Reading Notes: April 12th, 2022

“I wish to examine the concept of a system whose behavior can be (at least sometimes) explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and hopes, fears, intentions, hunches). I will call such systems Intentional Systems and such explanations and predictions Intentional explanations and predictions in virtue of the Intentionality of the idioms of belief and desire (and hope, fear, intention, hunch)….For me, as for many recent authors, Intentionality is to be viewed as a feature of linguistic entities—idioms, contexts—and for my purposes here we can be satisfied that an idiom is Intentional if substitution of codesignative terms does not preserve truth or if the “objects” of the idiom are not capturable in the usual way by quantifiers….The first point to make about Intentional systems as I have just defined them is that a particular thing is an Intentional system only in relation to the strategies of someone who is trying to explain and predict its behavior. [T]he predictions one makes from [the Intentional stance] are Intentional predictions….[Someone takes the Intentional stance with respect to X when] one is viewing [X] as an Intentional system. One predicts behavior in such a case by ascribing to the system the possession of certain information and by supposing it to be directed by certain goals, and then by working out the most reasonable or appropriate action on the basis of these ascriptions and suppositions.” (Dennett, Intentional Systems, 88-90) 

“It is a small step to calling the information possessed [by a computer] the computer’s beliefs, its goals and subgoals its desires. What I mean by saying this is a small step is that the notion of possession of information or misinformation is just as Intentional a notion as that of belief. The “possession” at issue is hardly the bland and innocent notion of storage one might suppose; it is, and must be, “epistemic possession”—an analogue of belief….In a similar way, the goals of a goal-directed computer must be specified Intentionally, just like desires. Lingering doubts about whether the chess-playing computer really has beliefs and desires are misplaced; for the definition of Intentional systems I have given does not say that Intentional systems really have beliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to them, and whether one calls what one ascribes to the computer…makes no difference to the nature of the calculation one makes on the basis of the ascriptions. One will arrive at the same predictions whether one forthrightly thinks in terms of the computer's beliefs and desires, or in terms of the computer's information-store and goal-specifications. The inescapable and interesting fact is that, for the best chess-playing computers of today, Intentional explanation and prediction of their behavior is not only common but works when no other sort of prediction of their behavior is manageable. We do quite successfully treat these computers as Intentional systems, and we do this independently of any considerations about what substance they are composed of, their origin, their position or lack of position in the community of moral agents, their consciousness or self-consciousness, or the determinacy or indeterminacy of their operations. The decision to adopt the strategy is pragmatic, and is not intrinsically right or wrong.” (Dennett, Intentional Systems, 90-91) 

“This celebration of our chess-playing computer is not intended to imply that it is a completely adequate model or simulation of Mind or intelligent human or animal activity; nor am I saying that the attitude that we adopt toward this computer is precisely the same that we adopt toward a creature we deem to be conscious and rational. All that has been claimed is that on occasion a purely physical system can be so complex, and yet so organized, that we find it convenient, explanatory, pragmatically necessary for prediction, to treat it as if it had belief and desires and was rational….When one deals with a system—be it man, machine, or alien creature—by explaining and predicting its behavior by citing its beliefs and desires, one has what might be called a “theory of behavior” for the system….Any time a theory builder proposes to call any event, state, structure, etc., in any system (say the brain of an organism) a signal or message or command (or otherwise endows it with content) he takes out a loan of intelligence. He implicitly posits along with his signals, messages, or commands, something that can serve as a signal-reader, message-understander, or commander (else his “signals” will be for naught, will decay unreceived, uncomprehended). This loan must be repaid eventually by finding and analyzing away these readers or comprehenders; for, failing this, the theory will have among its elements unanalyzed man-analogues endowed with enough intelligence to read the signals, etc., and thus the theory will postpone answering the major question: what makes for intelligence?  The Intentionality of all such talk of signals and commands reminds us that rationality is being taken for granted, and in this way shows us where a theory is incomplete.” (Dennett, Intentional Systems, 91-96) 

“Kant’s speculation…culminates, namely, in a metaphysical dualism of the subject-in-itself and the object-in-itself, as two reciprocally related entities, outside the sphere of knowledge, which somehow, by their mutual interaction, give rise to a tertium quid, the quasi-existent world of experience. But in respect to these two real entities, Kant finds himself exactly in the position of Locke with respect to his hypothetical substances—they are “uncertain suppositions of we know not what.” Kant himself…supplies abundant grounds for rejecting these conclusions to which in his unguarded moments he is so frequently tending. To extend the notion of reciprocity, the highest category within the realm of knowledge, and which, because it is the highest, necessarily involves all the rest, to an imaginary real background, which existed before knowledge was, and through the mutual interaction of the parts of which knowledge comes to be, is clearly to undermine the whole fabric, which the critical analysis of experience had so laboriously reared. We must regard this category in one way or the other. Either it expresses a relation for consciousness, in which case we must not view consciousness itself as springing out of it, or it expresses a relation not for consciousness, in which case we can form absolutely no conception of it, nor of all the other categories on which it depends.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 131) 

“If synthesis, relation, conjunction, be a characteristic feature of cognition, a mode in which conscious recognition or awareness is possible, it cannot come before us as itself one of the facts cognized, or have any resemblance to those external links of connection discoverable by observation among the parts of nature. And equally certain is it, that if sensation be also a requisite factor in experience, it cannot as such come before us as itself a separate part of what we are capable of experiencing. The conditions of experience, therefore, whether they be sensation or notions or what not, are bound, by the very necessity of the case, to be abstractions; we may be able to distinguish them as various aspects of the way in which experience is possible, but we are ex hypothesi precluded from treating them as separate entities in the real world.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 131) 

“[Kant] begins with the Consciousness of Self-identity and seeks to determine the conditions of its possibility. That self-consciousness is identical Kant claims as a merely analytical proposition. It means no more than that what I am conscious of is in my consciousness, that the content of which I am aware is so constituted as to be capable of being accompanied by the “Ich denke.” In other words, the unity of consciousness cannot, through any diversity of presentations, be split up into as many coloured and different bits of consciousness as there are presentations, for in that case not only experience but self-consciousness would be impossible, But this unity as such is a bare identity devoid of all content, and in order that it should be aware of its own unity and identity it must be in such relation to a plurality and multiplicity as to furnish the ground of their synthesis. The analytic unity…presupposes a synthetic unity of the parts of the manifold. Now this latter is by no means contingent or variable; it is precisely that type of unity which corresponds to the conception of an object. I have, for example, a series of presentations of a certain red colour, a1, a2, a3, which in time are separate one from another. If I assert it is the same red, of which through those presentations I am aware, I cannot mean that a1, a2, a3, as states of consciousness, are the same, for, as a matter of fact, they are different. I can only mean that the contents of the presentations are related to, or indicate something, A, which remains one and the same whether I am aware of it or not. The object…is no other than the necessary and universal way in which the contents of presentations are combined, and the consciousness of the unified and identical object is the correlate of the consciousness of self-identity, which apart from the former would be inconceivable.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 133-134) 

“No position can well be more hopeless before the problem of knowledge than that of the thinker who insists (1) that our experience consists only of mental processes, modifications of the mind, and (2) that the very essence of an act of knowledge consists in a reference to that which is other than and independent of the finite thinking mind.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 138) 

“The finite subject may become aware of his empirical and determined existence as part of the sum total of his experience. That such a distinction should be possible for him, that he should thus, in the very act of knowing, transcend the limits of his own finitude, is surely a characteristic of knowledge which we cannot overlook, and which remains inexplicable so long as we confine attention to the transient succession of mental states making up the subjective existence of the individual mind. As Hegel maintained later, the consciousness of limitation is only possible in so far as consciousness itself is in some way over and beyond the that limit.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 139) 

“It is only because consciousness never is wholly sensuous, only because it involves from the very beginning both unity of reference and capacity of discriminating and comparing, neither of which constituents can be ascribed to sense, that nexus and connection amongst sensuous contents are never absent. If it be urged that sensuous impressions would at least be connected as members of a temporal series, it is a fair rejoinder to insist with Lotze that there is the greatest difference imaginable between the succession of two representations and the awareness of such succession. In the latter sense alone can sequence be spoken of as a relation, and it, equally with the awareness of difference in the successive presentations, is certainly not a given sensuous fact, but implies a mental act in character and essence allied with what we call thinking or judging.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 158) 

“We, in our abstracting thought, distinguish hearing from the sound heard, seeing from the object seen, and so on, and the distinction is, as we have seen, of first-rate significance and important. But, at the same time, it is equally important to remember that there is no audible sound apart from hearing, or visible object apart from seeing; the content is not except as apprehended, the apprehension is not except as the apprehension of a content. To apply to contents or apprehended objects the predicate of existence at all seems to me wholly to mistake their significance, and to be probably the insistence of hypostatizing an abstraction that has wrought most mischief in philosophical speculation. The mental state exists—it occurs, and by its occurrence the subject is aware; the content, on the other hand, conceived of in abstraction from the mental state, is neither an existent nor an occurrence, but a portion of the wider whole to which we give the name of knowledge.” (Hicks, A Re-Statement of Some Features of Kantian Transcendentalism, 159-160) 

“The idea of existence, then, is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent. To reflect on anything simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other. That idea, when conjoined with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it. Whatever we conceive, we conceive it to be existent. Any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form. Whoever opposes this, must necessarily point out that distinct impression, from which the idea of entity is derived, and must prove, that this impression is inseparable from every perception we believe to be existent….A like reasoning will account for the idea of external existence. We may observe, that it is universally allowed by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion. To have, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive. Now, since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are derived from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows, that it is impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of anything specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we will never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.” (Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature, 67-68)