On piranhas, narcissism and mental representation: An essay on intentionality and naturalism.

Abstract

This dissertation is motivated by the following question: Is the portrayal of mind/brain processes as representations--as entities that in some sense reflect, correspond with, or symbolize the world--particularily apt? Through detailed examples from the neuroscientific literature, with an emphasis on sensory processing, I argue that this way of viewing brain functioning is typically misleading. It depicts neural functioning as a bipartite process: first the production of a set of neural "calibrational" states with properties in the world, and then their interpretation by "higher" functions. On the contrary, even at the transducer level, sensory organs cannot be characterized as relay mechanisms for the brute facts. The form and content of all information gleaned about the external world conforms to the particular needs, hence neural functions, of the organism. Evolution, it seems, is not concerned with "the truth", but only with that which proves necessary or expedient. Relaxing the grip of the representational metaphor, I argue, affords us the means to reconstrue or even dissolve some st and ard philosophical questions about content and intentionality. The questions that plague causal or information theories of content less become daunting: e.g. "What are the raw data, the given, of our thoughts?" "How and where does a percept become a belief, an intentional entity?" and "How is misrepresentation possible?" Further, the central question of intentionality, of how a mental state could be about an external event, can be broken into several more tractable questions, some of which require "naturalistic", reductive explanations, some of which do not.