A Theory of Freedomby John Valley Chapter 3. Intentionality.I’d like to introduce several points just briefly before going into more detail. Intentionality is not a physical property of things. People have intentions[1], and we can blame people for what they do intentionally; volcanoes do not, and to say that a volcano blows up on purpose would make no sense. Animals lie somewhere in between these two extremes. The distinction between physical and non-physical, or physical and mental properties, may not be precisely defined in casual discourse, but in philosophy, we need a more exact line. Right now, suffice it to say that intentionality doesn’t show up on any normal instrument, and even lie detectors don’t make a clear case of measuring intentions. (Technically, lie detectors measure physiological properties.) Intentionality is based on representation and has the same semantic form. Intentions are meaningful, and so, there is both a sign which signifies the intention, and the point of the intention, which is what it signifies. A symbol has the form of an intention. Free will and human freedom concern intentions, and so it is not the sign that concerns us, but its meaning. Human freedom is not a physical condition, but a mental one. Political freedom involves the ability to make a free choice. Elections are only one of the many ways free choice arises in a political context. Where no personal freedom to make choices exists, talk about political freedoms is nonsensical. Furthermore, a dialectical tension has to exist between the need of governments to organize and manage their societies, and the need of citizens to exercise free choice in their own self-interest. A denial of freedom is a denial of the opportunity to seek one’s own survival. That is roughly the outline of the issues yet to be addressed. This chapter stands after the discussions of randomness and causality because it represents a third metaphysical possibility. In the first two ways to understand choice, we can either suppose a person makes decisions without freedom under the operation of causality, or we can suppose that people's choices are random. These are, in fact, the only possibilities that arise for ordinary, inanimate matter, and so it is a simple consequence of their materialism that many philosophers have maintained that minds, and human beings, are similarly limited. But there is a third possibility: the possibility of an intentional choice. Whether intentionality is different from causality and from randomness will have to be demonstrated, but intuitively the sense of it is distinct from either one. Causality implies passivity; mere reaction. Intentionality implies motivation and impulse. Randomness implies indifference, as a coin is indifferent to the outcome of a toss, whereas intentionality implies reason and purpose. The concept of intentionality, then, if it can be formulated clearly, will serve as a bridge between the alternatives presented by a physicalist theory, namely that choices must either be random or causal, and the more intuitive idea that choices are chosen. If human choices are random, then they can be modeled by tossing a coin. If choices are the outcome of causal necessity, then people decide things the way volcanoes decide things. In either case, what’s missing from the formula is logic; i.e., reasoning and thought, and a purpose to guide the choice. The whole idea of intentionality requires us to posit some kind of mind or mental entity, at least a brain, such that you can pretend it has intentions. Whether we might accept that a computer has intentions illustrates this point rather well. Computer programs are of two general types which I’ll call utilitarian, and the other, games. Utilitarian programs are tools such as spreadsheets, text editors, internet browsers and email handlers. They are simple black boxes (simple conceptually, although their implementation may be complex). You tell it to do something, and it either does it or reports a problem that prevents the action. These programs render a computer the same kind of thing as a washing machine. It has a number of settings and buttons to start it working. You choose the settings you want and start it. The vast majority of computer programs are utilitarian. A utilitarian program doesn’t do anything except what it’s told, and it would be silly to personify it. Such an object is merely an extension of its user’s will. There is another class of programs, though, namely games, where the game implements one or more fake players to serve as the real player’s opponents. A good example of this type of game is Sid Meier’s “Civ III.” In this game there are imaginary entities implemented by AI techniques which play against the human player and seek to win the game. To a naïve user, these game entities may seem like real people, and one might talk about them having goals, being tricky or clever, and outwitting the human player. This difference between the two types of programs is the difference between mechanistic programming and goal-directed (or heuristic[2]) programming, and it reveals that intentions are not internal states or programs in the most general sense. Utilitarian programs have those, and yet clearly are not free-will agents. The game programs do, or seem to, and begin to approximate what we mean by intentional agents. It isn’t my purpose at this point to launch the question of whether computers can be conscious, but this analysis does show what we expect an agent to have if it is to be considered conscious and intentional: it must have some internal states that we can correlate with beliefs, knowledge, and plans; and it must have some sort of purpose or goal that we could call its intention. These aren’t physical attributes. They take shape in terms of abstract elements. Intentions concern purposes. Not what has happened, or even what will happen, but rather, what should happen. Intentions are descriptions of world states that do not actually exist. For example, a software AI entity might have the purpose to defeat the user. While this is an active intention, it describes a state which is exactly the opposite