Meaning and Intentionality
Closely related to consciousness is meaning and, what is technically called, intentionality [Searle 1999]. Our thoughts do not exist in isolation, they represent things in the external world. In that sense they have meaning. In contrast to that, the symbols manipulated by a computer do not have any meaning which has been conferred by the computer itself. The only sense that the symbols and calculations have intentionality is because such intentionality has been conferred by the designer or the programmer. The attribution of meaning to the symbols in the computer, conferred by an external agent, is called “derived intentionality”. A human agent is considered not to require such an external reference and the meanings of the thoughts in the this case are called “intrinsic intentionality” [Searle 1999].
The difference, which is argued means that “strong AI” or computers which are conscious, are impossible, is illustrated by Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. The man in the Chinese room can provide outputs which are meaningful to the people outside but incomprehensible to himself. To the man in the Chinese Room, the symbols and the rules for manipulation are purely syntactic whereas to the agents outside, they are also semantic.
The origin of “intrinsic intentionality”, or why only humans are considered to have it, is not known.
Conversely, it has been shown that humans will, in certain circumstances, relinquish this intrinsic intentionality and operate in what is referred to as “agentic mode”[Milgram 1974] where a person will yield their agency to an authority figure.
In milder cases, people can be “affirmed” by those they look up to and to some extent the meaning of what they do is derived from the belief that the authority figure gives it rather than it being truly intrinsic.
Intentions
Searle describes an “intention” as a brain state which refers to something in the external world. Such states include a belief, like, hate, desire etc.
Such states can be properties of unconscious systems but only if they are capable of causing conscious mental phenomena. For example a belief that the world is round is a property of a subject even when asleep and unconscious. However, that belief is capable of being made conscious on awaking.
A non-conscious state is one which can never become conscious, even when awake whereas an unconscious state is one which is capable of becoming conscious.
How can a word refer to an object? How can a brain state refer to something in the external world? Where does “meaning” enter into a system?
According to Searle, even if Dennett’s homunculii were progressively simpler, they would still need intentionality.
Derived intentionality: The symbols and workings of a computer have meaning only because someone else, a programmer or user, has attributed such meaning. Same as the meaning of symbols in the Chinese Room. They can only have meaning because someone outside has attributed that meaning.
Intrinsic intentionality: A source of meaning which can only be a conscious subject.
Observer dependent and independent facts?
Gray: Our senses present an “interpretation” of the data based on models which exist in our brains. They are not always accurate and sometimes not always consistent, such as the duck/rabbit picture, but it is the best guess of the processing system. The interpreted result is presented to the conscious subject already processed. Data fusion takes place before it is consciously perceived.
Presented to what? A Cartesian Theatre?
There is a problem in that there is nowhere in the brain for the data fusion to take place.
Searle speaks of consciousness emerging from the “micro properties of neurons” in an analogous way to the liquidity of water emerging from the micro-properties of atoms. However there is no idea of how that could possibly happen. Maybe more analogous to the emergence of electrical phenomena from putting together matter in particular ways. It relies on new, previously unknown, properties of material.
Existing neuro-science gets on “quite nicely, thank you” without reference to consciousness and there is nothing for consciousness to do.
ihttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
ihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron