Category: Intentionality

Mind without Consciousness?

David Brightly in a recent comment writes,

[Laird] Addis says,

The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa.

I can agree with that, but why should it presuppose consciousness too?

In a comment under this piece you write,

Examples like this cause trouble for those divide-and-conquerers who want to prise  intentionality apart from consciousness with its qualia, subjectivity, and what-it-is-like-ness,  and work on the problems separately, the first problem being supposedly tractable while the second is called the (intractable) Hard Problem (David Chalmers). Both are hard as hell and they cannot be separated. See Colin McGinn, Galen Strawson, et al.

Could you say a bit more on this?

I’ll try.  You grant that representation presupposes mind, but wonder why it should also presuppose consciousness.  Why can’t there be a representational system that lacks consciousness?  Why can’t there be an insentient, and thus unconscious, machine that represents objects and states of affairs external to itself? Fair question! 

Here is an example to make the problem jump out at you. Suppose you have an advanced AI-driven robot, an artificial French maid, let us assume, which is never in any sentient state, that is, it never feels anything.  You could say, but only analogically, that the robot is in various ‘sensory’ states, states  caused by the causal impacts of physical objects against its ‘sensory’ transducers whether optical, auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic . . . but these ‘sensory’ states  would have no associated qualitative or phenomenological features.  Remember Herbert Feigl? In Feiglian terms, there would be no ‘raw feels’ in the bot should her owner ‘feel her up.’  Surely you have heard of Thomas Nagel. In Nagelian terms, there would be nothing it is like for the bot to have her breasts fondled.  If her owner fondles the breasts of his robotic French maid, she feels nothing even though she is programmed to respond appropriately to the causal impacts via her linguistic and other behavior.   “What are you doing, sir? I may be a bot but I am not a sex bot! Hands off!” If the owner had to operate upon her, he would not need to put her under an anaesthetic. And this for the simple reason that she is nothing but an insensate machine.

I hope Brightly agrees with me that verbal and nonverbal behavior, whether by robots or by us, are not constitutive of  genuine sentient states. I hope he rejects analytical (as opposed to methodological) behaviorism, according to which feeling pain, for example,  is nothing more than exhibiting verbal or nonverbal pain-behavior.  I hope he agrees with me that the bot I described is a zombie (as philosophers use this term) and that we are not zombies.  

But even if he agrees with all that, there remains the question: Is the robot, although wholly insentient, the subject of mental states, where mental states are intentional (object-directed) states?  If yes, then we can have mind without consciousness, intrinsic intentionality without subjectivity, content without consciousness.

Here are some materials for an argument contra.

P1 Representation is a species of intentionality. Representational states of a system (whether an organism, a machine, a spiritual substance, whatever) are intentional or object-directed states.

P2 Such states involve contents that mediate between the subject of the state and the thing toward which the state is directed.  Contents are the cogitata in the following schema: Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-res. Note that ‘directed toward’ and ‘object-directed’ are being used here in such a way as to allow the possibility that there is nothing in reality, no res, to which these states are directed.  Directedness is an intrinsic feature of intentional states, not a relational one.  This means that the directedness of an object-directed state is what it is whether or not there is anything in the external world to which the state is directed. See Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence for more on this.

As for the contents, they present the thing to the subject of the state. We can think of contents as modes of presentation, as Darstellungsweisen in something close to Frege’s sense.     Necessarily, no state without a content, and no content without a state.  (Compare the strict correlation of noesis and noema in Husserl.) Suppose I undergo an experience which is the seeing as of  a tree.  I am the subject of the representational state of seeing and the thing to which the state is directed, if it exists, is a tree in nature.  The ‘as of‘ locution signals that the thing intended in the state may or may not exist in reality.

P3 But the tree, even if it exists in the external world, is not given, i.e., does not appear to the subject, with all its aspects, properties, and relations, but only with some of them. John Searle speaks of the “aspectual shape” of intentional states. Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others.  These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what make intentional  states the states that they are. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157) The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state that succeeds in targeting a thing (res) in external world is such that every aspect of  the thing is before the mind of the person in the state.

P4 Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something.  And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that  even if every F is a G, one  can be aware of x as F without being aware of  x as G.   Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.  

BRIGHTLY’S THEORY (as I understand it, in my own words.)

B1. There is a distinction between subpersonal and personal contents. Subpersonal contents exist without the benefit of consciousness and play their mediating role in representational states in wholly insentient machines such as the AI-driven robotic maid.  

B2. We attribute subpersonal contents to machines of sufficient complexity and these attributions are correct in that these machines really are intentional/representational systems.

B3. While it is true that the only intentional (object-directed) states of which we humans are aware are conscious intentional states, that they are  conscious is a merely contingent fact about them. Thus, “the conditions necessary and sufficient for content are neutral on the question whether the bearer of the content happens to be a conscious state. Indeed the very same range of contents that are possessed by conscious creatures could be possessed by creatures without a trace of consciousness.” (Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell 1991, p. 32.

