. I subscribe to approaches to understanding living systems that impute a kind of aboutness even to creatures with no cognitive capacities to speak of.
— Joshs

Buy then intention wouldn't be involved, right? — frank

Strictly speaking , without consciousness there could not be intentionality, although an ‘aboutness’ and self-organizing anticipative directionality would still characterize the organism’s behavior.

Strictly speaking , without consciousness there could not be intentionality, although an ‘aboutness’ and self-organizing anticipative directionality would still characterize the organism’s behavior. — Joshs

So your intestines have anticipitive directionality toward shitting. So that's what intestineses are about? Sort of, yes.

So your intestines have anticipitive directionality toward shitting. So that's what intestineses are about? Sort of, yes. — frank

Yep, kind of. Intestines function in relation to other digestive organs as part of a larger system of digestion, and that larger system coordinates with every other aspect of the body’s functioning such that a holistic directionality obtains.

There are as many definitions of information as there are of intentionality , so in order for each of us to know what the other is talking about we would need to clarify these terms. I would just offer that u less you are willing to reduce information to ‘sense’ , the only place for information I see in Husserl’s model of consciousness is as a derived, second order construction. — Joshs

I defined information earlier in the thread as the relationship between cause and effect. Sensation is a causal relationship between the sense and what is sensed, therefore sensation is a type of information.

Intentionality is the causal process of goal-directed behavior, so intentionality is also information. Is everything information? I think so.

This may not make much sense but maybe you can see how it deviates from the logic of natural cause-effect. — Joshs

You're right. It seems like an obfuscation. I think it can be explained in a much simpler manner. The simple idea of cause and effect is that some existing condition determines subsequent conditions. The fact that each effect is determined by its cause means that each effect carries information about the cause, or is about the cause. Effects are also causes of other effects further down the timeline. Designating any particular condition as a cause or effect is dependent upon the goal in mind, or intentionality. An example would be making hammer vs. using a hammer. The hammer is both the effect our building it, and part of the cause of the nail being driven.

The simple idea of cause and effect is that some existing condition determines subsequent conditions. — Harry Hindu

Tell me more about what you mean by a condition. What are the absolute rock bottom requirements for a condition that can act as a cause? (Or , if you like. what are the minimal requirements for something to exist.). For instance , does a condition have properties and attributes? Is it located as a position in time and space? Does a condition have duration , extension and magnitude? Is there some substantive element, content or feature that is carried through identically from
one cause-effect sequence to the next in a chain of causes and effects?

A condition is any state-of-affairs that we can point to. The temporal distance between some cause and it's subsequent effect is subjective, as change/time is subjective based on the mental state one is presently in. In other words, consciousness stretches out the relationships between causes and their effects, which produces the feeling of time passing - of information flowing through space-time. Information would be the element that is carried through all causal realtionships. Or maybe it's a particular property or attribute that gets carried through as what we point to that links the cause-effect with another sequence of cause-effect, but again, these relationships are subjectively stretched and the amount of time between any given causal events is also subjective.