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Intentional Stance

No mind required.

Daniel Dennett recently died.
I first encountered him in Consciousness Explained and he made a lot of sense about a tricky topic and has been my favourite philosopher ever since. A key element of his thinking was what he called the 'intentional stance'.

"Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do." —?Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance, p. 17

Dennett was assuming that other creatures were like him; that they had goals and act rationally to attain them. If you play chess you assume that your opponent intends to win by following the rules. This works whether the opponent is a person or a computer program.

And the programs are good. I've enjoyed chess all my life but I don't think I've ever beaten chess software; not even sargon running an a 16k trs-80 ? And I never minded losing. There was no person grinning at me across the board at the end.

The intentional stance seems to me to be essential for harmonious human interaction but it doesn't account for everything. Sometimes big branches fall from trees around here and they would kill anybody they struck. It would not be correct to think the tree intends to hurt anyone.

I think that the intentional stance underpins a lot of religious thinking. People would try to placate various gods in various places and things and the assumption that those gods were rational and would act to get what they wanted. Over time that meme evolved into an all-powerful god that one could placate with prayers and offerings and who had plans.

Heck - even I - a longtime atheist - have been known to mutter 'c'mon world - gimme a break ?

Often we take the intentional stance without thinking about it. People walking on a crowded sidewalk assume that others are like them and don't want to collide and act accordingly and so no collision occurs.

A while ago we discussed how a thief thinks that everyone is a thief. The intentional stance causes that. Also tho, it enables us to resist thieves by locking our doors.

Now we have things like google and chatgpt that we converse with and ask questions of. Do those systems have goals that can be rationally acted upon. Of course they can - the builders and owners of those systems could do that knowingly or inadvertently.

In some ways the intentional stance is a gloomy stance even if accurate. The world is fractured into many beliefs about reality. The intentional stance predicts that the people trying to communicate across belief boundaries will profoundly misunderstand each other.

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.