MY THEORY

V1. There is no distinction between subpersonal and personal contents. All contents are contents of (belonging to) conscious states. Brentano taught that all consciousness is intentional, that every consciousness is a consciousness of something.  I deny that, holding as I do that some conscious states are non-intentional. But I do subscribe to the Converse Brentano Thesis, namely, that all intentionality is conscious. In a slogan adapted from McGinn though not quite endorsed by him, There is no of-ness without what-it-is-like-ness. This implies that only conscious beings can be the subjects of original or intrinsic intentionality.  And so the  robotic maid is not the subject of intentional/representational states. The same goes for the cerebral processes transpiring  in us humans when said processes are viewed as purely material: they are not about anything because there is nothing it is like to be them.  Whether one is a meat head or a silicon head, no content without consciousness! Let that be our battle cry.

And so, when the robotic maid’s voice synthesizer ‘says’ ‘This shelf is so dusty!’ it is only AS IF ‘she’ is thereby referring to a state of affairs and its constituents, the shelf and the dust.  ‘She’ is not saying anything, sensu stricto, but merely making sounds to which we original-Sinn-ers, attribute meaning and reference. Thinking reference (intentionality) enjoys primacy over linguistic reference. Cogitation trumps word-slinging. The latter is parasitic upon the former.  Language without mind is just scribbles, pixels, chalk marks, indentations in stone, ones and zeros. As Mr. Natural might have said, “It don’t mean shit.” An sich, und sensu stricto.

V2. Our attribution of intentionality to insentient systems is merely AS IF.  The robot in my example behaves as if it is really cognizant of states of affairs such as the dustiness of the book shelves and as if it really wants to please its boss while really fearing his sexual advances.  But all the real intentionality is in us who makes the attributions.  And please note that our attributing of intentionality to systems whether silicon-based or meat-based that cannot host it is itself real intentionality. It follows, pace Daniel Dennett, that intentionality cannot be ascriptive all the way down (or up). But Dennett’s ascriptivist theory of intentionality calls for a separate post.

V3. It is not merely a contingent fact about the intentional state that we our introspectively aware of that they are conscious states; it is essential to them.

NOW, have I refuted Brightly ? No! I have arranged a standoff.  I have not refuted but merely neutralized his position by showing that it is not rationally coercive.  I have done this by sketching a rationally acceptable alternative. We have made progress in that we now both better understand the problems we are discussing and our different approaches to them.

Can we break standoff? I doubt it, but we shall see.

AI and the Unity of Consciousness

Top AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI,"  hold that advanced AI systems are conscious.  That is far from obvious, and may even be demonstrably false if we consider the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness.  I will first explain the phenomenon in question, and then conclude that AI systems cannot accommodate it.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example One

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. It is not as if there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states), one pleasurable the other painful; there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this phenomenological argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these states are taken distributively (one by one) or collectively (all together).

May we conclude from the phenomenology of the situation that there is a simple, immaterial, meta-physical substance that each one of us is and that is the ontological support of the phenomenologically given unity of consciousness?  May we make the old-time school-metaphysical moves from the simplicity of this soul substance to it immortality? Maybe not! This is a further step that needs to be carefully considered. I don't rule it out, but I also don't rule it in. I don't need to take the further step for my present purpose, which is merely to show that a computing machine, no matter how complex or how fast its processing, cannot be conscious.  No material system can be conscious.  For the moment I content myself with the negative claim: no material system can be conscious. It follows straightaway that no AI system can be conscious.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example Two

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

This is because the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  This implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is co-given whenever one hears a melody.  (This seems to imply that all consciousness is at least implicitly self-consciousness. This is a topic for a later post.)

Diachronic -Synchronic Unity of Consciousness

Now consider a more complicated example in which I hear two chords, one after the other, the first major, the second minor.   I hear the major chord C-E-G, and then I hear the minor chord C-E flat-G.  But I also hear the difference between them.   How is the awareness of the major-minor difference possible? One condition of this possibility is the diachronic unity of consciousness. But there is also a second condition. The hearing of the major chord as major cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  So here we have an example of the diachronic-synchronic unity of consciousness.

These considerations appear to put paid to the conceit that AI systems can be conscious.

Or have I gone too far? You've heard me say that in philosophy there are few if any rationally compelling,  ineluctably decisive, arguments for substantive theses.  Are the above arguments among the few? Further questions obtrude themselves, for example, "What do you mean by 'material system'?"  "Could a panpsychist uphold the consciousness of advanced AI systems?"

Vita brevis, philosophia longa.

A Design Argument from the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?

Substack latest.

I present an argument that many will take as supporting classical theism. But I point out that, so taken, the argument is not rationally inescapable or philosophically dispositive since it may also be construed along Nagelian lines to support an inherent immanent teleology in nature.
 
Topics include rationality, intentionality, both intrinsic and derivative, and the fascinating structural similarity of dispositionality to (conscious) intentionality.

Jeffrey Long, M. D. on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Here (under 5 minutes).

'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest. 

It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then  the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.

Consider a perceptual illusion.  I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake.  I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion.  (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)

What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act  (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another.  No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act. 

Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.'  (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used  is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then,  is object-directedness.  One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state  exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. 

Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of  (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness  may or may not exist.  Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.'  From 'S is conscious of  an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.

In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something  appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what  appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root — else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving.  I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act. 

If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.

Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain,  and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased  and that the patient is 'brain dead.'  Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed.  The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs.  But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real.  Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real,  and this despite their being extremely vivid. 

Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.

Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'?  Yes it is.   That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience.  He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows  whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states. 

But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's  survival of  one's bodily death.

For it could be — it is epistemically possible that — it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last  experience, even if  it turns out to be an experience as of  heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.'  ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.'  Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in  a separate post.)

If this epistemic possibility cannot  be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.

Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is  certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven  is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.

Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs.  There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.  

On Perceptual ‘Taking’

Ed writes,

Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”.

This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake.

But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to be a person occupying the space behind the mirror, thinking it to be a window. In that case there is also no Y (because no such person) but is there an X? That is, does “I take a mirror image to be a person” imply that there is some X such that X is a mirror image and I take X to be a person?

It is the ‘ontological’ (=referential) questions that interest me. I have never had any interest in epistemology. Is a mirror image a τόδε τι, a hoc aliquid, a this-something?

Over to you.

BV:  I don't believe anyone who knows English would ever say, 'I take a tree root to be a snake' as opposed to 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'  If you see something that you believe to be a tree root, then you cannot at the same time take it to be a snake.  If, on the other hand, if you take something to be a snake, and further perception convinces you that it is a tree root, then you can say, 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'

Suppose we try to describe such a situation phenomenologically. I am hiking in twilight through rattlesnake country. I suddenly stop, and shout to my partner, "I see a snake!" People say things like this. What we have here is a legitimate ordinary language use of 'see.'  Sometimes, when people say 'I see a snake,' there is/exists a snake that they see.  Other times, when people say, 'I see a snake,' it is not the case that there is/exists a snake that they see.  In both cases they see something. This use of 'see' is neutral on the question whether the seen exists or does not exist. Call this use the phenomenological use. It contrasts with the 'verb of success use' which is also a legitimate ordinary language use. On the success use, if subject S sees X, it follows that X exists.  On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. On the phenomenological use, if S sees X, it does not follow that X exists. Mark the two senses as sees  and seep respectively.

I seep a snake. But as I look more closely the initial episode of seeing is not corroborated by further such episodes. The snake appearance of the first episode is cancelled. By 'appearance' I mean the intentional object of the mental act of seeingp. This appearance (apparent item)  is shown to be a merely intentional object. How? By the ongoing process of visual experiencing. The initial snake appearance (apparent item) is cancelled because of its non-coherence with the intentional objects of the subsequent perceptual acts. The subsequent mental acts present  intentional objects  that have some of the properties of a tree root. As the perceptual process continues through a series of  visual acts the intentional objects of which cohere, the perceiver comes to believe that he is veridically perceiving a tree root. He then says, "It wasn't a snake I saw after all; I took a tree root to be a snake!"

Clearly, I saw something, something that caused me to halt. If I had seen nothing, then I would not have halted. But the something I saw turned out not to exist.

So my answer to your concluding question is in the affirmative.

Finally, if you have no interest in epistemology, then you have no interest in the above question since it is an epistemological question concerning veridical and non-veridical knowledge of the external world via outer perception.

You are some kind of radical externalist.  But how justify such an extreme position? 

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson’s Non-Solution

Hi Dr. Vallicella,

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem. 
 
Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYM
 
Best,
Chandler
 
What follows is a warm-up for a discussion of the paper to which Chandler directs us. Galen Strawson is a brilliant philosopher with very interesting ideas.   I am not sure I quite understand him. The entry below is a slightly emended version of a post from 2018. It is based on a much earlier paper by Strawson.
 
………………………

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' — the secularist will assure us — there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The very notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed  nonsense.  We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.  

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.

The Brentano Inference

London Ed writes,

Early on I commented on the following ‘Brentano’ inference, with the question of whether it is valid or not.

(1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object.

I think you said it was valid.

It is not a question easy to answer properly, and my impression is that Ed does not appreciate the depth of the issue or the complexity of its ramifications. You cannot just return a 'valid' or 'invalid' answer; the question has to be explicated.  The explication may be expected to turn up points of disagreement. We might, however,  be able to agree on some of the following. Perhaps only the first.

a) If Jake is thinking of something, it does not follow that there exists (in reality) something such that Jake is thinking of it.  I am sure that we will agree on this most basic point. 

b) If Jake is thinking of something, a distinction must be made between the occurrent episode of Jake's thinking (a datable event or process in Jake's mental life) and what the thinking purports to be of or about.  Typically, this will be something of a non-mental nature. And given (a), what the episode purports to be of or about may or may not exist without prejudice to the episode's being the very episode it is.  

c) That the episode is occurrent as opposed to dispositional Ed will surely grant. Jake may be disposed to think of London when he is not thinking of it, but if he is thinking of the city, then his thinking is a mental act — 'act' connoting actuality, not activity — and thus a particular occurrence.

