Intentionality

[Jay G]

Are there any philosopher types out there who are familiar with the concept of "Intentionality". Any places you could recommend where I might get some idea of what it's about?

[GrahamH]

You could read this for starters...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

[hiyymer]

Are there any philosopher types out there who are familiar with the concept of "Intentionality". Any places you could recommend where I might get some idea of what it's about?

You're brave. I take the simple approach. Our conscious experience is an integrated representation of everything the body needs to respond to in order to replicate. It's a functional representation but not an accurate representation. The way the brain represents living biological processes is as intentional self-caused agents. Intentional agency doesn't exist in scientific reality. The idea is that the brain needs to model and predict what the process is going to do, so what the process has done in the past is represented as intention. The self-caused intentional agent is just an encapsulated model of the characteristics and past behavior of the process. The tiger is across the clearing looking at me. "He wants to eat me", I say, as my amygdala kicks in and my feet start going in the opposite direction. There is no agent in the tiger intending to eat me. It's just a representation of what the fully-caused biological process called a tiger tends to do. It works great to keep me from getting eaten. I think it's that simple. But the philosophers will slice it and dice it to death.

[Trolldor]

Derp.

[Comte de Saint-Germain]

Should be dealt with in any decent introduction into analytic philosophy. I'd have to do some reading to provide a decent explanation - but it does require some background knowledge.. I.E. you might as well take a course in analytic philosophy