This principle is intentionality; it is always necessary to appeal to my intention; I need to have an intention to implement one and not the other, the intention is what determines the pattern, and the brain is only the medium through which this intention is represented. On this view, the relationship between brain and mind is analogous to the relationship between the physical words in a book and the meaning of said book. The meaning of the book is not reducible to the ink marks on the pages, but the ink marks on the pages are the means by which the meaning is represented.
I would suspect that if intentionality were clearly understood your point would be a fairly obvious one, no a priori assumptions required.
The word “intend” would seem to be a shortened form of “inner tendency,” which would seem to be a feature of every entity in existence and which – bringing Aristotle back into the picture – would seem to be the reason he developed the idea of final causes.
Everything has a kind of in-built tendency towards some end or other. Rocks have an inner tendency towards staying put; trees towards growth by developing branches, leaves and roots; and the Sun towards producing heat and light.
An acorn has the in-built or “inner tendency” towards becoming, as its end “goal,” an oak tree. It “inwardly tends” or “intends” to become an oak tree. That end or goal is not foreseeable to the acorn, nor is the acorn “aware” in any sense of its “intending” to become an oak, but it is constructed so to achieve that end.
This kind of unconscious or unwilled “intent” inheres in the nature of the acorn because it depends entirely upon causal antecedents to bring about or activate the potential inherent within the acorn. The acorn doesn’t “choose” in any sense of the word its end goal, it simply moves towards it as a result of the relationship between its internal structure, “information” in the cells that make it up and the environment around it. The inner-tendency is obviously there because acorns don’t become pianos, aardvarks or large erratic rocks.
Now either the “inbuilt tendencies” or “intentions” of a human being are simply more of the same or substantially different. The inbuilt tendencies of higher order animals are typically quite predictable by human beings. Apes do ape things, porpoises do porpoise things. They carry on pretty much as they have always done with not much differentiation in behaviour – except perhaps when they model novel human behaviour.
Humans, are distinctively different from all animal species, especially in terms of the nature of our intentionality. We don’t simply “tend towards” a certain repertoire of ends. Our “inner tendency” or what we “intend” is not limited by causal mechanisms. In a very real sense, our capacity to be aware of and understand in a way that transcends the natural causal or “inbuilt” order of things permits us to look into the future, look at the past and study the present in order to interject novel causal sequences.
We can “intend” that which does not exist, that which isn’t a part of any “internal tendency” of our own because our intentions seem to far exceed the inbuilt tendencies of the material order from which we rose up. What we do and build is nowhere found in the natural order. That has to be explained.
The natural order can produce things far more complex and integrated than the things we create – cells, brains, ecosystems, etc. – but we intend and make things found nowhere else in the natural order – computing and communication devices, books, musical instruments, vehicles, engines, image and motion capture devices, etc.
These could not have been part of the natural or “inbuilt” tendency of matter, yet if they depend for their coming into existence entirely on human intellect and will, then, in some sense, human intellect and will were “intended” by the causal mechanisms inbuilt in the physical world. Where are those inbuilt tendencies found?
The possibility of human intellect and will to “intend” that which is beyond or transcends possibility for the material causal order would have been “inbuilt” into and, therefore, an “inner tendency” or “intended by” the causal order, itself. How could this be so?
That it just happened as a “natural” consequence of the inhering nature of the causal order seems to imply that causality isn’t as determined or determinable as it is made out to be. Or, just maybe, the existence of human will and intelligence is an indicator or clue of the “something more” that is behind the material order.
Given that we don’t really understand the nature of the material order, it would seem to be premature to speak of “reducing” mind to brain as if we truly understand what “matter” or “brain” really are. What we are bringing into our attempts to understand or “explain away” the mind are the legacies of a mechanistic view of matter from the eighteenth century because treating the “material” universe like a mechanical device was helpful at the time. Thus the distinction between mind and the machine it “inhabits” was thought to be a useful paradigm for explaining human beings in Cartesian terms.
Since, then it has become clear that the “machine” – as exemplified in brains, cells, living organisms, etc. – is far more complicated than was assumed, and that fact alone, it is wrongly assumed, makes mind unnecessary.
Getting away from a mechanistic view of nature and armed with a greater understanding of how the universe and the things in it are inherently “informed,” there has been a more recent return to an Aristotelian view of “informed substance” and a clear need to get away from the artificial separation of mind/information from mechanism, which is why hylomorphism is being reconsidered by new essentialist philosophers and physicists.
. Maybe my usage of the term “non-physical faculty” was sloppy, because it gives the impression that there is an extra object that is part of the system. That would be Cartesian dualism. What I mean to suggest is something along the lines of what Richca suggested. If you go back to Pattern 1, 2, and 3 from an earlier post of mine, the physical facts can’t tell you which pattern specifically is the one i am implementing, so we need to appeal to some extra-physical principle that would determine which pattern is indeed being implemented. This principle is intentionality; it is always necessary to appeal to my intention; I need to have an intention to implement one and not the other, the intention is what determines the pattern, and the brain is only the medium through which this intention is represented. On this view, the relationship between brain and mind is analogous to the relationship between the physical words in a book and the meaning of said book. The meaning of the book is not reducible to the ink marks on the pages, but the ink marks on the pages are the means by which the meaning is represented.
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