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"There are two senses of 'intentionality'" ... " All of these focus on the
relation between ourselves and
the 'other'." (15)
Which is
an Absolute
qualitative difference
"First, there is intensionality, which is the 'aboutness' of our
thoughts." (15). "the '
aboutness' of something from the
inner or mental state seems to require, or at the very least, presuppose,
an outer or external state" (23) "All of these [senses of intentionality]
focus on the relation between ourselves and
the
'other'". (15)
It is difficult "'to explain away an
absolute qualitative
difference — such as that between third-person physical events and
first-person consciousness'" (19, quoting Hart)
This contributes
to the mysteriousnness.
"There's a large body of thought that views not just
ideas
but other content such as '
concepts' and 'information' as
irreducibly and necessarily non-physical." (25)
And a concept is
viewed as a non-physical representation
of something from the physical world. "In truth, there is nothing
more mysterious about ideas, concepts and information than there is about
categories (and, arguably, ideas, concepts and information are no more
than the modern instantiation of categories)." (25)
"what might be called the '
first person vantage' is pretty
much an irreducible. It is not something I derive or infer from other
things; it is something of which I have an immediate awareness. ...
'willing to deny ... the actual existence, of the first-person vantage.'
... seems to fly in the face of our everyday experience." (28)
This
difference from a Third Person view seems to be an Absolute
qualitative difference.
"In philosophy, and in particular in the context of the problem of
consciousness, it [
intentionality]
has to do with the idea of
free will versus determinism." (15)
Free
will also seems like distinctively
human.
(Ideas expressed by words)
"Second, there is intentionality, which is understood in the common sense
of our '
intending' to do something." (23) "All of these [senses of
intentionality] focus on the relation between ourselves and
the
'other'". (15)
"Humans speak - and think - in
language. This might be one of
the more remarkable stages of evolution. It is certainly one that
distinguishes
humans from rocks, plants and lizards." (21)
"Consciousness seems to be mysterious to most people." (01)
"The supposition that mental states (or representations) are governed by
the same principles as physical states is what Pylyshyn calls 'the
objective
pull', 'the tendency to view the cognitive process in terms of
properties of the represented objects'" (17).
I think, a
similar tendency or habituation may lead us to try and view our
consciousness too much like an outside
object, with our usual approach of distancing, isolating, fixing,
aboutness and representation (which McGilchrist calls the 'emissary') ?
References
(words, thoughts) to the outside physical world let the Outside
vs. Inside difference appear as a difference between a Physical and
a Non-physical realm. Not everybody realizes that "there is not,
in human nature, a separate mental realm that reasons abstractly about the
physical realm." (06)
An outstanding example of the First
Person Vantage is the following: "There is a notion of what it
feels like to perceive something. The phenomenon of pain offers a great
example. When we are in pain, it hurts, but when we observe someone else
in pain, no matter how closely, it does not hurt (though the activity of
mirror neurons may make us flinch a little). So clearly there is something
different about the subjective experience of pain that is not observable
as the physical experience of pain. These subjective experiences ... are
known as
qualia." (13)
"There are two ways of talking about 'emergent results' ... One way is to
think of it as an outcome. ... The other way of thinking of emergent is to
see it as a pattern. Mess around with some ingredients and eventually they
take the form of something you recognize as a chocolate cake. Or evolve
from one form of biological life to another to another and eventually you
end up with something you
recognize as a rabbit. That's what I
think Dennett means. It's important to understand this distinction, I
think, because it helps us understand the 'suddenness' of the
emergence
of language (or consciousness, or any of the other phenomena we are
discussing). When you are manipulating a pattern of entities, order may
'suddenly' appear out of chaos, but what changed
suddenly
was not the pattern of entities but rather our perception of them." (12)
"[S]emantics has to do with what we call the '
aboutness'
of a
word,
sentence or sequence of sentences". (23)
Words may refer
to the outside,
physical world.
Concepts are often viewed as a non-physical representation of
something in the physical
world. But: "Our thoughts about objects are not
representations
of the external world, they are not inferred from experience, they are
sensations of the external world (which J.J. Gibson would call direct
perception), and are experienced directly." (03)
"We [
humans]
didn't
suddenly come into being, consciousness didn't suddenly come
into being, and nor either does an idea in our head suddenly come into
being." (11) "The argument that there is some
mystical
non-natural aspect to languages is rapidly being proven false in the
domain of natural language processing today." (22)
But the
appearance of human competencies, language and ideas seems sudden and
mystical. Like an "'evolutionary saltation between pre-linguistic and
linguistic abilities'" (21, quoting Hart)
, like "evolutionary
short cuts such as an innate capacity for
language"
(21)
, like a "'gap' in evolutionary history" (11)
,
like "'a discontinuity'" "'between mere accidental associations and
intentional signs'" (24, quoting Hart).
"'For Dennett,
language
must have arisen out of social practices of communication, rooted in basic
animal gestures and sounds in an initially accidental association with
features of the environment. Only afterward could these elements have
become
words, spreading and combining and developing into complex
structures of reference.'" (21, quoting Hart)