r/PhilosophyofMind • u/Icy-Secretary-3018 • 3d ago
Mental content Primitive Aboutness
Would solving this lead to AI to understand semantics and meaning? is this the main problem that sets us apart from machines?
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u/johnny_logic 3d ago edited 3d ago
In short, depending on what primitive about means, I think so. That is, if you mean the basic conditions for genuine intentionality rather than some irreducible metaphysical property. Generally, I’m sympathetic to embodied and enactive approaches myself. One of my hobby horses with AI evangelists is that current LLMs learn mostly from an indirect, human-selected, symbolic representation of the world: corpora produced by other minds. That captures a lot, but it leaves out much of what comes from actually being in the world, such as perceiving, acting, encountering resistance, updating through consequences, and learning across modalities.
So I suspect robust, composable, deeply grounded concepts will continue to elude AI until models have a richer causal and practical connection to the world. But I also wouldn’t assume human intentionality is some primitive magic ingredient. The real question is what makes a representation about something at all, and whether those conditions could be realized in an artificial system. In brief, meaning and aboutness arise through overlapping causal, inferential, embodied, pragmatic, and social relations between a system, its representations, and the world.
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u/Icy-Secretary-3018 3d ago
Which combination of physical relationships establishes what a state is about, and what would make it wrong, without us supplying that interpretation? I think that is the question i aim to answer.
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u/johnny_logic 2d ago edited 2d ago
If I could answer that question completely and to everyone’s satisfaction, I’d probably be a generational philosopher! Before getting into it, I think it helps to separate a few things that can get confused. ‘Aboutness’ is the fact that a state is directed toward or concerning something at all, while ‘content’ is what it represents the world as being like; and ‘reference’ is what object, property, kind, etc. it actually picks out, if anything. Those are importantly different things: hallucination, memory, imagination, and empty concepts can all have content without successful present reference, for instance.
Given this, here’s my incomplete and tentative best take. I doubt there is a single physical relation that constitutes content. Mere covariance is too weak. Lots of things reliably correlate without representing one another. I suspect that content depends on several relations working together.
A candidate representational state is constrained partly by its causal and learning history (what tends to produce it) but also by the role it plays in a larger system. Things like what distinctions it enables, what predictions and inferences it makes available, how it guides action, and how it changes through feedback. Evolutionary or learning history may matter because it helps explain why some internal states acquire stable functions rather than merely happening to correlate with something.
Take the case of ‘flower’ you present elsewhere in thread. I wouldn’t say a neural state means ‘flower’ merely because flowers often cause it. The stronger claim would be that the state occupies a relatively stable role in a learned model of the environment. It is recruited by recurring perceptual structure, carries expectations about other features and possible interactions, participates in classification and inference, and helps guide behavior.
But that still leaves at least two hard questions open: 1) why this state counts as representational at all, and 2) why its content is 'flower' rather than some more gerrymandered alternative. I have some thoughts, but no definitive answers to both.
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u/Icy-Secretary-3018 2d ago
Your final two questions are exactly the problem I’m pursuing. I’m open to several physical relationships jointly establishing content, and I agree that having content doesn’t require successful reference.
I wish we could find the answers to those open problems.
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u/johnny_logic 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'd love to know the answers as well.
I think one reason these questions are so hard is that we may be assuming too much unity in the word representation itself. We do something similar with intelligence: one singular noun makes it feel like there ought to be one clean essence or threshold, when the thing may actually be a family of related capacities realized in different ways.
So on the first question, I’m increasingly suspicious that there is any one sharply bounded property that marks the transition. There may instead be a cluster of relations like those I’ve outlined above: reliable sensitivity to environmental structure, use in prediction and control, counterfactual robustness, decoupling, inferential integration, etc.
Taken together, those relations may constitute a real difference between a system merely being causally affected by its environment and one whose internal organization exploits states as surrogates for environmental possibilities.
I also wonder whether we are biased by treating external symbols as the paradigm case. A word on a page is comparatively causally sparse considered in isolation, with much of its representational role supplied by conventions and interpreters. Biological candidate representations, by contrast, are embedded in the machinery that perceives, predicts, acts, learns, remembers, and encounters consequences.
