[FRIAM] Dennett on agency

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I'm not sure you can have this conversation with a *gradation* of intent. I'm fond of the insult "He's a tool", because people can be *used*. If a person is used by another person, does that imply the "intent" of the tool is a degraded form of "intent"? I think that's a reasonable conclusion. But the argument suffers some sort of causa prima problem or recursion problem.

Our common conception of a computer program defines it as a Pure Tool, no agency whatsoever. But perhaps *some* kinds of computer program (e.g. an individual S-expression grown by a genetic algorithm) might have a tiny bit more agency/intention than a hand-written program.

The fundamental problem, though, is the ideal, in the limit, ultimate agency/intention. I suspect we can narrowly escape that recursion problem by only allowing co-evolutionary structures where the "objective functions" are all implicitly defined by the churning milieu. That way agency/intention can be *locally* transitive but not globally transitive. E.g. I can be Renee's tool, but not the tool of someone I've never met in some small village in Kazakhstan. Similarly, a cell might be a tool of its local tissue, but not the tool of some distant cell in some other organism on Venus or somesuch.

On 10/20/20 11:06 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Computer programs can certainly be described using intentional language. Does that mean that a computer program can have intention? If so, that seems to degrade the notion of intent. 

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