d) Now if Jake is thinking about London, his act of  thinking purports to be about London which, of course, cannot be internal to anyone's mind or mental state.  London with all its buildings and monuments is and remains in the external world whether or not anyone thinks about it.  'Cannot be internal' means that London herself cannot be a constituent of anyone's thinking about London. It cannot be 'in Jake's head,' not even if that phrase is taken figuratively to mean: in Jake's mind. London cannot be a part of Jake's psychic state when he thinks about London.  And yet Jake and the rest of us can think about London and many of our thoughts are veridical.

e) Although London is not a constituent of anyone's thinking about London, there must be some factor internal to the mental state, a factor  epistemically accessible to the subject of the state, that somehow represents or perhaps presents London to the subject of the state.  This factor is a feature of the mental state whether or not the external thing (the city of London in our example) exists. This internal factor does not depend on the existence of the external thing. If Jake in Arizona is thinking about London, and the city goes the the way of  Sodom and Gomorrah, i.e., ceases to exist, and if this event occurs while Jake is thinking about the English city, nothing changes in Jake's mental state: the thinking remains and so does its particular outer-directedness, its directedness to London and to nothing else.  In other words, if Jake is thinking about London and, unbeknownst to Jake, the city ceases to exist while he is thinking about it, Jake remains thinking and his thinking retains the same specific aboutness that it had  before the city ceased to exist.  Thus neither the thinking nor its aboutness, depend on the existence of London.   This aboutness or outer-directedness to a particular external thing — I am studiously avoiding for the moment the polyvalent term 'intentional object' — is or is closely related to the internal factor I mentioned above. What should we call it? If the act is the noesis, the internal factor responsible for the particular outer-directedness can be called the noema.

f) Much more can be said, but enough has been said to answer Ed's question. He wants to know whether the inference encapsulated in the following sentence is valid or invalid:

(1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object. 

The question cannot be answered as it stands. (1) needs disambiguation. 

(1a) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, this thing, if it exists, is contained in Jake's thinking of it.

INVALID.  

(1b) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, there is something internal to Jake's thinking in virtue of which his act of thinking has the precise directedness that it has, and this item — the noema — is 'contained in' in the sense of dependent upon Jake's act of thinking.

VALID.

Further questions arise at this point. How are we to understand the 'relation' of this noema to the external thing that it presents or represents?  And what exactly is the status of the noema?  

 

Intentionality, Singularity, and Individual Concepts

Herewith, some notes on R. M. Sainsbury, Intentionality without Exotica.  (Exotica are those items  that are "nonexistent, nonconcrete, or nonactual." (303) Examples include Superman and Arcadia.)

'Jack wants a sloop' could mean three different things. (a) There is a particular sloop Jack wants.  In this case, Jack's desire is externally singular.  Desire is an object-directed mental state, and in this case the object exists and is singular.

(b) There is no particular sloop Jack wants; what he wants is "relief from slooplessness" in Quine's phrase. In this case the desire, being "wholly non-specific," is not externally singular.  In fact, it is not singular at all.  Jack wants some sloop or other, but no particular sloop whether one that exists at present or one that is to be built.

(c) Jack wants a sloop of a certain description, one that, at the time of the initial desire, no external object satisfies. He contracts with a ship builder to build a sloop to his exact specifications, a sloop he dubs The Mary Jane. It turns out, however, that the sloop is never built.  In this case, Sainsbury tells us, the desire is not externally singular as in case (a), but internally singular:

The concept The Mary Jane that features in the content of the desire is the kind of concept appropriate to external singularity, though that kind of singularity is absent, so the desire counts as internally singular. The kind of concept that makes for singularity in thought is one produced by a concept-producing mechanism whose functional role is to generate concepts fit for using to think about individual things. I call such a concept an ‘‘individual concept’’ (Sainsbury 2005: 217ff). Individual concepts are individuated by the event in which they are introduced. In typical cases, and when all goes well, an act of attention to an object accompanies, or perhaps is a constituent of, the introduction of an individual concept, which then has that object as its bearer. In cases in which all does not go well, for example in hallucination, an individual concept is used by the subject as if it had an object even though it does not; an act internally indistinguishable from an act of attending to an object occurs, and in that act an individual concept without a bearer comes into being. A concept so introduced can be used in thought; for example an individual concept C  can be a component in wondering whether C is real or merely hallucinated. In less typical cases, it is known to the subject that the concept has no bearer. An example would be a case in which I know I am hallucinating.     
    External singularity is relational: a subject is related to an object. Internal singularity is not relational in this way. (301, bolding added.)
 
What interests me here is the notion of an individual concept (IC). We are told above that an IC is distinct from its bearer and can exist without a bearer.  So the existence and identity of an IC does not depend on its having a bearer. We are also told that one and the same IC can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience, the seeing of a dagger, say.  So it is not the bearer that individuates the IC. What individuates it is the mental event by which it is introduced.
 