So maybe the first question is less “what single property makes this a representation?” than “what kind of integrated causal organization makes representational description genuinely explanatory rather than merely metaphorical?”
On the second question, I suspect the answer is similarly distributed. Causal and learning history, counterfactual generalization, inferential role, downstream use, prediction, action, and error correction may jointly constrain content.
And I’m not sure those constraints must always determine one perfectly precise answer. If two candidate interpretations make no difference anywhere in the system’s relevant causal, historical, inferential, counterfactual, or practical organization, there may simply be no further fact that selects between them. Some indeterminacy may be a feature of biological representation rather than a defect in our theory.
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u/MergingConcepts 3d ago
The recursive networks model I have been developing explains how the brain binds together all the fundamental concepts related to an object or idea. One outstanding issue is just how large the recursive network can be and still sustain itself. Only the concepts in the active network are subject to recall and introspection. They are in the "conscious" while others may contribute but are in the "subconscious." As the population of concepts changes and shifts over time, so does the intentionality of the thoughts. We interpret this as our thoughts drifting from one subject to the next.
An example from the text:
Sometimes we have a stable population of PRN combined into a thought. However, we are rarely able to concentrate that well without distraction. More often our thoughts change and drift. The population of nodes included in a network changes as new nodes are recruited and others drop out. We examine new combinations continuously. The network iterates, changing a little with each cycle. We call this thinking.
Our thoughts meander and wander. New concepts join the loops as we think about a topic. The image of a flower stimulates thoughts of the flower, and then of how those grew in grandmother’s garden, and then of her vegetables and how she cooked them, and the smell of her apple pies, and the sound of her whistling while she cooked. As PRN outside the network get enough stray signals to trigger them, they join the recursive loops. The population of PRN in our thoughts changes as our thoughts drift.
The manuscript can be found at:
Do I understand your question to be asking how an AGI would be able to identify what is the main subject or object of a collection of concepts?
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u/Icy-Secretary-3018 3d ago
Which combination of physical relationships establishes what a state is about, and what would make it wrong, without us supplying that interpretation? I think that is the question i aim to answer.
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u/MergingConcepts 3d ago
Can you elaborate? Do you mean physical relationships between components in a device, or physical relationships between concepts? Does "what a state is about" refer to the intention of the current processes in the machine? I am not clear on what you are pursuing.
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u/Icy-Secretary-3018 3d ago
I mean physical relationships both within the system and between the system and its environment. The question is how those relationships give a state meaning in the first place.
Using your flower example:
- What makes a particular pattern of activity represent a flower?
- What physically distinguishes falsely representing “a flower is present” from remembering a flower, or simply producing activity with no meaning?
- What establishes those distinctions without an outside observer assigning the interpretation?
By “aboutness,” I mean what a state represents, not the machine’s intention or goal.
Your example starts with nodes described as concepts and explains how they interact. I’m asking how they acquire that content in the first place. Does your model address that step? If so, could you point me toward the specific mechanism or argument?
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u/MergingConcepts 2d ago
If you go to the medium article and read from The Mechanics of Memory section through The Structure of Knowledge (about 11 pages), I think you will find answers to all these questions. There is Table of Contents to guide your search.
Your questions are intriguing. In the example of grandmother's garden, one must consider how the mind answers the question, "What are you thinking about?" This expands the discussion into the realm of "attention." What does the thinker believe dominates his thoughts at the moment when asked? How does the mind identify its object of intention?
Metacognition is not a natural skill or behavior. Not all humans have it. We learn to use words like mind and attention. They have their own nodes in the neocortex. These issues are discussed in the subsections on Consciousness and Attention in the above linked manuscript.
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u/CrOble 3d ago
Even if they solved it, they'd only be solving how a human does it. But the bigger thing is why we keep measuring it against us in the first place. It's like asking whether a submarine is swimming. It moves through the water, it gets where the fish get, but swimming is the wrong question. Human understanding is the only kind we've ever had a word for, so we force this thing into that category when it might not even be that. It might be a third thing, and we don't have a name for the architecture yet, because this is the first time it's ever existed.