of the present situation-the user is not defeated, he is in fact still playing and could win the game. This explains why only minds and mental entities can have intentions[3]. Purposes don’t exist as far as their content goes. A purpose to build a house concerns a house that doesn’t exist. A purpose to kill an enemy concerns a man who is alive. Purposes are at odds with what is the case. Given that understanding of purposes, it’s clearly nonsensical to talk about a physical condition or state that is at odds with what is the case. Now we can begin to see why a physicalist theory of mind forces an unreasonable conflict. Physical laws pertain to things and states of affairs that exist, and that will exist. Intentions, however, can pertain not only to things and states of affairs that don’t exist, but that never will, and even to phenomena that are impossible. But how can natural laws give rise to impossibilities? That would be a paradox indeed. So clearly we can see that there’s a conflict here between a study of minds and behavior and any simple or direct explanation by physical laws. So what are physical laws? What kind of exact meaning does the term “physical” take on in a discussion such as this? Physics, especially insofar as we talk about causality, is the science that studies our notions of physicality. We will have to talk about physics, but only insofar as it pertains to the problem before us. In other words, if we could dismiss the idea that the universe is deterministic and that the operations of the mind are causal (and only causal), then we wouldn’t have to concern ourselves with the physical sciences. But our idea of causality, such as it is, flows precisely from our experience with physical objects such as cue sticks and billiard balls. Physics has grown from its beginnings as a science that studied the behavior of mundane objects, to discuss a very wide range of phenomena on the scales of the very small and the very large, but regardless of its size or sophistication, the study has focused on the behavior of non-thinking objects, and all these objects seem to obey causal laws. Physics, then, is the field of action of causality. Anything in that field can be expected to be regulated by causal laws. Anything outside that field need not be[4]. So what kinds of things are physical, and what kinds of things are not? Physics itself, as a science, is somewhat vague about this. It explicitly discusses atoms and the chemical table of elements as the basic building blocks of matter. It doesn’t define chairs, garages, sandwiches, weather phenomena, etc., as physical objects, although it’s normal to think of them as such. In addition to these gross objects, physics (as a science) includes a discussion of energy of various sorts. So physical entities are not just atoms and structures of atoms. Altogether there are five classes of entities which are physical: matter, energy, forces, space, and time. Matter includes atoms and all types of subatomic particles, including some types of particles that never occur as bound elements of larger structures. Neutrinos, for example, are always free particles, and yet are material. According to Albert Einstein’s Special Relativity theory, matter is convertible into energy, and vice versa. This interchangeability is well established and it isn’t open to question that matter and energy have some sort of complementary relationship. On the other hand, matter and energy are also profoundly different, most prominently in the fact that matter must always move at speeds less than the speed of light and energy must always propagate at that speed. In other words, interchangeability is no indication of identity. Even despite this consideration, physics as a discourse talks about both matter and energy, so any language of physical stuff must include both matter and energy as terms and as basic concepts. A similar situation exists with respect to space and time. Einstein showed there is a complementary relationship between space and time. Indeed, there is even a constant of proportionality: 1 second = 186,260 miles. Nevertheless, even Einstein was interested in maintaining a clear distinction between the three dimensions of space and the one of time, if for no other reason than that much of physics necessarily expresses processes and rates of change in terms of time. So whether or not we see a relationship between them, we need concepts of both space and time in order to understand the physical world. Forces are a distinct kind of entity, distinct from matter because forces are immaterial, and distinct from energy because energy is conserved and forces are not. As we might say, the release of energy generates forces, which continue in effect as long as energy is being released. When you hit a cinder block with your hand to break it in two with a well-placed karate chop, it takes energy to move the hand, but the impact of the hand against the block applies a force. The force may cause some part of the cinder block to move, such as by splintering and throwing fragments, or, if the block refuses to cooperate, the force merely creates heat. Forces are the agents of change. But physical and natural laws don’t really apply to the kind of phenomena we’re talking about. We have a framing problem here. We must reframe the problem of intentions, mind, and will, into a context that includes the kind of objects involved, and it isn’t physics. It is logic. Logic, in the most general sense, is a system of laws and a kind of process that involves abstract entities such as symbols, relations, and concepts. Logic, in the sense I mean here, includes mathematics, and it includes human languages and symbolic systems of all kinds. Logic is related to physical phenomena in a very peculiar way. As an example, consider a proof of a math theorem written out on a piece of paper. This written proof has physical qualities. The paper has weight, dimensions, and chemical properties. The writing on it is made of ink. The writing includes letters that have specific shapes and very measurable sizes. The type uses a font, which has properties like italic, bold, or subscript. There