To these two points I add a third: it is built into the sense of 'individual concept' that if an individual concept C has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer in the actual world, and the same bearer in every  possible world in which it has a bearer.  So if there is an individual concept SOCRATES, and it has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer, Socrates, and not possibly anything distinct from Socrates.  This implies that individual concepts of externally singular items are as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts. This in turn implies that no individual concept of an externally singular item is general:  no such concept is multiply instantiable or multiply 'bearable.'
 
I now add a fourth point: concepts are mental entities in the sense that they cannot exist apart from minds. Concepts are representations and therefore mental entities in the sense indicated.  A fifth point is that our minds are finite and our powers of conceptualization correspondingly limited. One obvious limit on our power to conceptualize is that no concept of ours can capture or grasp the haecceity (thisness) of any externally singular item.  We ectypal intellects cannot conceptually eff the ineffable, where what is ineffable is the individual in its individuality or singularity or haecceity, i.e.,  in that which makes it be this individual and no other actual or possible individual.  God, the archetypal intellect, may be able to grasp the haecceity of an individual, but this is clearly beyond our 'pay grade.' If God can do it, this is presumably because he creates the individual ex nihilo.
 
It follows from the fourth and fifth points that all of our concepts are general.  Suppose that the concept FASTEST MARATHONER (FM) applies to Jones. That concept is general despite the fact that at any given time t only one person can instantiate or bear it.   For at times earlier and later than t, some other runners were and will be the FM.  Therefore, FM does not capture Jones' haecceity. But even if Jones is the FM at every time in the actual world, there are possible worlds in which some other person is the FM at every time. What's more, at any time at which Jones is the FM, he might not have been the FM at that time.
 
Sainsbury's theory of individual concepts strikes me as incoherent.  The following cannot all be true:
 
1) There are individual concepts.
2) Concepts are representations in finite minds, and our minds are finite.
3) Individual concepts of externally singular items must be as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts.
4) Every externally singular item exists. (There are no 'exotica.')
5) Every externally singular item is wholly determinate or complete where x is complete =df x  satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).
6) No concept in a finite mind of an externally singular item is singular in content in the sense of encoding every property of the wholly determinate or complete thing of which it is the concept.
7) One and the same individual concept can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience.
 
Sainsbury is committed to each of these seven propositions, and yet they cannot all be true. The first five propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of (6).   Or if (6) is true, then (1) is false.  (6) and (7) cannot both be true.
 
I conclude that there are no individual concepts, and that the distinction between externally singular and internally singular object-directed mental states cannot be upheld.  

Mark Sainsbury on Intentional Relations

Following A. N. Prior, Sainsbury sets up the problem of intentionality as follows:

We are faced with a paradox: some intentional states are relational and some are not. But all intentional states are the same kind of thing, and things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational.  (Intentional Relations, 327)

Cast in the mold of an aporetic triad:

1) Some intentional states are relational and some are not.

2) All intentional states are the same kind of thing.

3) Things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational.

These propositions are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. Sainsbury solves the problem by rejecting (1).  He maintains that all intentional states are relational.  Whether I am thinking about Obama, who exists, or about Pegasus, who does not exist, a relation is involved.  In both cases, the relation connects the subject or his mental state to a representation. The representation, in turn, either represents something that exists 'in the world' or it does not.  In the first case, there is me, my intentional or object-directed mental state, the concept OBAMA, and the man himself in the external world.  In the second case, there is me, my intentional or object-directed mental state, the concept PEGASUS, and that's it: there is nothing in reality that the Pegasus representation represents.  

Sainsbury is not saying that when I think about Obama, I am thinking about a representation. Plainly, I am thinking about a man, and a man is not a representation in a mind.  While Sainsbury advocates a representationalist theory of mind (RTM), he essays to steer clear of ". . . a disastrous turn that a representationalist view may take: instead of saying that the intentional states are about what their representations are about, the fatal temptation for British Empiricist thinkers (and others) is to regard the intentional states as about the representations (“ideas”) themselves." (330)  On Sainsbury's RTM,

For representationalists, all intentional states, including perceptual states, are relational, but the representations are not the “objects” of the states in the sense of what the states are about. Rather, the representations are what bring represented objects “before the mind”. Analogously, we see by using our eyes, but we do not see our eyes. Using our eyes does not make our vision indirect. (330)

This implies that representations are not representatives or stand-ins or epistemic deputies or cognitive intermediaries interposed between mind and world. They are not like pictures. A picture of Obama is an object of vision just as Obama himself is.  But Sainsburian representations "neither react appropriately with light nor emit odiferous molecules." (330)  Pictures of Obama and Obama in the flesh do both. Representations are in the mind but not before the mind. They are "exercised" in intentional states without being the objects of such states:

Intentional states are not normally about the representations they exercise. The representation is not the state’s “object”, as that is often used. Rather, the state’s object is whatever, if anything, the representation refers to, or is about. The notion of “aboutness” needed to make this true is itself intensional: a representation may be about Pegasus, and a thought about Pegasus involves a representation about him. (338)

Sainsbury's solution to the problem codified in the above inconsistent triad involves two steps. The first is to reject (1) and hold that all intentional states are relational.  They are genuine relations, not merely relation-like. The second step is to import relationality into the mind: every intentional state is a relational state that connects two intramental existing items, one being the intentional state itself, the other being the representation, whether it be a truth-evaluable representation, which S. calls a thought, or a non-truth-evaluable representation, which S. calls a concept.  

