Walter J.Freeman How Brains Make Up Their Mind

Phoenix 1999 Pg 17 Meaning, Representaion and Intentionality     Meaning A fundamental and enduring human activity is the search for meaning.  What we're looking for is not something we can define, because the form that meaning takes is unique for each person.  Nor is it necessary to try to define it, because it is universally experienced in the drawing of realising it and in the pain of losing are lacking it.  People seeking meaningful relationships, experiences and causes.  What distinguishes these from meaningless situations, chance encounters, and lost causes the richness of context and the promise of a continuing emergence throughout personal choices of interesting and fruitful complications. Consider the meaning of raised eyebrow.  On a camping trip, it may be a defensive gesture against an annoying insect.  At a dinner party, it may expressed surprise at the arrival of an unexpected guest, between sexual predicate is it means something else, but what?  He reaches with his hand to cut her elbow.  She argues an eyebrow.  Is this an invitation or an expression of contempt?  He has to interpret the rotation of a body and the attitude of the head.  She has to gauge's physical strength and pliancy of will.  The exchange of subtle signals has a purpose but is not deliberative, but automatic and habitual, a formal social negotiation or partly joint and partly conflicting aims and desires.  Power?  Companionship?  Sex?   Those aims invoke meanings in each of the pair, but the meanings are not the same. The meaning in each participant invests in entire personal history and the sequence of words and gestures between them. Meanings have no edges or compartments.  We are not solely rational or emotional, but a mixture.  They are not thoughts or beliefs, but the fabric of both.  Each meaning has a focus at some point in the dynamic structure of an entire life.   Meaning is closed from the outside by virtue of its very uniqueness and complexity.  In this sense, it resembles the immunological incompatibility of tissues, by which each other stiff as from all others.  The barrier between us is not like moat around a castle or firewall protecting a computer system; the meaning in each of us is a quiet universe that can be probed but not occupied. How meaning comes into being Brain scientists have paid little attention to how meaning comes into being, and what the conditions are that foster it.  Some people passively expect it to happen to them.  For pragmatists and existentialists, it is clear that meaning forms through action.  More specifically, it is created in and by their brains. Meaning is created in unique forms within ourselves through the actions and choices we all make, initially by learning to live according to a system of beliefs offered to us through our parents, peers or colleagues, first changed to suit ourselves, then modified to become ourselves.  Every choice we make in everyday life is a way of grasping our part of the world we all cohabit, but in our own terms, in accord with our unique experiences. Much of the effort and energy of our lifetimes is spent in trying to understand the meanings of others, and to induce others to understand our own.  We can't ever fully transport or inject our meaning into anyone else, but we can express ourselves and invite communal actions as a way of bringing into harmony with others some part of the meaning structure within ourselves.     Social meaning We commonly speak of "shared meaning" as though it could be distributed within the group, like food and wine.  My belief is that meanings can be made to be similar in people who work, dance, sing and pray together, and I call this portion of their meaning structure is "assimilated meaning".   That fraction of assimilated meaning that can be presented as public knowledge suffices to support cooperation, although the meaning it leads to are never identical among the participants.  The assimilated meanings are the bases for all knowledge and cultural, social and political groups, beginning with families. The ways to communicate meaning include speech, facial expressions and gestures.  These material forms are representations of meaning, but books, equations, movies and paintings have no meaning in themselves.  They are capable of eliciting the construction of meaning in recipients and observers, but these meanings inevitably differ in each viewer from those of the authors and the artists.  We believe they have close resemblance, but they are unique to each of us.   pg 22 Because brains are composed of interconnected neurons, there must be some way in which meanings arise through the activities of neurons.  We already know a great deal about the anatomy, physics and chemistry of neurons.  What we most need now, to understand the relation of neurons to meaning, is a fresh perspective on the masses of data that neurobiologists have gathered, and on the puzzles those data pose.   The old question - How are voluntary actions generated?  How does the firing of neurons give rise to awareness of meaning?  How do brains make sense of the world? - remain challenging as neuroscientists test, observe and accumulate new data.  But the new general theory to guide research and natural and artificial intelligence requires new assumptions and new definitions.   I believe that the idea of meaning, a critical concept that defines the relation of each brain to the world, is central to current debates and philosophy and cognitive science, and will become so in neurobiology.     Intentionality The process by which meanings grow and operate is intentionality.  Most people understand "intention" as referring to any conscious, goal-directed behaviour: "I intend to eat lunch at noon"; "I propose to go to the bank to get the money to pay for it"; "the road to hell this paved with good intentions".   This everyday usage is a watered down version of the concept devised by Thomas Aquinas.   The other watered down version has been used by philosophers in the past century to designate the relation between mental states and objects of events in the world, where the real or imaginary.  A thought is always about something.  The belief is always about some state of affairs.  This use of intentionality is often referred to as the "aboutness" of mental representations. A major feature of both the everyday and recent philosophical usage of intentionality is an implicit requirement that mental states be conscious. However, we perform most daily activities that are clearly intentional and meaningful without being explicitly aware of them.  Consider the activities of athletes and dancers, who move their bodies in space and time to some end (winning games, telling stories and expressing emotions).  When people first learn to dance or play a sport, they draw upon conscious reflection of what they ought to be doing with their bodies, but mainly they draw unconsciously upon the already learned skills that we all have been using our bodies, such as running.   As the training of the brain and body proceeds, that conscious reflection on the manipulation of the body falls away, and they can take the plunge through having what we commonly called strong "feel" for the game of dance.   Performance becomes second nature.  For many people, the greatest fulfilment and enjoyment comes with total immersion into the activity, so that self-awareness is scattered to the winds, and they become wholly what they desire in body and spirit, without reservation.   The brain and body anticipate inputs, perceive, and make movements without need for reflection.  It is precisely this kind of unconscious, but directed, skill in the exercise of perception that the concept of intentionality must include. The examples of the athlete and dancer demonstrate what I considered to be the three main properties of intentionality.    1 The first is unity.  Our brains and bodies are entirely committed to the action of projecting ourselves corporeally into the world, and our perceptions are unified across all our senses a trade faster than we can perceive.  Here I distinguish between the self, which is unified, and the awareness of self that we experience as the ego, which is not unified but can be splintered like sunlight on waves.    2 The second property is wholeness: the entirety of life's experiences brought to each moment of action.  The experiences of games and dancing are generalised and continually built upon.  It includes an effort, described by Aristotle and again by Goethe two centuries ago, as a blind organic striving towards realising our full potential within the constraints of heredity and environment. 3 The third property of intentionality is purpose or intent, because whether athletes and dancers are aware of it or not, their actions are directed to some end.

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