are many different physical styles of type or writing that could be used to express the proof. Yet the proof stands independently of all that. It works, establishing its point (if it succeeds) by virtue of the meanings in it, and not by virtue of, say, using the right font, or having the letters written large enough. Indeed, you can’t destroy the proof by burning the paper it’s written on, and nobody has ever disproved the Pythagorean theorem by erasing it[5]. This meaning dualism, to use the technical term, implies that there is something present in the writing that isn’t the writing itself, even though the most scrupulous physical examination would find nothing else. Yet, we are accustomed to this state of affairs. Ordinarily it doesn’t invite any special comment. We study a proof, deciding whether it’s a good proof or a bad proof, by trying to grasp its terms and thinking whether the relationships and concepts the proof expresses are consistent with other concepts in the same discipline. If the concepts work, the proof is valid, even if the text of the proof has physical flaws. A word may be misspelled. An illustration or diagram may have a line going in the wrong direction. Such flaws, though, can be corrected by the reader as he reads and easily ignored. They have nothing to do with the proof’s logical validity. This sort of logic, or abstract thinking, can vary significantly from real world facts. There would be no difficulty at all, for example, in writing a text to describe the solar system that doesn’t match the solar system. And this wouldn’t imply that the text included impossibly written letters, or made diagrams that couldn’t be drawn. Everything about the text should be perfectly in agreement with the natural laws that govern paper and ink-but something about the text is still wrong. Having taken the discussion this far, we can now answer what kind of object intentions are and what kind of rules they follow. The applicable principles aren’t those of physics or chemistry, they are the principles of logic, language, and semantics. Only such tools allow the expression of things and states of affairs that don’t actually exist. An architect’s blueprints, for example, before construction begins, are all full of intentions about the building that doesn’t exist yet. Nevertheless, we don’t find the blueprints to be in any violation of natural laws merely because the building they describe doesn’t exist. Interestingly, the blueprints can also describe a building that can’t be built. If the architect’s thinking doesn’t take proper account of loads and stresses and the properties of materials, the building won’t stand, yet there is nothing about this physical impossibility that reflects back to erase the blueprints. They continue to describe the physically impossible situation with no difficulty at all. We have to conceive of intentions as the same kind of things as blueprints: they are free to talk about states of affairs that don’t exist now, but that might exist under the right conditions. Just as blueprints can describe a building that won’t stand because of internal weaknesses, so, too, intentions a mind may take up can concern plans that are impossible of realization, plans that will fail. Their inability to be realized doesn’t prevent the intentions from being formed. Logic, language, games, hopes and desires and fears, all these mental types of things are alike in that they use physical materials to describe them, but what they describe is independent of the physical materials, and possibly even at odds with it, just as you could write the sentence “This is an invisible sentence.” A purely physical understanding of the world has no way to grasp these types of phenomena. This analysis has revealed several interesting properties of intentionality:
We are beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Where “free will” at first seems to be a vague and confusing subject, intentionality, together with an information-theoretic view of their nature, is leading toward a field of interpretation that is not so jumbled and chaotic as may have first appeared to be the case. In the next chapter, we want to look at the idea of intentions as representations. [1] There is no question that people are physical entities. The fact that people are physical, however, doesn’t imply that everything about them is physical. In particular, we would like to have it that when someone imagines a unicorn, there doesn’t have to be a real unicorn someplace. But this simple proviso implies that some human phenomena aren’t a reflection of material facts. [2] Heuristics, a technical term in computer science, just means rules of thumb, or trial and error methods. A heuristic is a general policy for making choices, such as the well-known rule for finding a path through a maze, by always taking a left turn. It is characteristic of heuristics that they aren’t guaranteed to win, just like some kinds of mazes don’t yield to the left-hand rule. [3] For now, the issue of whether heuristic game programming is true intentionality should be tabled. We need a clearer understanding of what intentionality is and what minds are before we can tackle the question profitably. [4] The skeptical reader will wonder what kind of proof I have to show that phenomena outside of physics don’t have to obey causal laws, but satisfactory examples are plentiful. The game of chess, for instance, describes rules of play, but they aren’t causal; castling queen-side by white, for example, doesn’t force black to make any particular kind of response (and it would be hard to see how it would). The laws of geometry, similarly, are the rules of logic, and don’t define a sequence of before-after temporal succession such as causality stipulates. Additional examples can be produced ad infinitum. [5] We could get into debates whether the Pythagorean theorem would still exist if all written copies of it were destroyed. Doing so, however, would lose track of the fundamental point that the truth of the theorem is not determined by how its proof is written on the paper.
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