It is easy to see that one could take the first step without taking the second. One could hold that all intentional states are relations but that these relations tie intentional states to mind-transcendent items, whether existent, like Obama, or nonexistent, like Pegasus. But this is the way of Meinong or quasi-Meinong, not the way of Sainsbury. He argues in the paper in question against Meinong for reasons I will not go into here.

In sum, intentional states are relations, but they are neither relations to mental objects nor are they relations to extramental objects.  They are relations to representations which are neither.  A mental object is (or can be) both in the mind and before the mind.  And extramental object is (or can be) before the mind but not in the mind. A Sainsburian representation is in the mind but not before the mind (except in cases of reflection as when I reflect on the concept OBAMA as opposed to thinking about him directly).

The article ends as follows:

Metaphysical relationality is the fundamental feature of intentional states, the nature they all share. In the original puzzle, it was claimed that Raoul’s thinking about Pegasus is not relational, since there is no such thing as Pegasus, whereas his thinking about Obama is relational, since there is such a thing as Obama. But in both cases the claims are made true by Raoul being in a two-place relational state, involving a Pegasus-representation in one case and an Obama representation in the other. The metaphysical underpinning of thinking about Pegasus is just as relational as his thinking about Obama. For the Pegasus case, that is not because there really is such a nonexistent object as Pegasus, but because the truth-making state is a relational one, holding between Raoul and, in the typical case, the concept PEGASUS. For the Obama case, the state is relational in the relevant way not because there is such an object as Obama, but because the truth-making state is a relational one, holding between Raoul and, in the typical case, the concept OBAMA.

CRITIQUE

Does this solve our problem? I don't see that it does.  First of all, we are left with the problem of the intentionality of representations. What makes an Obama representation about Obama?  Sainsbury's solution to the Prior puzzle is to reject the first limb of the aporetic triad by maintaining that ALL intentional states are relational.  But since these relations are all intramental we are left with the problem of external reference.  We are left with no account of the of-ness or aboutness of representations.  We need an account not only of noetic intentionality but of noematic intentionality as well, to press some Husserlian jargon into service.

Second, it is not clear from this article what exactly representations are. We are told that "representations are what bring represented objects 'before the mind'." How exactly?  Talk of the "exercise" of representations suggests that they are dispositions.  Is the concept OBAMA in Raoul his being disposed to identify exactly one thing as Obama?  But how could an occurrent episode of thinking-of be accounted for dispositionally? Besides, the concept OBAMA would have to be a haecceity-concept and I have more than once pointed out the difficulties with such a posit.

 

Could Scollay Square be a Meinongian Nonexistent Object?

Scollay Square novelBill, newly arrived in Boston,  believes falsely that Scollay Square exists and he wants to visit it. Bill asks Kathleen where it is. Kathleen tells him truly that it no longer exists, and Bill believes her. Both use 'Scollay Square' to refer to the same thing, a physical place, one that does not exist. To exist is to exist in reality.  'In reality' means outside the mind; it does not mean in the physical world.  

So both Bill and Kathleen use 'Scollay Square' to refer to a physical place that does not exist. The two are not using (tokens of) 'Scollay Square' to refer to Fregean senses or to any similar abstract/ideal item.* Scollay Square is not such an item.  It is concrete, i.e., causally active/passive.  After all, it was demolished. 

Now it could be that reference is routed through sense as Frege maintained. Perhaps there is no road to Bedeutung except through Sinn. Whether or not that is so, when Bill and Kathleen think and talk about Scollay Square, they are not thinking and talking about an abstract object that mediates reference, whether it be thinking reference or linguistic reference.  They are thinking and talking about a concrete, physical thing that does not exist.

 

We also note that Bill and Kathleen are not thinking or talking about anything immanent to consciousness such as a mental content or a mental act. They are referring to a transcendent physical thing that does not exist.  Scollay Square is not in the head or in the mind; if it were, it would exist! If memory serves, it was the illustrious Kasimir Twardowski who first made this point, leastways, the first in the post-Brentano discussion. 

Therefore, some transcendent physical things do not exist. Copley Square is an example of a transcendent physical thing that does exist.

But you don't buy it do you? Explain why. (I don't buy it either.)

_______________

*Anglosophers use 'abstract'; Eurosophers sometimes use 'ideal.' Same difference (as a redneck student of mine used to say.)

More on the Riddle of Intentionality with the Help of Molnar

  According to George Molnar,

The fundamental feature of an intentional state or property is that it is directed to something beyond itself . . . All mental states and processes have an internal reference to an object. The identity of the intentional state is defined in terms of this intentional object. . . . Since intentionality constitutes the identity of mental phenomena, it follows that the nexus between the mental state or process in question and its intentional object is non-contingent. (Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 62, second and third emphases added.)

