New Issue to Modeling Intentionality in the Field of Consciousness

Abstract

Brentano in 1870s was the first to introduce intentionality to mean “conscious of”. At the end of the 1960s, a version of this view was developed by analytic American philosophy to construct a theory of meaningful language. That led Dennett to claim that intentionality was mainly a feature of sentence, not mental states. In contrast, Searle in 1990s rejected the Brentanian thesis and explained intentionality by a biological naturalism. Thereafter, radical eliminativists such as Churchland claimed that all philosophical arguments merited replacement by neuroscientific knowledge. Unfortunately, very few neurophysiological studies attempted to scientifically tackle the problem raised by intentionality. The issue now emerging is a new conception of intentionality based on phenomenological, neurobiological and quantum theories, such as: 1) the notion of “intentional arc” proposed in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty; 2) the neurobiological and quantum model of Freeman, in which self-organizing pathways are accompanied by quantum transitions in controlling intentionality in brain; 3) the recent hypothesis that some visuo-motor neurons would be involved in controlling these self-organized pathways; 4) the quantum models of Vitiello and Globus, in which a thermofield (dissipative) system governs the dynamic dialog of dual quantum modes between environment and brain. Based on this conception of mind-world interactions, it implicitly appears that intentionality might be a fundamental force which draws us irreversibly towards the future. An alternative hypothesis based on this promising proposal is argued.