Seeing red

[Angrboda]

No it isn't a memory.  The information is represented in these states, but these states do not form a representational system.  Note that in the case of the robot, a representational system consists of information, a system for representing it, and an environment for which that representation is meaningful (and by meaningful here I mean that it contains information which, by its content, guides the behavior of the representational system; in the robot driver example, this element is reflected by the road being represented being amenable to the motion of the vehicle; a robot driver in mid-air or on its back wouldn't be representing objects in a meaningful sense).

Does not a single photon from a thousand light years away affect the state of even an entire galaxy?  Isn't the way the galaxy unfolds a "behavior?"

Why do you ask, do you need to equivocate on a few terms?

It still seems to me that we are using a lot of substance-dualist words here: intention, meaning, even behavior.  But it is WE as thinking humans who see intention, meaning and behavior in some systems.

Or those systems really have it and all your posturing about WE as thinking humans is just special pleading.  "They have intentionality but it's not real intentionality, it's derived."  Yes I have the ability to describe the robots behavior in terms of meaning and intention.  Unless you're just begging the question, there is no difference between the applied use of these terms to describe the robot than there is to describe WE humans.  "The robots have aboutness but it's not the kind of aboutness that I have."  How would you know? All you're doing is suggesting that we have richer systems for intentionality and meaning in that we can use our concepts to ascribe meaning to the behavior of robots. That doesn't exclude the possibility that the robots behaviors are deserving of such description.

In an experiment at the Max Planck institute, dogs and chimpanzees were compared for their performance on a simple test. The test would put a small reward under one of two cups, and the experimenter would point to the cup that concealed the reward. The task was to find the reward. The dogs did well on the task, going straight to the cup with the reward, whereas the chimps were not helped by the pointing. Obviously the dogs understood that the pointing finger was 'about' something in a line from the end of the finger. They understood the intentionality of the gesture, and no amount of human reinterpreting can take that away from them.

A few additional points. First, it's clear that if dogs can possess intentionality, it doesn't take much hardware to implement it. Much as we love our dogs, they aren't exceptional as a species in terms of intelligence. Second, while the test was not performed with wolves, I suspect wolves would be just as stymied as the chimpanzees; and if not the wolves, at least a recent ancestor of them. This would show that it takes a relatively short time, 10,000 years, to evolve such intentional behavior. This suggests that the machinery for such behaviors already exists in species like the wolves or the chimpanzees, simply awaiting for evolution to tease it out into a manifest behavior. Third, it points to the possibility that intentionality can evolve. Unless we are postulating doggy souls, some mechanistic change occurred in the brain over the course of those 10,000 years to bring out this intentionality. This suggests that the substance necessary for such behaviors is a mechanism, not some mysterious ectoplasm.

So, no, it isn't only WE as thinking humans, but quite likely much of the animal kingdom.