Molnar is right: the directedness beyond itself to an object is an internal feature of the intentional state. Consider an act (intentional state) of seeing a particular green paloverde tree. What makes the mental act a consciousness of that very object? Some will be tempted to say that the tree in reality, outside the mind, causes the mental state both to be directed and to be directed  to the very object  to which it is directed.  But then the object-directedness would not be an internal feature of the intentional state.  The curious thing about the nexus of intentionality is that mental acts are intrinsically directed to their objects.  They refer beyond themselves by their very nature. So it is not in virtue of an external relation to an external thing that a mental state is object-directed.  As I argued earlier, object-directedness is not to be confused with object-dependence. One should not allow the prevalence of various forms of externalism over the last 35 years or so to blind one to the predominance of internalism in intentionality theory from Brentano on.  (This is not to say that there are no object-directed states  whose identity does not require the existence of an external referent.)

If one were to suppose that the object-directedness of every act requires the existence of external things, then (i) there would no object-directedness in the case of acts directed to nonexistent objects such as the merely possible golden mountain and the impossible round square, and (ii) an intentional state would lose its intentionality should the external thing to which it is directed cease to exist.  In the case of (i), what either does not or cannot exist cannot do any causing, and in the case of (ii), what no longer exists cannot do any causing either.

Consider again my Washington Monument (WM) example. If, unbeknownst to me, it ceases to exist while I am merely thinking about it, but not sense-perceiving it either directly by ordinary vision or indirectly via television, the directedness (intentionality) of my thinking is in no way affected by the WM's ceasing to exist: my conscious state remains directed, and it remains directed to the very object to which it was directed, and indeed in exactly the same way, say, under the incomplete description 'monolithic marble obelisk.' But what object is that? Which object is the intentional object? Is it the transcendent WM itself? Or is it an immanent object? There is a puzzle here that cannot be solved  by stipulative definition of 'intentional object.' Two possibilities.

P1. One possibility is that the intentional object (IO) is the WM itself.  There is good phenomenological reason to maintain this. After all, when I think of the Washington Monument, my thinking is directed beyond itself to something other than itself: I am not thinking about some intermediary item or epistemic deputy or surrogate such as a sense datum, idea, image, way of being appeared to, representation, guise, noema, or whatnot.  My thinking goes straight to the transcendent thing itself; it does not stop short at some immanent item that plays a mediating role.  It seems we ought to say that the IO is the transcendent thing itself.  

If so, the WM is my act's IO both while the WM exists and after it ceases to exist.  Don't forget that it is a phenomenological datum that the IO remains self-same over the interval despite the fact that during that interval the WM ceases to exist. Now the WM is in no way immanent to consciousness; it is neither a real content thereof in Husserl's sense of  reeller Inhalt, nor is it immanent in the manner of an Husserlian noema.  No wholly determinate 550-foot-tall marble obelisk resides in my head or in my mind. It cannot be in or before my mind because my mind, and yours too, is finite: it cannot 'wrap itself around' the entirety of the massive monolith. Only a tiny fraction of the WM's parts, properties, and relations are before my mind when I think of it.  That would also be the case were I standing in front of the monument looking at it.

So on (P1), the WM is the IO of my act, and the WM, both before and after it ceases to exist, is one and the same transcendent  item.  After it ceases to exist, however, it is a nonexistent transcendent item without ceasing to be the IO of my act of thinking.  That is to say: my ongoing thinking  of the WM has available to it an IO over the entire interval, an IO that has and then loses the property of existence.  Note the difference between 'My thinking has no object' and 'My thinking has an object that lacks existence.'

(P1) thus lands us in the Meinongian predicament of having to affirm that some items are both transcendent of consciousness and thus in no way mind-dependent, and without existence. (I am assuming the untenability of any distinction between being and existence; hence there is no escape by this route.)  I will say that an item that has neither existence nor being of any sort is 'beingless.' It is a pure 'what,' a pure Sosein bereft of Sein. It is ausserseiend. 

I myself find the notion that some items are beingless unintelligible although I do understand how the notion is arrived at. Some will dismiss my finding of unintelligibility as a merely autobiographical remark, but by my lights it is more than that.  It just makes no sense to say that there are, in an ontically unloaded or non-committal sense of 'there are,' definite items actually possessing properties and thus numerically different from one another that are both transcendent of consciousness and jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing." 

Therefore, while there is good phenomenological reason to maintain that the intentional nexus puts us in touch with  the thing itself and thus that the intentional object of an act is the thing itself, this plausible view entangles us in seemingly  insuperable Meinongian difficulties.  My thinking of the WM does not become objectless  half-way through the interval. That is phenomenologically obvious. Therefore, if the WM  is the IO of my act, then the WM becomes a nonexistent object by the end of the interval.  As I noted earlier, Husserl in the 'Jupiter' passage in the Logical Investigations seems headed in a Meinongian direction.

