Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:

> "John Wilkins"  wrote in message
> news:cbs4a7$12d2$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> > Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:
> >
> > > "John Wilkins" 
wrote in message
> > > news:cbnls7$2os1$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> > > > ... It can't be "real" intentionality unless
> > > > it has a brain.
> > >
> > > Please revise this to read "It can't be
"real" intentionality
> > > unless it has a mind, and, as I see it, minds can only arise
> > > from brains."
> > >
> > > I don't know how you do things "down under", but where I
> > > come from it is considered bad form to attempt to close
> > > an open philosophical issue by dictating what words must
> > > mean.  Though I doubt that it is a very successful
> > > tactic in any venue.
> >
> > Words mean what they are used to mean (Wittgensteinian view of meaning),
> > and a term has an exemplary application from which we generalise and
> > metaphorise. "Design" means the sort of intentional
activity done by
> > agents, all of whom have a brain, as we know.
> 
> As you believe...  I have friends who believe in the existence of
> disembodied minds that are quite capable of doing a little designing.
> And, while I disagree with them, I don't consider their belief
> to be absurd or to be a product of inappropriate use of the word
> "design".  I have heard it speculated that collective entities
> such as bureaucracies and ant colonies might be said to possess
> some of the attributes of mentality.  (Certainly they can act
> as agents).  I might speculate that somewhere in the universe,
> there exist minds as powerful as our own that are not based
> on anything remotely resembling a brain.  Such entities might
> have arisen through natural selection or they might be AIs,
> created by intelligent design.
> 
> > (I am not concerned with
> > 17th century uses of "mind" here. We are discussing the proper
> > scientific use of a word. "Mind" is so vague as to be
useless in a
> > scientific context.)
> 
> Funny, I thought I understood what "mind" meant.  But I have no idea
> what an "agent" is in your mind (or should I say
"brain"?), perhaps
> because I have become contaminated by technical uses of the term in
> computer science and game theory.  In these fields, the posession of
> a brain is by no means required to "get your agent's license".

Jim - do you really understand what "mind" is? Then rush into print
immediately and settle the last 500 years of debate. Because dualists
and monists, epiphenomenalists and connectionists, all do not know what
that term "means". They have accounts of how brain activity generates
behavior, and of how we systmise and classify complex phenomena, and how
hormone levels affect our reaction systems, but nobody can "define"
mind.

We have two options when we take a word that has a folk usage and import
it into exact discourse of any kind - one is to identify that term as
being the equivalent of a number of better understood theoretical
entities; and the other is to show that what that term commonly refers
to is, in fact, a heterogenous class of other things that are better
understood. "Mind" means partically nothing in neurophsychology, but all
the apparently identifying features of "mind" are better understood as
the latter, a class of heterogenous processes of brains, societies, and
languages,

The common error of western thought for the past 2500 years has bene to
identify a noun as referring to a thing, no matter if that thing has a
theoretical basis. But pretty well all the stuff that "mind" accounted
for in legal, moral and social explanation prior to the modern era has
been dispersed into theoretical domains that do not tie together. There
is no need to reify "mind" any more.
> 
> > I consider we should try to ascertain the clear and central sense of a
> > disputed term first, before we consider if it rightly applies elsewhere.
> > This is not exactly stipulation - I can't do a Humpty Dumpty and define
> > them any way I like - so much as a look at the terrain the map is
> > supposed to represent.
> 
> I am perfectly happy to take human intentionality and mentality as
> the central exemplar for all of this disputed language.  And that
> is the terrain that we can look at.  But the map is not yet drawn.
> I want to draw the map with some open spaces beyond the known
> terrain - marked, if appropriate, with the warning "Here there be
> dragons."  You seem to want the map to cover only the terrain that
> was considered exemplary.

Well, I certainly want it to cover only that whioch has actually been
mapped.
> 
> Perhaps you ought to revise the quote that started this discussion
> to read "It can't be exemplary intentionality unless it has a brain".
> I might agree to this.  However, as the previous paragraph indicates,
> my agreement doesn't commit me to much.

No, I want to make the strong claim - if it is truly intentional, then
inductively we know it has a brain, because true intentionality involves
brains. If we found a case where it didn't, then empirically I'd have to
revise my induction.
-- 
Dr John Wilkins
john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au   http://wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss" 
                                               - Francis Bacon
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