Philosophers have long been concerned with the analysis of the phenomenon
of intentionality, which has seemed to many to be a fundamental feature of mental states and events...
I cannot want without wanting something, but what
I want need not exist for me to want it...
intentional relations depend on how their objects are specified...
the apparent soundness of information- processing theories,
and their utility in practice, has strengthened the conviction that somehow we must be able to make sense
of the ineliminable intentional formulations they contain without compromising thoroughgoing materialism...
Any computer program, any robot we might design and
build, no matter how strong the illusion we may create that it has become a genuine agent, could never be a truly
autonomous thinker with the same sort of original intentionality we enjoy...
Suppose you have composed a shopping list, on a piece of paper,
to guide your shopping behavior. The marks on the piece of paper have derived intentionality, of course, but if you
forgo the shopping list and just remember the wanted items in your head, whatever it is that "stores" or "represents" the
items to be purchased in your brain has exactly the same status as the trails of ink on the paper. There is no more real,
or intrinsic, or original intentionality than that.
