Seeing red

[Angrboda]

… aboutness is what philosophers refer to as intentionality.  

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For this, a simple counter-example will suffice.  Every year there is a race held in the desert to compare completely robotic vehicles' performance on a pre-determined course.  These vehicles use a variety of sensors to track the terrain as they drive along.  They 'map' the road as they come upon it.

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To suggest that the data in these onboard computers is not 'about' the road in front of them is ridiculous.

In Scholastic terms the robot is a hylomorphic substance. Absent software it is just hunks of metal and plastic. Absent hardware it is a disembodied set of immaterial instructions.

As a hylomorphic substance, the robot cannot reduce to one or the other. Anyone can see that instructions are proscriptive purposes and ideas, i.e. final and formal causes. Instructions can play out on anything from transistor to vacuum tubes (even gears and cogs). They can be physically stored on anything from solid-state hard drives to punch cards. They can be expressed in a wide variety of symbols strings and languages. The efficacy of a string of symbols depends on the extent to which it participates, to greater or lesser extent, in something beyond the signs themselves, something that gives the symbols efficacy. Formal Causes. Final Ends.

In other words, it's not really a mechanical device because "it's imbued with magic." No, you can use whatever nomenclature you like, it doesn't change the fact that a mechanical device has intentionality. Its instructions and the data in the hardware are very real physical manifestations. All your talk about final causes doesn't change that. And unless those instructions are expressed in the hardware of the robot, they do not function at all. The efficacy depends upon being mated to the right hardware. Period.

(ETA: And mated to the right environment.)