So, we might say the position of the bimetal strip in a (old) thermostat resents the temperature. If I push on the strip, I can change that and make the furnace go on.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
Likewise, if someone stole a stone from the shepard's basket, his behavior would change. But no such effect from the stones the passing girl has.
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Replying to @robamacl @OortCloudAtlas and
Well, this was the main topic of philosophy of mind in the 80s, and I think it’s reasonably fair to say that it ended with everyone giving up and moving on. Dennet was one major player. The problems are hairy and not easily summarized.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
The buzzword was “intentionality” in analytic philosophy and “the symbol-grounding problem” in AI. The “binding problem” was a related manifestation in connectionism. I’d suggest the SEP articles cited here? [Eggplant draft text]pic.twitter.com/qQoBMCroDV
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
“Intentionality” is just jargon for “aboutness.” The question is how can a physical thing-in-the-head be about something else. The usual analysis is that the bimetallic strip is *not* intentional because it’s too closely coupled causally. (Not everyone agrees on this point.)
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
FWIW, Dennett does (or at least did) consider thermostats to have intention, and I am willing to go there. But I don't want to drag you into this morass unless you are interested in going there.
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Replying to @robamacl @OortCloudAtlas and
Well the question would be where you draw the line, or if you think intentionality is continuously graded. If you grant it to the thermostat, what mechanisms are *not* intentional, and why not?
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
According to Dennett, which I follow, a thing is has intention if it is useful to regard it as having intention. This pragmatic in the philosophical sense.
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Replying to @robamacl @OortCloudAtlas and
Yeees… that view is popular outside the field, but was not widely accepted within it. Problem is it doesn’t help explain anything about “how do minds/brains work” which is what cogsci wanted, nor does it give any purchase on the philosophical questions.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
IMO, "not answering hard philosophical questions" is an expected property of useful theories. When it comes to philosophically loaded terms like intention, they probably should end up being ontogically remodeled in same way as "planet".
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Yes, exactly. The point is not “representations don’t exist” but that the category is highly problematic; trying to build a rigorous theory on it reliably fails, so in any specific case you want a different ontology, or at least get clear about what “representation” means in situ
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
FWIW, "useful to regard it as having intention" is not circular; this is a highly knowledge-based situated judgement which people often get wrong in practice. This question of "what model do I use" has a meta-rational flavor.
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Replying to @robamacl @OortCloudAtlas and
Yes, I think that’s importantly right. OTOH, the binary judgement is/not intentional is rarely sufficient; you need to go on to specifics. And then the hard issues come back (and they probably generally feed into binary judgement, too!) However >
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