With regard to the mind, I believe, and have defended, the Sartrean thesis that consciousness has no content. There is no such thing as mental content. Therefore, given one or two more plausible premises, I am committed to the Wittgensteinian claim that the word is a totality of content (i.e. facts) not things (if we don’t think mental content, we must think worldly content).
For this reason, I am committed to thinking of intentional directedness towards the world as a form of revealing activity, broadly understood. I am the subject of intentional states to the extent that I entertain worldly content in a certain way (credulously, desirously, emotively, and so on). And my endorsement of embodied and extended cognition follows directly from this – revealing activity often straddles neural, body and environmental processes. (All this is discussed at much greater length in my recent book, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (MIT Press, 2010).
My view that consciousness is, in the above sense, empty leads me to at least look favorably on no-self views of the sort associated with Buddhism and Derek Parfit – and therefore, also the ethical consequences of these views (no absolute distinction between one’s own suffering and that of others, etc).
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Intentionality (capability to represent) or consciousness? Which phenomenon is, in your opinion, more complex and fascinating?
I do not think you can separate the two. At its core, I think intentionality should be understood as disclosing or revealing activity. Consciousness is a type of disclosure. So, there is no question of one being the more complex or fascinating. Two types of disclosing or revealing activity: causal and constitutive. Sub-personal cognitive processes disclose the world causally in the sense that they provide a physically sufficient condition for the world to be revealed in a given way to a subject. For example, if Marr’s theory of vision were true, then certain processes that begin with the retinal image and conclude with a 3D object representation would be physically sufficient for the world appear a certain way to a subject. These processes would not be logically sufficient. The subject might be a zombie, and so on. But the processes do form a physically sufficient condition. Conscious experiences, on the other hand, disclose the world constitutively in the sense that they provide a logically sufficient condition for the world to be revealed in a given way. Thus, if an experience with a certain phenomenal character – a certain what it is likeness – occurs, then that is logically sufficient for a certain portion of the world to be revealed in a given way (even if the experience is illusory or hallucinatory). Consciousness is, fundamentally, constitutive disclosure of the world, and as such is a species of intentionality.
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Will machines think?
Yes.
in
AVANT Volume III, Number 1/2012
catching the bull 