Mind ~ Latin: mens, Sanskrit: manas, Greek: μένος

……. Philosophers commonly agree, for good reason, that meaning and mind can never be pulled apart, that there could never be meaning where there was no mind, or mind where there was no meaning. ‘Intentionality’ is the philosopher’s technical term for this meaning: it is the ‘aboutness’ that can relate one thing to another – a name to its bearer, an alarm call to the danger that triggered it, a word to its referent, a thought to its object. Only some things in the universe manifest intentionality. A book or a painting can be about a mountain, but the mountain itself is not about anything. A map or a sign or a dream or a sing can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything. Intentionality is widely regarded by philosophers as the mark of the mental. Where does intentionality come from? It comes from minds, of course.

But that idea, perfectly good as its own way, becomes a source of mystery and confusion when it is used as a metaphysical principle, rather than a fact of recent natural history. Aristotle called God the Unmoved mover, the source of all motion in the universe, and Locke’s version of Aristotelian doctrine, as we have seen, identifies this God as Mind, turning the Unmoved mover into the Unmeant Meaner, the source of all Intentionality. Locke took himself to be proving deductively what the tradition already took to be obvious: original intentionality sprints from the Mind of God; we are God’s creatures, and derive our intentionality from him.

Darwin turned this doctrine upside down: intentionality doesn’t come from on high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic process that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop. And, perfectly following the pattern of all Darwinian thinking, we see that the first meaning is not full-fledged meaning; it certainly fails to manifest all the “essential” properties of real meaning (whatever you may take those properties to be.). it is mere quasi-meaning, or semi-semantics. It is what John Searle has disparaged as mere “as if intentionality” as opposed to what he calls “Original Intentionality.” But you have to start somewhere, and the fact that the first step in the right direction is just barely discernible as a step towards meaning at ll is just what we should expect.

There are two paths to intentionality. The Darwinian path is diachronic, or historical, and concerns the gradual accretion, over billions of years, of the sorts of Design – of functionality and purposiveness – that can support an intentional interpretation of the activities or organisms. Before intentionality can be full fledged, it must go through its awkward, ugly period of featherless pseudo-intentionality. The synchronic path is the path of Artificial intelligence: in an organism with genuine intentionality – such as yourself – there are, right now, many parts, and some of these parts exhibit a sort of semi-intentionality, or mere as if intentionality, or pseudo-intentionality – call it what you like – and your own genuine, fully fledged intentionality is in fact the product of the activities of all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up. That is what a mind is – not a miracle-machine, but a huge, semi-designated, self-designing amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the “economy of the soul” ~ Pages 205/206