We face a serious problem if Meinongianism is to be avoided. We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries.  We want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.'  But the problem of nonexistence (not inexistence! pace so many historically ignorant analytic philosophers) throws a spanner in the works.  One could say, and it has been said, that when the IO exists, the act gets at it directly; when the IO doesn't exist, the act terminates at a representation in a mind.  This is an option that needs discussing in a separate post.  For now I am assuming that in every case, the IO is either a transcendent item or an immanent item. I have argued that on the first alternative the upshot is Meinongianism, an upshot that by my lights is unacceptable. 

P2. The other possibility (theoretical option) given the assumption just stated is that the IO of my ongoing act  of thinking of the WM during an interval in which it passes from existence to nonexistence is not a transcendent item, but an immanent item.  Two sub-possibilities (theoretical sub-options) suggest themselves.

P2a.  On the first sub-option, the IO is a representation R in the mind.  To say that the IO exists is to say that R represents something in the external world. To say that the IO does not exist is to say that R does not represent anything in the external world.  So when I am thinking about the WM, during the entire time I am thinking about it, what I have before my mind is a representation Rwm which at first represents something and then ceases to represent anything but without prejudice to its being one and the same representation during the entire interval. This suggestion accommodates the fact that, phenomenologically, nothing changes during the interval.  But it succumbs to other objections. Husserl fulminates against representationalism and its notion that consciousness is like a box with pictures in it of things outside the box.  See Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness.If an intentional state is directed to what is beyond itself, as Molnar rightly states above, then it is not representations to which consciousness is directed, but the  things themselves.

P2b. On the second sub-option, the IO is an immanent item, but not  a representation. It is an ontological 'part' of the thing itself.  Suppose the tree I see is a synthetic unity of noemata.  The transcendence of the tree is constituted in the potential infinity of the series of noemata, but each noema is inseparable from a noesis. This leads to idealism which is arguably untenable. But I cannot say more about this now. 

The intentional nexus as non-contingent

Molnar tells us above that the link between act and object is non-contingent. The reason is that acts are individuated by their objects: every act has an object, and what makes an act the act it is is its object.  Since an act cannot be without an object, an object that makes it the very act it is, the nexus between act and object is non-contingent.

But if in every case an act cannot exist and be the very act it is without an object, then, if the external thing does not exist,  as in the case of the Roman god Jupiter, the object must  be a Meinongian nonexistent object.

The intentional object may or may not exist

"The intentional object can be existent or non-existent." (Molnar, 62) He infers from this that the intentional relation cannot be a genuine relation given that a genuine relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist.

But we should note an ambiguity in Molnar's formulation. The formulation uses the modal word 'can.' But is the point non-modal or modal? Are we being told that some IOs exist and some do not? Or that every IO is such that, if existent, then possibly nonexistent, and if nonexistent, the possibly existent?   I should address this in a separate post.

We should also note the following. If the intentional nexus is not a relation (because some IOs exist and some do not), and the act-object nexus is non-contingent such that, necessarily, every act has an intentional object,  then in the cases where the IO does not exist, and Meinongianism is false, the IO must be an immanent object.  So at least some IOs are immanent objects given the internality and non-contingency criteria cited by Molnar.  But if some IOs are immanent, then the pressure is on to say that they all are, which leads us either to representationalism or to transcendental idealism, both of which are deeply problematic.

The indeterminacy of intentional objects

Finally, among the non-linguistic criteria of intentionality, Molnar mentions the fuzziness or indeterminacy of intentional objects (p. 62). It is clear that some intentional objects are, as Molnar says, "seriously indeterminate." Suppose that I am expecting a phone call soon.  To expect is to expect something. The object expected, the phone call,  is indeterminate with respect to the exact time of its arrival. It is indeterminate with respect to other properties as well. But is every intentional object indeterminate?  The WM exists, and whatever exists is wholly determinate.  But when I think of it or remember it or expect to see it or perceive it, what is before my mind is not the WM with all of its parts, properties, and relations. Given the finitude of our minds, it would be impossible to have the whole of it before my mind. The WM, precisely as presented, cannot be the WM itself.  The former is indeterminate in many but not all respects whereas this is not true of the latter.  What this suggests, given the internality and non-contingency criteria is that the intentional object is not the thing itself, but an immanent object.  

Aporetic conclusion

We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries.  It is a phenomenological feature of intentional states that they purport to reveal things that do not depend for their existence on consciousness.  My visual perception of  the tree in my backyard purports to make manifest a thing in nature that exists and has many of the properties it has whether or I or anyone ever perceives it.  That purport is built into the phenomenology of the situation. We therefore want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.'  But then we bang up against the problem of intentional nonexistence.  

We seem to face a dilemma. Either the IO  is the thing itself or it is not. To hold to the identity of the IO and the thing itself, we must enter Meinong's jungle. We have to embrace the unintelligible notion that there are transcendent nonexistent items in those cases in which the IO does not exist. On the other hand, if we hold that the IO is an immanent item, then the problem of its relation to the thing itself arises. Is the IO a representation of the thing itself? Or is it an ontological part of the thing itself? Either way there is trouble.