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From: ronald@uhunix1.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Ronald A. Amundson)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.chem
Subject: Re: Forgotten Entities: Do You Remember Any?
Keywords: protoplasm
Message-ID: <10093@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 31 Oct 90 04:06:37 GMT
References: <1990Oct25.232546.12357@portia.Stanford.EDU> <3870@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <4155@kitty.UUCP> <3879@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
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In article <3879@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>In article <4155@kitty.UUCP> larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) writes:
>>	I've got one better: ectoplasm (the "spiritual" variety, that is).
>
>That reminds me of an entity that badly needs to be forgotten.  It is
>called "intentionality" and was described by F. Brentano in 1874 as
>the feature or aspect that distinghuishes mental from physical
>phenomena.  It has been revived in the past few years to explain why
>machines can never "really think", no matter how convincingly they may
>eventually behave as though they did, and beg for mercy when
>threatened with termination, etc.
>
>The problem is that this revival is disturbing my colleagues and
>students, who will not accept my declaration that there simply isn't
>any such thing. ...

Prof. Minsky's nomination of intentionality as an entity which "needs
to be forgotten" is, shall we say, tendentious.  I've got some
sympathy for his view, but modern advocates of intentionality are not
worried about spiritual entities, nor about whether Minsky's computers
are about to beg for mercy.

Were I not the broadminded fellow whom I be, I might suggest another
supposed entity which many think deserves defunctitude:  Artificial
Intelligence.  

Ron Amundson
Philosophy
Univ. of Hawaii at Hilo
ronald@uhccux.bitnet