“Intentional Systems”

Daniel Dennett

In this selection, Daniel Dennett distinguishes three different “stances” we might take toward other beings and explicates one in some detail.

Can Brain Explain Mind?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPGvu8lT8HY

Intentional Systems

❖ Intentional Systems: which is a system the behavior of which can be explained and predicted by ascribing beliefs and desires to the system.

❖ (Intentional systems need not actually have the beliefs and desires we ascribe to them, however.)

❖ One of the best examples of an intentional system (besides human beings, of course) is a chess-playing computer.

❖ Although most of us are inclined to say that the computer does not literally have beliefs about what move is best, the best way to predict its moves is by ascribing to it those sorts of beliefs.

❖ When we look at chess-playing computers as intentional systems, we take the intentional stance toward them.

The intentional stance is to be contrasted with the design stance and the physical stance.

Design Stance❖ One takes the design stance

toward an entity by attempting to predict its behavior in terms of what it was designed to do.

❖ A software programmer might take the design stance toward his or her program when attempting to work out the kinks—the programmer makes predictions based on the program’s design.

Physical Stance❖ One takes the physical stance toward

an entity, on the other hand, by attempting to predict its behavior in terms of the actual physical state of the entity in conjunction with whatever the predictor knows about the laws of nature.

❖ For example, even though light switches aren’t designed to shock people, we might know that if you touch the switch with your wet hand, you’ll get a shock.

❖ In making this prediction, we are taking the physical stance toward the light switch.

Dennett’s Argument

❖ In many cases, taking the intentional stance is extremely beneficial.

❖ He points out that most computers cannot be viewed with either the design stance or the physical stance.

The inner workings of a computer are so complicated that there’s really no way to take the physical stance and try to figure out what precise state the computer is in at a given time.

By the same token, even the person that built the computer might find it extremely difficult to predict the behavior of the computer based on the computer’s extremely complex design.

Thus, it is extremely useful to take the intentional stance even toward computers.

In general, it is useful to take the intentional stance whenever we have reason to doubt the practicality of the physical or design stance.

Interesting Features of the Intentional Stance

❖ The most prominent of which is that when we take the intentional stance toward an object, we assume that the object is rational.

❖ And to the degree that they fail to follow the rules of logic, for example, we stop ascribing rationality to them and begin to take the design stance instead to see what’s going wrong.

In addition…

❖ to helping us make predictions about complex systems, talk of intentional systems has the benefit of being completely neutral with respect to most of the contentious questions about the nature of the human mind.

Hod LipsonRoboticist

Building ‘Self-Aware’ RobotsHod Lipson demonstrates a few of his cool little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hod_lipson_builds_self_aware_robots?language=en

The Illusion of Consciousness

Daniel Dennett

Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?language=en