On The Role of Intentionality in Knowledge Representation: Analyzing Scene Context for Cognitive Agents with a Tiny Language Model

Cognitive abilities, which include ideas like intentionality and consciousness, have long been viewed in Western philosophy as exclusive to the human realm. Intent is roundly considered justifiable only with minimum requirements for self-awareness or situational comprehension. However, such hard line views have softened gradually with modern enlightenment, and more of us are likely to accept that terms such as'agency', 'intelligence', and even'emotion' can apply for other species too. Even plants lean into sunlight in an intentional way; the identification of an intention doesn't have to arise from the plant to be true. Latterly their possibility has been extended even to artificial systems, which some find more acceptable, though a modern version of the privilege argument persists in a distinction between'simple' machinery and'complex' biology, which many believe still holds some principled leap in understanding. Ideological'blood-brain barriers', like these, continue to undermine efforts to form a rational causal explanation of intent, leading extremists to clutch at esoteric straws like quantum mechanics or complexity theory to account for perceived magic. In this note, I address another apparent schism that may shed light on these questions: the difference between process dynamics (the realm of physics) and interpretive semantics (the realm of linguistics and philosophy), and the suggestion that (deep down) intentionality might be a relatively simple phenomenon with an energetic explanation (as trust has been shown to be [9]). The recent acceptance of attention mechanisms in Large Language Models is related example [19, 22].