Sorry about the delay -- I have no excuse.
you said:
> That's the sense I used in my post, but I get the
> impression you might mean the "ultimate" question - why does
> anything exist at all - is that correct?
No, actually, I meant in the sense you used -- thanks. As to why
*something* exists, rather than nothing at all, I think the anthropic
principle is about a "good" an answer as anything[1]. Something exists
because, if something didn't exist, we wouldn't be here to ask questions
about it...
I did, however, get a good laugh about this type of question from Dennett's
book, _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_. In a foot note, he quotes another author
who says that (paraphrase) "although my answers to this question are
strange, the question is of such *depth* that, if the answer *isn't*
strange, you can be sure you haven't understood the question!"
> I assumed, in responding to your original post, that by saying
> "intentionality" you were referring to the act of ascribing a sense
> of "spirituality" to inanimate objects, and that you were of the
> opinion that this is folly. I agreed.
My exact position is that "festooning the universe with large scale
meaning", especially by postulating a god or some silliness like that, is
folly. This I call "spirituality", mostly on the presence of "spirit",
which I take to be a euphemism for "ghost", in the word.
"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that
the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are
nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason
otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by
Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this
heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know.
But heresy it certainly is."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820
As to "intentionality" itself, I have mixed thoughts. Certainly as
metaphor it is a useful concept -- e.g. "selfish" gene's... When it gets
right down to the foundation of my knowledge base, however, I'm not sure
that even *I* have intentionality. Certainly I model many "people" on a
deterministic basis, with fair success.
"My own thoughts on the subject are few, but I have wondered if:
a deterministic self-aware system living in a quantum (uncertain)
world, would be indistinguishable from a freewilled being living
in a deterministic world."
-- JPSchneider jschneid@hanoverdirect.com, on the CoV mailing list
I suspect that although we *cannot* know the difference between the two
possibilities above, we are probably the former, rather than the latter...
draw your own conclusions about intentionality...
Irregardless of my conclusion on the issue, I think it is *easier* to model
complicated things with intentional language (ala Dennett, _The Intentional
Stance_, which I *do* intend to read, yet this summer. I've certainly
heard enough about it!)
ERiC
[1] That is to say, in-as-much-as anything can answer this question... I
didn't phrase it well above, so try this:
"Anthropic Principle: - Cosmologists Dicke and Carter reflected on the
way the universe seems to be fine tuned for intelligent life and
stated: "What we can expect to observe must be restricted by the
conditions necessary for our presence as observers." " p.135
-- http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~grassie/StudentProjects/Glossary.html