No. Intent is a capacity of mind. Essentially, its a desire. No mind, no desire.....In other words, is there ever a justification for ascribing 'intent' to the cell?
Ah; perhaps you missed the part where I suggested that "Intent is part of the language used for systems (e.g. creatures) that have the high-level cognitive capabilities of planning and forethought."... we may find I misunderstood you on a few things, so there may be further clarification necessary on your part.
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I feel as if you're stuck (maybe unconsciously) on human intent rather than a generalized concept of intent. As such, you appear to make leaps that don't follow - I have an intent centered in my brain, therefore organisms without brains are without intent. You express this through ideas such as levels and emergence, but you've not established why intent requires levels and emergence. It seems you're arguing intent requires a specific level of complexity without really defining complexity. You're just assuming more levels means more complexity, more likelihood for emergence, etc.
Saying that evolution 'programmed' them is just shorthand for saying that the trial and error process of heritable variation coupled with natural selection repeatedly filtered out the less successful variant individuals and reproductively favoured the more successful variants, eventually resulting in individuals with cells that coordinate their activities in complex and sophisticated ways to the advantage of the reproductive success of those individuals.Evolution didn't program them to do anything......
And here we are back to the concerns of the OP concerning the words purpose and intent. Evolution (which doesn't exist in the first place) is not a rational thinking being and programed nothing..... The cell (if you want to leave God out of the equation), did it all by itself.....
There is more to it than that, as I said. Emergent properties are qualitatively different from those of the substrate from which they emerge. This is what makes the difference.
Yes, requests for clarification seem to be labeled "bad form" in this thread. If you are unable to explain your position so be it, but please stop with the condescension.
No. Intent is a capacity of mind. Essentially, its a desire. No mind, no desire.
OK. Then you tell me what you mean by intent in this context.But that doesn't mean anything. I can define playing chess to be a capacity of mind, and therefore computers don't play chess. They might be executing a set of instructions, but they're not playing chess. Big deal. You might win the semantic argument, but you'll still lose the chess game.
Ah; perhaps you missed the part where I suggested that "Intent is part of the language used for systems (e.g. creatures) that have the high-level cognitive capabilities of planning and forethought."
I did even ask if you thought this might apply to an amoeba: "Do you think an amoeba has high-level cognitive capabilities that permit planning and forethought (i.e. modeling the environment, self, future scenarios, etc.), or is it clearly much simpler than that?" This was intended to clarify whether you accepted that usage of 'intent' and that it wouldn't apply to an amoeba.
The idea was to highlight (without getting into philosophical depths) that, in my experience, intentionality is generally taken to be a cognitive function involving planning & forethought; IOW, a desire to take some action to achieve some goal, with an implication of knowing, and/or deliberation, and/or volition (the descriptive language used for aspects of high-level cognition).
The implication is that creature with little or no cognitive capacity can't have intent.
Does that make sense?
OK. Then you tell me what you mean by intent in this context.
I will follow up for sure. But I really would like you to tell me what you meant by "intent" in your OP question, just so I can start off on the right foot here, as I seem to have misinterpreted your question right off the bat.My apologies. My reply to you was probably too short and assumed too much about the extent to which you have followed the conversation. If that's your answer to the OP, then thank you for the reply.
In your opinion, things without mind do not demonstrate intent. How, then, do you determine what has 'mind'?
I will follow up for sure. But I really would like you to tell me what you meant by "intent" in your OP question, just so I can start off on the right foot here, as I seem to have misinterpreted your question right off the bat.
I see. (I think)No, I don't think you misinterpreted.
I'll try to keep the story short. Were you to read through all my posts you'll see that at one point I indicated a willingness to let the term evolve with the conversation. I began by saying that I simply infer intent. There are things I do that I believe I've done with intention. If I see other organisms do those things, I assume they have also done them with intention. So it was definition by example rather than by logical construct: the chemical reactions of volcanoes vs. cells, the consumption of forest fires vs. hunting/gathering.
Later I added some necessary criteria: 1) the external environment offers multiple possibilities and the path taken is determined internally to the organism, 2) the decision cannot be deterministically defined
Finally, I've begun discussing a mechanism (of sorts) where the decisions are an emergent property of the organism rather than a basic chemical (or other) mechanism of the organism - what can only be described with something like chaos.
The dictionary is a good guide for me here:
Maybe our minds are mere machines too. But I dont think so. They possess qualities utterly lacking in what we typically think of as a machine.
Well first of all it has to have a physical architecture thats even capable of the necessary information processing. That rules out rocks, probably plants, and various other things.....My question to you was how you know if something has a mind.
Well first of all it has to have a physical architecture thats even capable of the necessary information processing. That rules out rocks, probably plants, and various other things.
After that its about determining whether a being displays actual plan-making capabilities, rather than just program-executing. Thats more difficult. But I think a test is whether or not we see any novelty in attempted plans.
To me plan-making is the real key to "intent".
Not sure how amenable I am....So I'm amenable to this, but it's important to keep in mind that it is a shortcut of sorts, an act of pretend that we regard these things 'as though' they have design or intent.
Seems to me the Turing test could produce a ridiculous amount a false positives depending on the (lack of) imagination of the administrator.Agreed. Some sort of Turing test? I never thought that test was really very effective.
At the moment the only test I can think of is does the proposed "mind" show us novelty in its plan making. I'll need to think more deeply to go any further with this....
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