(April 21, 2013 at 12:37 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:(April 21, 2013 at 10:34 am)whateverist Wrote: ...Brains states which underpin beliefs aside from being configurations of matter are already about something. Similarly if I write out a "Spare any change?" sign on a scrap of paper, the piece of paper is just a piece of inert material, compositionally. But now it also conveys my belief that someone is going to throw me some coin, which is my intention.In your example, the paper does not in itself have meaning. It must be interpreted and assigned meaning from the outside. If your note is written in English it will have no meaning to someone who only knows Chinese. Likewise a brain-state, as a physical thing, has no meaning unless one is assigned to it. When you say conveys your intention, what then is the ontological status of your intention. Is the intention a thing in and of itself, conveyed first by your brain then transferred to paper? This implies something independent of both your brain and the paper that has been transferred. What is that thing?
I don't think so. Whereas pieces of papers are not the sort of thing we think of as assigning or conveying meaning, brains are precisely the kind of thing we think does so. So when we consider the compositional make up and process of our brains, we aren't looking at something akin to a piece of paper. We are looking at the biological processes of the creature we have observed as engaging in the conveyance and reception of meaning.
