this derived intentionality which is different from intrinsic intentionality But what makes derived intentionality not abstract? What definition of abstract are you using that excludes derived intentionality while including intrinsic intentionality? But lets look more closely at the differences between derived and intrinsic intentionality. Derived intentionality is some relation that picks out a target in a specified context. E.g. a binary bit picks out heads/tails or day/night in my phone depending on the context set up by the programmer. Essentially the laws of physics are exploited to create a system where some symbol in the right context stands in a certain relation with the intended entities. We can boil this process down to a ball rolling down the hill along one track vs another track is picking between two objects at the bottom of the hill. How does intrinsic intentionality fare? Presumably the idea is that such a system picks out the intended object without any external context needed to establish the reference. But is such a system categorically different than the derived sort? It doesn't seem so. The brain relies on the laws of physics to establish the context that allows signals to propagate along specific circuits. The brain also stands in specific relation to external objects such that the necessary causal chains can be established for concepts to be extracted from experience. Without this experience there would be no reference and no intentionality. So intrinsic intentionality of this sort has an essential dependence on an externally specified context. But what about sensory concepts and internal states? Surely my experience of pain intrinsically references damaging bodily states as seen by my unlearned but competent behavior in the presence of pain, e.g. avoidance behaviors. But this reference didn't form in a vacuum. We represent a billion years of computation in the form of evolution to craft specific organizing principles in our bodies and brains that entail competent behavior for sensory stimuli. If there is a distinction between intrinsic and derived intentionality, it is not categorical. It is simply due to the right computational processes having created the right organizing principles to allow for it.

danielam 6y ago
An essential feature of abstract things is that they do not exist independently and in their own right. For example, this chair or that man (whose name is John) are concrete objects. However, the concepts "chair" and "man" are abstract. They do not exist in themselves as such. The same can be said for something like "brown", an attribute that, let's say, is instantiated by both the chair and by John in some way, but which cannot exist by itself as such. So we can say that "chair", "man" and "brown" all exist "in" these concrete things (or more precisely, determine these things to be those things or in those ways). However, apart from those things that instantiate them, these forms also exist somewhere else, namely, the intellect. However, they exist in our intellects without instantiating them. Otherwise, we would literally have to have a chair or a man or something brown in our intellects the moment we thought these things. So you have a problem. You have a kind of substratum in which these forms can exist without being those things. That does not sound like matter because when those forms exist in matter, they always exist as concrete instantiations of those things. W.r.t. derived intentionality, the relation that obtains here between a signifier and the signified is in the mind of the observer. When you read "banana", you know what I mean because the concept, in all its intrinstic intentionality and semantic content, already exists in your intellect and you have learned that that string of symbols is meant to refer to that concept. I could, however, take a non-English speaker and mischievously teach them that "banana" refers to what you and I would use the term "apple" to mean. No intrinsic relation exists between the signifier and the concept. However, there is an intrinsic relation that obtains between concepts and their instantiations. The concept "banana" is what it means to be a banana. So the derived intention involves two relations, namely, one between the signifier and the concept (which is a matter of arbitrary convention) and another relation between the concept and the signified, which necessarily obtains between the two. Derived intentionality is parasitic on intrinsic intentionality. The former requires the latter. So what is meant when we say that computers do not possess concepts (i.e., abstract things), only derived intentionality, we mean that computers are, for all intents and purposes, syntactic machines composed of symbols and symbol manipulation rules (I would go further and say that what that describes are really abstract computing models like Turing machines, whereas physical computers are merely used to simulate these abstract machines). Now, my whole point earlier was that if we presuppose a materialist metaphysical account of matter, we will be unable to account for intrinsic intentionality. This is a well known problem. And if we cannot account for intrinstic intentionality, then we certainly cannot make sense of derived intentionality.