Neural nets and the puzzle of intentionality

In this work, we ask epistemological questions involved in making the intentional behavior the object of physical and mathematical inquiry. We show that the subjective component of intentionality can never become object of scientific inquiry, as related to self-consciousness. On the other hand, the inquiry on objective physical and logical components of intentional acts is central to scientific inquiry. Such inquiry concerns logical and semantic questions, like reference and truth of logical symbols, as well as their relationship to the “complexity” of brain networking. Such metalogical inquiry suggests indeed some hypotheses about the amazing “parallelism”, “plasticity” and “storing capacity” that mammalian and ever human brains might exhibit.

[1]  Edward N. Zalta,et al.  Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality , 1988 .

[2]  P. Churchland.  Neurophilosophy: Toward a unified science of the mind , 1989 .

[3]  W. Singer,et al.  Oscillatory responses in cat visual cortex exhibit inter-columnar synchronization which reflects global stimulus properties , 1989, Nature.

[4]  M. Kilgard,et al.  Cortical map reorganization enabled by nucleus basalis activity. , 1998, Science.

[5]  Hubert R. Dinse,et al.  A time-based approach towards cortical functions: neural mechanisms underlying dynamic aspects of information processing before and after postontogenetic plastic processes , 1994 .

[6]  Willard Van Orman Quine,et al.  Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary , 1987 .

[7]  K. Popper,et al.  The Logic of Scientific Discovery , 1960 .

[8]  Per Roland,et al.  The engine of reason, the seat of the soul , 1996 .

[9]  M. Posner,et al.  Images of mind , 1994 .

[10]  Ernest Nagel,et al.  Le théorème de Gödel , 1989 .

[11]  William Downes,et al.  Language and Society , 1984 .

[12]  Jerry A. Fodor,et al.  Fodor's guide to mental representation: the intelligent auntie's Vade-Mecum , 1993 .

[13]  A. Clark.  Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again , 1996 .

[14]  Willard Van Orman Quine,et al.  Word and Object , 1960 .

[15]  Hubert L. Dreyfus,et al.  Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science , 1982 .

[16]  A. L Perrone.  Applications of chaos theory to lossy image compression , 1997 .

[17]  D. L. D’ Avray,et al.  Representations and Reality , 1994 .

[18]  H. Feigl,et al.  Readings in philosophical analysis , 1950 .

[19]  D. J. Hermes,et al.  Spectro-temporal characterization of auditory neurons: Redundant or necessary? , 1981, Hearing Research.

[20]  Douglas R. Hofstadter,et al.  Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies , 1995 .

[21]  Reinhard Eckhorn,et al.  Feature Linking via Synchronization among Distributed Assemblies: Simulations of Results from Cat Visual Cortex , 1990, Neural Computation.

[22]  G. Gentzen.  Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der reinen Zahlentheorie , 1936 .

[23]  G. Parisi,et al.  Asymmetric neural networks and the process of learning , 1986 .

[24]  Solomon Feferman,et al.  Transfinite recursive progressions of axiomatic theories , 1962, Journal of Symbolic Logic.

[25]  J. Fodor.  Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[26]  W. Freeman,et al.  How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world , 1987, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[27]  P. J. Cohen.  Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis , 1966 .

[28]  J. Fodor.  Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind , 1988 .

[29]  Timothy G McCarthy.  Self-reference and incompleteness in a non-monotonic setting , 1994, J. Philos. Log..

[30]  John R. Searle.  Mind, Language and Society , 2000 .

[31]  C. I. Lewis,et al.  The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics , 1944 .

[32]  Imre Lakatos,et al.  Mathematics, science and epistemology: Indexes , 1978 .

[33]  Saul A. Kripke,et al.  Naming and Necessity , 1980 .